With herds of students as plentiful as the resident peccaries, La Selva Biological Station is teeming with life. As a biological hot spot that shares a border with the extensive Braulio Carrillo National Park, the field station can be frequented by animals as elusive as jaguars and pumas. This trip, however, we did not see any, though we encountered plenty of other charismatic Costa Rican creatures. The surrounding atmosphere was often filled with chatty green macaws and bellowing howler monkeys, in between the oh so often rainstorms. Air from the Caribbean unleashes its burdensome rain over these coastal lowlands before continuing its journey over the mountains. Umbrellas and rubber boots become an extension of your being.
We had the fortune of working with faculty on projects focused around frogs and stream macroinvertebrates, which gave us great hands-on experience in such a rich environment. The project I worked on looked at how water quality in a stream can be determined by macroinvertebrate community composition, as certain orders can be very sensitive to pollution. We found water in the stream we sampled to be of excellent quality with a large portion of these indicator macroinvertebrates living in leaf litter caught in riffles, which emphasizes the importance of having intact forests around streams.
-Seth Robinson, University of Florida
OTS Field Ecology 2020-1 