Another day in the office...

My day began a little late as I rolled out of bed after 7 and scrambled up to the comedor to get some gallo pinto before the kitchen ladies packed it away. Now I have learned that I can´t trust the toucans to wake me up bright and early. After that, I hit the forest trail to play around with some methods for my independent project. Chris´work focus on how the local extinction of large mammals affects herbivory rates on seedlings and seed predation. So what he is asking is: What happens to the next generation of trees (the seeds and seedlings) if we take out big mammals that usually disperse seeds, trample and eat seedlings, and prey on seeds? To complement that, I want to look at how the local extinction of large mammals affects the composition of the insect community and how much that insect community eats seeds and seedlings. This will give us a more complete picture of herbivory, seed predation, and the community of the plants´enemies at Las Cruces and La Amistad, the large continuous forest which protects large mammals like tapirs and peccaries.

To do that, I am going to sweepnet the seedlings understory in randomly distributed plots. That just means passes a mesh net over all the seedlings. Any insects on the leaves get trapped in the net, so that I can conveniently collect them in a plastic bag and identify them back in the lab. (Sweepnetting makes me feel like a little kid running through a meadow catching butterflies; it is so much fun.) Emily, the PhD researcher from University of Michigan, suggested that I use pit-fall traps to survey the critters crawling in the litter layer.

For herbivory, I began by doing a guessimate of how many of the leaves in the plot had been nibbled on. This is a very rough totally unreliable guessimate, but I thought that it was impressive that over three-quarters of the leaves had at least some herbivory damage. Life is tough for little seedlings; would it be awful to grow up and know that, most likely, 75% of your limbs would be munched on? All in all, I am feeling more hopeful than overwhelmed about the project right now. We will see what Chris says when he arrives next week.