La Selva, pt. 1: Going bananas

After successfully hiking out of San Gerardo, we took the bus back to Calandria and stopped for showers and an early lunch before continuing the ride out to La Selva. We arrived at our destination just in time for dinner; La Selva is in the lowlands of northeast Costa Rica, so it was several hours of driving to get out to the final field station we'd inhabit during the semester. After dinner we had time to settle in to our rooms. Since we had switched up the usual roommate situation at Monteverde, and since we would be parting ways in just a few weeks, we made sure to room with our favorite amigos. Tessa, Steph, Chesca, Francesca, Rukhshana and I snagged a room for six with (gasp!) a private bathroom! All of the other rooms in our bunk had shared bathrooms located in between bedrooms, so we were pretty excited to have one to ourselves. 

Even though we didn't have any serious activities planned for the first night, we could immediately tell that La Selva was quite different from Monteverde in many more ways than just climate and ecosystem. First of all, the station was HUGE, and had multiple buildings. It is better described as a campus than a single station, I guess. At Monteverde, everything was self-contained in the one tiny, quaint building. There are always lots of scientists at La Selva, so it's bustling with people, compared to the relative solitude we experienced at Monteverde, Cabo Blanco, Cuerici, and even Palo Verde (although it's also a bigger station, it's one of the less sought-after destinations for many biologists and tourists). In fact, when we arrived at La Selva, the first thing we saw was a large group of younger-looking students, and we soon realized that we would be sharing all of our meals and common spaces, for the first week of our stay, at least, with a high school tour group. That certainly was a switch! Also, this was the first place we stayed with real labs, since researchers stay there for months at a time conducting complex projects. Thousands of papers have been published by scientists who have lived and worked here. I began to think of La Selva as, comparatively, a swanky hotel for field biologists. We assumed that the semester was planned for us with La Selva as the last stop in order to make re-entry into the "real world" a little less harsh.

The next morning, we had an orientation hike around parts of the reserve. To add to the stark contrast to the previous field stations we stayed in, we quickly discovered that the trails at La Selva are all paved with concrete. This seemed pretty weird and "unnatural" at first, but it turns out there are so many visitors to La Selva (and so much RAIN) that paving the pathways helps to keep human-induced erosion minimal and minimize the amount of maintenance required on the trails. Also, there are stakes planted throughout the whole property at 50 m intervals, so you can precisely identify where you are at any time. Every trail has markers at .1 km intervals with both the distance and trail name, so you can easily find your way around (as long as you know the codes for the trails) and estimate how long it will take you to get back from wherever you are. Pretty convenient, but, again, surprisingly "managed" compared to other sites we'd seen.

The class hiking around on a paved trail at La Selva

An eyelash pit viper on a tree

Our walk was brief, only an hour or so, and was more to tell us basic facts about La Selva than to see a significant part of the property, which is HUGE.  We did, however, get acquainted with two or three of the main trails and saw lots of cool plants and animals even in the short time we had. After the general orientation walk, we had a plant walk with Susan to start learning our new group of plant families for the site, which we'd be quizzed on later in our stay. At the end of the plant walk, we were crossing the iconic bridge over the Puerto Viejo river, and we were lucky enough to see tarpin down below! I wasn't able to snap a picture in time, but it was amazing to see these giant, frugivorous fish which are rare because they are so good to eat. Susan was especially excited, because in all of her years coming to La Selva she had only seen them one other time.

The iconic bridge at La Selva

In the afternoon, we had time to start developing IP ideas, which really meant we just had free time to walk around and explore. Later, we had a cool lecture on neotropical mammals. After dinner (which we ate quickly to avoid having to spend too much time around loud, hyper high school students) we decided to walk a few km to the nearest bar to check it out. While we've had to be careful at all of the sites we visited, La Selva is particularly dangerous because of the high frequency of venomous snakes in the region. Particularly, there are lots of fer-de-lances (terciopelos in Spanish), which are exceptionally aggressive snakes, and will strike without even being threatened. As Mau described it to us, if three people walk by a terciopelo, the first one will alert it, the second one will annoy it, and the third one will get bitten. So, on our excursion into "town" (really just a bar on the side of the road leading up to the station), we all wore our thick rubber boots to make sure our feet would be safe from snake bites. We affectionately called our trip "bitches in boots night"because (a) we were mostly ladies, (b) we got dressed up, and (c) we were wearin' our snake boots. It was a fun night, although the bars were pretty empty because, coincidentally, it was Palm Sunday. Oops!

All ready for bitches in boots night!

The next day, we had a free day. Because we had just arrived and still hadn't seen much of the property, we spent it pretty casually. For one of the first times in the semester, I slept through breakfast and spent the day lounging around the bunk with my roommates. Also, I did laundry, which was exciting in prospect but turned out to be pretty ineffective... while our clothes came out objectively "clean" (i.e. no dirt), they still smelled exactly the same way they did when we put them in, which was certainly not very good. Luckily at this point we were all pretty used to being dirty and smelly around each other, so it wasn't a big deal.

On Tuesday, we took a trip to a Dole banana plantation. While we had a reader with lots of articles in it, the only actual book we needed for our OTS course was called Breakfast of Biodiversity, and talked a good deal about the banana industry in Costa Rica and its effects on, well, biodiversity. So, a trip to a commercial banana farm was quite appropriate, and also a nice switch to the usual activities that we did.

A Dole employee describing how bananas grow

Ashur demonstrating how bunches of bananas are harvested. First, foam pads are placed in between the individual rows of bananas (called "hands") to minimize the inter-fruit squishing. then they are bagged up, and one worker uses a machete to chop the whole bunch at the base. Another worker, below the bunch, catches them on his shoulder (also protected with a pad) and hauls them to a conveyer-type that transects the whole plantation and brings the bananas back to the processing plant.

Banana processing!

Since it's a food plant, we had to wear hair nets. We look like lunch ladies.

Checking the bananas to make sure they're healthy

Bananas getting washed and floating across the factory

Employees brush the tips of the fruits with alum to prevent rotting. It's toxic! Yum!

The tour ended with all of us receiving free Dole stickers and a shot of banana liqueur. It sounded good in theory, but was actually disgusting. Sickeningly sweet and very very strongly alcoholic...

After our tour was done we returned to La Selva, had lunch, and then had another lecture about bananas! This time, though, it was from an academic/scientific perspective instead of the commercial one we got at Dole. As it turns out, bananas are very political! (Seriously, search the history behind the term "Banana Replublic.") We also had a group discussion about the book we had read, and then had dinner. While the facilities at La Selva are nicer because of the number of people who visit it (and the revenue they bring in), unfortunately the food was not as good as that at other stations since the cooks were preparing meals for so many people simultaneously.

Following our lackluster meal, we met one of our visiting professors: Cesar Nufio from UC Boulder. He studies grasshoppers and climate change, and is also a curator at a natural history museum there. We also had the last of our ethics discussions, this time on first world/third world interactions in science. Once all of our classes were finally done, we went to sleep, ready to begin our faculty-led research projects the next day!