The Hippie was Eaten Alive Where He Meditated

There was a man who came here once, a hippie, who took to meditating in the forest. He was damn good at it, meditation that is. He sat on the wrong log, I guess, and the army ants found him. Within minutes, they reduced him to a skeleton. Earlier today, I think I saw his femur.

I stopped to take a piss in the river, and before I knew it, a Candiaru catfish was swimming up the stream of urine. Fuck. Somewhere out there, there are cannibals.

The plants above are growing on the corrugated tin roof of an "entrance" to a trail. I do not know how long they have taken to grow that size.

Maybe not. But I did something stupid today. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's rantings in Dharma Bums, I sat down on the trail and closed my eyes, listening. I wasn't exactly asleep, but close enough, and suddenly, there was Dimebag Darrel in my head, telling me I was an idiot. I opened my eyes. There were bullet ant foragers everywhere. I hadn't noticed them. Fucking hippie.

All day, I saw those whiptails. Also, slender anoles, and at least one ground anlole. Yesterday's lemur anole was not in the guidebook, presumably because it is a canopy species that should never have been on the ground in the first place. Birds' nest fungi, pale-billed wookdpeckers, making an awful racket.

My Trigona colony has finally posted a perimeter of workers around the entrance to their fallen home. I do not know whether they are capable of abandoning it by swarm, like Apis, or not.

So much of the tropical ecology I have been reading, for years, has turned out to be correct. This trip has been an astounding exercise in seeing things firsthand. The leaf litter is thin, and beneath it, red clay. Thin soil horizons and rapid decomposition everywhere, just like the textbooks teach. Light gaps full of regrowth. A surprisingly open canopy, however, not the midnight dark of Amazonia. Hurricanes, I hear, or read, fell the tall trees frequently enough so that regrowth is perpetual. Flowering is idiosyncratic, irregular, and intensely particular to the plant in question, as is fruiting. This also, I read in books. Termites really do construct tunnels over their foraging columns, and, also true, there are a great many leafcutter ants. With this maddening diversity comes a certain lack of abundance. I have seen a few parasitoids, but never more than one representative of a species. The biomass of a single common species of Trigona (I have that black one in mind, whatever it is) is probably greater than the combined biomass of all the Braconids out there, all fifty thousand of them. Trigona are so common that, drinking coffee in the morning, they land on my knee and investigate.

There are so many medium-sized leguminaceous trees here. I wonder if the productivity is actually as high as they say it is. If this is the case, the standing crop biomass does not represent it at all. Not exactly surprising, true. What seems to happen is that everything grows abundantly, and either falls over, is thrown to the ground by monkeys, or just kinda breaks off and disappears somewhere. These trees are built like Ikea furniture.