Palm tree dissection!!! But actually, we dissected an entire royal palm. The motivation, after having learned about Chagas disease, was to actually find the insect vector in it's natural habitat, the royal palm. A couple of people had set traps the day before to determine if any of five trees tested were housing the chinche bug. So, Saturday morning, the group piled into the bus for a long drive to Chilibre, a rural town to the northeast of Gamboa, to check the traps and hopefully find some chinches.
We brought with us two experts on Chagas disease who would lead the testing and dissection process, and once we arrived, their main objective was to retrieve the traps and see if any were positive. All five came back negative, so after some wandering, the men chose a random tree out by the main road.
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| Looking for the traps in the tree |
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| Waiting to see if the trap tested positive |
Once a tree was selected, we were instructed to stand back. The younger of the two Chagas experts pulled out his axe, and started chopping away at the tree. In the crowd, dumb jokes were thrown around about Abraham Lincoln (REALLY people...) not telling lies a la the cherry tree story. As an Illinoisan and obligate Lincoln lover, I was personally offended. Anyways, after several minutes of chopping, the tree started to creak. It slowly and epically fell to the forest floor with a rustley thud, and that was it. Yup, we killed a tree for science...
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| Chopping the tree down by hand |
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| Timber! |
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| And she's down |
Time for dissection! Essentially, that involved our experts chopping and hacking away at the tree as all of us pulled out chinche bugs (the tree was positive!!), lizard eggs, lizards, spiders, land snails, massive caterpillars, scorpions, opossum feces, roaches, crickets, beetles, ants, termites, and all sort of other critters. I was in charge of writing down every organism found, which was especially interesting since people were finding so many things in rapid succession and shouting their findings out to me. I was furiously scribbling the entire time, but I did get a chance to make some sketches of organisms as well. In the end, we found around 60 chinche bugs (which is a lot) along with countless other organisms. It was truly amazing to see the diversity that one single tree can support.
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| Let's start dissecting! |
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| The Aftermath |
Once we returned to the schoolhouse, it was back to dissecting fish for hours and hours until dinner. Afterwards, I was in desperate need of a break, so decided a walk was in order. Me, Simone, Nikki, Blair, Patricia, and Evaline went wandering through residential Gamboa to stretch our legs and rest our minds. It was one of the better walks I've ever been on, considering the things we did and found. We started off heading to a fig tree in a cul-de-sac where supposedly bats hang out at night. I hadn't realized, but the tree was more accurately in someone's back yard. This being Gamboa, it was perfectly acceptable for us all to walk into the yard at night while the neighbors were watching across the road as we stared like lunatics up into the dark canopy of the fig. No bats. We continued walking, and and as we passed a house, a tiny but aggressive wiener dog came charging out at us barking it's head off. The dogs owners heard, and came out into the road as we tried to calm the dog so it would let us pet it. She calmed the dog, whose name is Babette (Babi for short), and then the six of us were pulled into a great conversation with the woman and her niece. We were literally sitting in the road together, petting Babi and learning about the woman's life working for the Canal, learning English, and loving all things Chinese. About an hour later, as we were leaving, we were invited back for swimming, BBQ, and chinese food. Two more friends made in Panama!
We continued to walk, and found a playground previously unknown to me. I set my inner child free for a while on the swingset, then the slide and the climbing structures. It was getting late, so we decided to walk back to the schoolhouse. As we were walking to the door, we were distracted by an armadillo, and made a big commotion. That's when the (extremely attractive) South Africans who were squatting in the church next door saw us through their open door. Impulsively, I waved, and got a beckoning wave in response. We headed in, and were surprised to find Lukas already hanging out with the guys. We all sat down, were served coffee, and fell into conversation about what they were doing in Panama. Turns out they are with a organization called Global Challenge Expeditions, which is a Christian-based mission trip organization. They're doing the "Work Your Way" trip through all of Central America, Canada, and parts of Europe and Africa for eight months with Panama as the first stop. Essentially, working and doing community service on a negative cash flow, spreading their faith, and relying on the goodness of others. It's pretty amazing to think about dropping everything to go do something like this, travel the world to do something amazing that you believe in. Though I'm not big on the religious aspects, I still really admire what they're accomplishing with the few resources they have; they speak virtually no Spanish and yet they have no worries about their next eight months to come. It's these almost "Into the Wild"-esque journeys that I hear and read about that always fill me with a sense of wanderlust.
Anyways, we learned a bit about all four of them, played some silly games together, and bid them farewell. They'll be in Bocas del Torro while we are, so fingers crossed we meet again.
Sunday:
That morning, Nikki, Blair, and I once again headed to the docks to go fishing. We were looking for both the peacock bass for Blair's behavioral experiment, as well as for native fish. Things were looking pretty grim until Nikki caught four fish in about a 45 minute time span. Three bass and one dogfish. What really killed me about the whole "field work" experience of the day, however, was the participation of the dock staff and the general interest in Blair's project. So she's looking at how gill parasites change swimming behavior in peacock bass, the idea being that fish with higher gill parasite loads will swim more because less gill surface area is exposed for gas exchange. She does her experiment in a kiddie pool, filming the fish for two minutes. We told Kenneth, the dock master, about this, and had brought a cooler to keep the fish alive so we could transport them back to the schoolhouse. Kenny would have none of this, however, and insisted on driving Blair back to the schoolhouse to get the pool and conduct the experiment right there on the dock. This of course became a tourist attraction. As people came to the docks for their river tours and fishing trips, they'd stop and inquire about the pool. We'd then get to explain what we were doing. The tourists loved it, Kenny loved it, and I just found it really amusing.
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| Terrifying dogfish, and peacock bass |
After more afternoon dissection, dinner, and final microscope work on the current samples, the evening devolved into impromptu karaoke. I'm fairly sure it began because Sebastian has been claiming to have a voice like Frank Sinatra's, so we convinced him to sing for us. Then everyone joined in and we were singing for several hours. We had country songs, Backstreet Boys, Don McLean, Billy Joel, fun., Adele, and then duets from Grease. Eventually, Nikki, Lukas, Sebastian, and I ended up outside again chatting about life, death, stars, and everything in between. Another great night that I won't forget.
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| Air guitar |
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| Frank Sinatra's "My Way" getting intense |
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| Still with the Sinatra |
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| Backstreet Boys |
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| Little bit of reenactment from Dirty Dancing (3 extras) |
Monday:
Monday once again began with fishing in the morning. We Nikki and I headed to the dock determined to catch some more native fish. I managed to get a massive, aggressive, and stubborn dogfish. Neither of us could bring ourselves to beat it to death, so we left it (probably more cruelly) to suffocate in the empty cooler. About 45 minutes after catching it, it was still thrashing in the cooler. It reminded me of the Tell-Tale Heart with the intermittent thudding sounds of the fish struggling to escape the prison we were responsible for trapping it in. It was literally the undead dogfish.
Nikki's fishing experience was also entertaining. She felt something hit her line, and started reeling in. Immediately we could tell it was a big one - we though a dogfish with a lot of fight in it. As the creature came into view from the depths, we discovered to our shock that it was in fact a turtle the size of a basketball. Somehow, the turtle had been hooked under the jaw, and was desperately trying to free itself. After about a minute of freaking out and not knowing what to do, I grabbed the net and caught the big guy before he broke Nikki's line, hoisting him onto the dock. He was less than thrilled, and spent a great amount of effort hissing at us and attempting to run away. No one was around at the time to help us, so I had to step my foot on his back to keep him on the dock while Nikki searched for pliers to remove the hook. Things were getting desperate, when suddenly one of the staff showed up. He found the pliers, took out the hook, and I released the turtle back into the water. Not something you see everyday.
Animal sighting: Crocodile! I watched a crocodile try to eat a bird out of the water, Animal Planet style. The bird got away in case you were concerned.
That night, we had after dinner trivia hosted by Billy. Girls versus boys. Obviously, the girls won.
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| The girls with the Gamboa Cup of Victory |
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| Pretty view through the microscope |
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| Horrifying prehistoric dogfish creature |
More fishing in the morning! We caught zero fish on the line. Our only specimen brought back was technically already dead. We scooped that bad boy out of his belly-up, waterlogged grave. Little did we know how much he'd smell when we opened the cooler back at the schoolhouse...
Once done dissecting, Nikki and I powered through the day, running statistics and creating our project presentation. Here's hoping it goes well tomorrow!
I'll update later on our data findings.
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| Gill filaments in slides |
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| A page from my lab notebook |
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