Fauna Forever Tambopata Blog

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Warm regards from a very warm Amazon rainforest.

The Fauna Forever Team

Butterfly identifying, urine, abandoned farms, high fevers conquered with Amazonian jungle cures, explaining methodology in broken Spanish, putrid fruit, getting lost with two Peruvians, swimming through transects, and lots of boat rides.

That is my one-sentence summation of the ever first phase for the FFT insect team and my first phase as coordinator. It’s a bit long, but you get the gist: life in the jungle never fails to provide interesting stories.

Thankfully for us Lepidopterists, the rainy season hasn’t been chuckin’ it down (as I recently discovered is a common Britishism) during the final days of January and much of February. I was initially expecting the majority of my time to be spent pouring over specimens and identification guides while watching it pour. Instead, we (myself and Licha, the insect team volunteer - a young Peruvian) passed the first few weeks tweaking our live fruit-baited traps – which were refusing to attract and trap any butterflies. If at first you don’t succeed…. Change everything. And try anything. In a completely scientific manner, of course. We changed the construction and smell of the traps, the suspended height, we washed them in urine and river water, we painted them to make them less sexy to hummingbirds. Oh, and the bait. Butterflies, those pretty, flitting creatures that inspire such poetry and whimsy. The things on which they prefer to feast. We baited the traps with rotten tuna, rotten bananas, old rum, fermented urine, and solutions with varying degrees of salinity. I stopped short of feces and blood when we discovered a mixture of bananas, rum, sugar, and urine that seemed to work nicely. However, I feel like I can sense feces being a central point in the dung beetle study that I will likely be continuing this dry season. Yay!

Among other interesting events, I came down with a strange jungle sickness that has been characterized by the doctor in Puerto Maldonado (and my favorite corner store matron in town as well) as dengue fever. The blood tests failed to show dengue, however, after waiting for days for these results, I was told that they would show negative either way, since enough time hadn’t passed for the incubation period. My friend and resident jungle man (Elisban, who those of you who has spent time at Explorer’s Inn should be lucky enough to know) saw my fever and weakness, which inspired him to construct something that can only be described as a tea that I bathed in. The concoction made my fever break over night, which was a blessing and allowed me to gather myself back to lucidity enough to get to town and rest in front of a fan – one of the few comforts while sick.

After a late start at Casa Ita, I have continued to hone in on the perfect formula for trapping butterflies in the rainy season. After a morning of getting lost in a swamp with Licha and one of the resident Ita researchers, things have gone fairly smoothly. A few day’s rest in the cool climate of Cusco and you shall hear more from me as we head to Sachavacayoc and Tambopata Research Center on the Rio Tambopata.

Ashley is the FFT Insect Team Coordinator

My first sighting: the footprint of a large cat. Abraham, with machete in hand, squats down low next to the print: "They are puma; too pointed for a jaguar... ...puma are dangerous, known to track humans.” Abraham and I set out on our first mammal transect to begin our data collection at Explorers Inn. I’m walking behind Abraham; we find white lipped and collard peccary tracks. He patiently points out the small differences between the two comparing them to the white tailed deer tracks I know so well from back home. We walk slowly through the dense forest, quietly lifting our feet high to create less noise. Searching the forest floor, understory and canopy we find paca and agouti tracks. It’s 4:00pm and I find myself settling into the forest surroundings. Walking with an up turned mouth, half smiling sometimes even laughing out loud. The forest is so deep and full, so noisy, rich and diverse, yet peaceful all at once.

Abraham spots a male red howler monkey climbing higher into the canopy. We map the distance from Abraham to the base of the tree, then perpendicularly from the path to the base of the tree and finally the distance we’ve walked since the beginning of the trail, 1,250M. We watch the howler and he watches us. I laugh out loud again as he dangles and swings his legs back and forth, one on either side of the branch. He is just laying there on his belly watching us as we watch him. We are all curious. “Let’s go, we have more to monitor.” I follow, watching the machete he carries, his arm bent at the elbow holding the blade in front of his body, the tip about 6 inches above his head. I assume this keeps the spider webs from hitting him in the face. Night starts to fall and the warm embrace I felt during those hours of sun filtering through the dense leaves of trees, lianas and epiphytes begins to tighten. An opening in the canopy betrays my senses, the sun hasn’t yet set after all, it’s only dusk and we still have time to get back.

Done monitoring we pick up the pace. Light continues to fall. I continue to walk closer and closer to my guide. My mind wanders back to the puma track. I hear the eyrie calls of the red howler monkeys. Abraham’s machete still held in front of his body now appears to be a weapon of defence as he seems tenser, more alert, and ready to strike. The forest grip tightens. I'm hot, my mind jumps to Brian’s explanation of the heat-sensing pits that vipers use to find their prey. "Hey Abraham, do you think that Puma is watching us?" "Ha! Are you scared?" "No".

Jana was a Phase 10.1 FFT Mammal Team Volunteer

And here we are...

When asked to write this blog, I figured that the best place to start would be at the beginning. Then I found myself thinking that few things in life seem to have a definite beginning point. A journey or passion, for example, may have their beginnings with a number of seeds planted throughout one’s life, with maybe an impetus or culmination somewhere along the way.

This is often how I feel with my relationship to science. I cannot begin to tell you when I became a scientist, or the exact moment that I realized I had found a profession that would challenge and interest me for the rest of my life. I can, however, recall several seemingly insignificant moments that I now realize were vital to my current position and outlook. A series of seeds were unknowingly planted by parents, who let me run wild in the prairies of the Midwest catching frogs and butterflies while encouraging my natural independent personality. Later, I became close with three wonderful professors and mentors while at Drake University. They helped me gain experience in the field doing research and hone in on my areas of interest. One project I worked on for two years studied the movement of a butterfly, the Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele), in a series of fragmented habitat patches. This project was my first experience working with insects and opened by eyes to a new way of looking at ecological theories. I later worked on a project funded by the National Science Foundation, in which I looked at two particular families of moths and their potential as indicators of different forest composition in beech-maple forests in Ohio.

That said, here I am in January of 2010, and along with Fauna Forever Tambopata I am once again entering the breathtaking forest that lies on the Rio Tambopata, this time as the Research Coordinator for the new FFT insect team. I was first introduced to the Peruvian jungle last summer, when I accepted a position as a Resident Naturalist (RN) at The Explorer’s Inn. The RN Programme has been offering young biologists and explorers a place to live and learn about the forest for nearly 30 years. While at Explorer’s Inn, I became acquainted with FFT and was able to assist some of the teams with their research. After a few conversations with the coordinators and Chris Kirkby, I did some research and decided on a subject for the insect team’s first project. I’ll follow up with details about this project in my next post.

Ashley Anne Wick
FFT Insect Research Team Coordinator

I wish to share my experiences of wasps in the Tambopata rainforest. My intention is not to frighten you, but rather to share the bittersweet memories of their attacks.

The first time I was stung by wasps was when I worked on the mammal team and we went out to check the Tourist Swamp trail at Explorer’s Inn. There were three of us, and as usual whenever we went out hiking, I was the person at the back. There is a small creek that crosses the trail and an old log which bridges the trail together. Nothing happened on the way out to the end of the trail. It happened on the way back as I followed my team members crossing that creek. I saw a swarm of wasps in front of me about half a meter from my face! At the time I was standing in the middle of the log and I didn’t know what to do. In few seconds, the wasps were all over me and I screamed for help to Abraham and Martina, who were already on the other side of the creek. They shouted, “Run Fahrol, run!” I was panicked and I ran as quickly as I could, but it was not easy because the log was slippery and I had to climb a few narrow ‘steps’ up the bank afterwards.

While I ran, I tried to wave the wasps away with my hand and I tried to cover my face. As I did that I felt painful pokes on my arm and I could sense that there were a lot of them swarming all around me as I ran for my dear life. As I ran, I saw Abraham and Martina in front of me about 20 metres ahead - they looked very worried and concerned. They said there were no more wasps around me so I slowed down my pace. Then, I started to feel the needle-poking-like pain mostly on my right arm. I checked my arm and I found six little swollen – but painful - bumps which meant six wasps had successfully stung me that day. We analysed what had happened and we realized that there was a small wasp hive inside the hollow bamboo which we’d been using as a support to hold while crossing over the bridge. As Abraham walked across the log and held the handle, it must have woken the wasps. They got agitated when Martina did the same, and by the time I got there they were ready to attack!

My second encounter with a swarm of wasp was not by accident, but rather ‘on purpose’. Again, I was with the mammal team, this time at Sachavacayoc Centre, and this time it was just me and Abraham.
It was a fairly boring afternoon’s transect on T1 trail when Abraham saw a newly developing wasp hive in the middle of the trail a couple of metres off the ground at 3,225m trail distance. He told me to duck and walk quietly under the hive and then quicken my pace as I passed them. We both did it without any problem and continued with our transect. At the end of the transect, we took a rest and Abraham told me that he needed to destroy the wasp hive because it was at head height on the trail and would be hazardous to anyone using this part of the trail, especially the tourists. Initially, I could not ‘compute’ the idea, and when he said he would use his machete to knock the hive down, I gasped and started to imagine what might happen.

Abraham said the plan was simple; he would give me one minute to walk as fast and as far as I could past the hive, and after that he would knock it down and run for his life. At the time, a lot of things flashed in front of my eyes and ‘what if’ questions kept popping up in my head, for example; what if the ground was not level and he triped over some roots when he ran for his life? I tried to reason with him but he looked very determined to do it. As we approached the hive, Abraham saw it for the second time and he realized that the hive was already a bit bigger and he wanted to give me more time to get away, as far as possible! “Is that supposed to calm my feeling?” I asked him. I told him that I would walk as far as I could for a minute and wait for him to see what happened because I also planned to record a video of it.

We took a deep breath and Abraham handed me his day sack so it would be easier for him to escape. I did as planned and chose a good spot to wait for him. As soon as I thought ‘when is he going to knock it down?’ I heard a ‘boom’. It gave me a fright and my heart started to pump like mad. It took me few seconds to hear his running footsteps, but once I did, I realised it wasn’t slowing down and instead stayed at a constant – fast – pace. I panicked and I thought I should have gone a bit further because the wasps were obviously still chasing after him. When I saw Abraham waving his hands all over the place I knew I should have run, but I hesitated. In that second, I imagined that if Abraham outran me, I would surely be their next target - that was not going to happen, not again! I was holding my camera on and quickly turned it off and slid it inside my pocket.

Abraham shouted: “Ruuuun!” and that was the last bit of encouragement I needed. I held his day sack close to my chest and I sped with all my might down the trail. I guess I was running too fast because I felt like the trail could not catch up with my pace. I was so scared that I felt like my face had turned white because all of my blood went down to my feet! I was gasping for air as I ran out of energy and I shouted to his that I could not run anymore. I turned my head to Abraham who was a few metres behind me and he told me to stop. I was so relieved and stopped just before one of our footprint traps of T1 trail. I saw a wasp stuck on his shirt and he said he had only been stung by two wasps. We laughed and laughed and laughed and were both glad that we had successfully cleared the trail from potentially harmful wasp stings... for now anyway.

Fahrol Liza Jaafar (26 November 2009)
Sachavacayoc Centre
Mammal Team, Phase 2, FFT Project 2009/2010

In the world of amphibians there are almost as many reproductive strategies as there are species. The traditional "eggs that hatch tadpoles in the pond" scenario gives way to a diverse range of bizarre modes as one moves towards the tropics. Caecilians feed their offspring with their own skin. The marsupial frog one-ups the piggyback ride that poison dart frogs give their young by actually brooding their young in a special pouch on its back, only to be one-upped once again by the surname toad; a species that bores into pores on the back of its mother as an egg. Then there are the calls that partition various wavelengths of the audio spectrum to bring females to the breeding habitat. Like their fellow external fertilizers the fishes, frogs are just as likely to have males caring for offspring as females. This, and other classic amphibian reproductive mechanisms were noted for Cruziohyla craspedopus, by a group of researchers, including myself, at one of FFT’s survey sites in 2003. A breeding population of C. craspedopus had been located by Erik Wild in previous years at Reserva Amazonica with a different group of students. Luckily for us they were still there when we returned in 2003, and breeding in the same habitat, open to our careful observations.

Like other species in its former genus Agalychnis, these frogs choose to lay eggs above the water source that will be the tadpole's home in a sticky mass that waits for the best conditions of abundant prey and lack of predators. Many frog species can't breed in large permanent water bodies as they will be eaten by the various predatory residents. So tree frogs of this subfamily choose temporary water bodies, and further hedge their bets by letting their eggs develop outside of the water, hatching and dropping in later. The catch is: there are predators outside the water as well, always searching for juicy frog eggs.

The chosen habitat of C. craspedopus in this case was exemplary; as it was separate from any permanent water, but big enough to house the quite large tadpoles. The buttress roots of a tree had criss-crossed one another, and the resulting phytotelma, or plant-born water body, was at least 30cm deep and full of water during the wet season. Upon relocating this population, one egg mass was positioned above the pool. In the ensuing weeks, another appeared on the other side of the buttress. This was a perplexing observation, as these eggs were certainly doomed unless the entire forest flooded in next 2-3 weeks. There was no water underneath them.

Questions flew as to what this particular female C. craspedopus was thinking. Our first guess was predator distraction. In previous years Dr. Wild had seen egg masses disappear coinciding with observations of the cat-eyed snake Leptodeira annulata, a frog egg specialist. Seeing as a local cat-eyed snake may be satiated by one egg mass for the necessary amount of time that it takes a separate egg mass to develop, the frog could theoretically save its best suited offspring while taking pressure off the limited usable habitat. This is what we surmised.

Eggs from these frogs have a behaviour pattern of their own. When they are attacked by a predator, like a cat-eyed snake, they hatch, escaping into water below. If they are attacked at an early stage, the snake gets to eat the entire embryo. If they hatch at too late of a stage, the water source can dry up. So it follows that these frogs have to lay eggs in odd places at odd times to have the best chances. One researcher who has detailed this process, Karen Warkentin, figured our errant C. craspedopus egg mass was a mistake i.e. the female frog isn't as smart as the developing embryos that can recognize predators. Other frogs of the genus Agalychnis will lay eggs in anticipation of oncoming flood waters. It just so happens that our C. craspedopus at Reserva have a prime habitat in the middle of terra firma forest, a unique example of just one of the myriad reproductive strategies employed by amphibians as they face so many sources of predation and competition in tropical rainforest.

Works cited:
Block, J. E., S. L. Unser, J. K. Mooney, and E. R. Wild. 2003. Agalychnia craspedopus (Amazon Leaf Frog). Reproduction. Herpetological Review 34: 134-135

Caldwell, M.S., J.G. McDaniel & K.M. Warkentin. 2009. Frequency information in the vibration-cued escape hatching of red-eyed treefrogs. Journal of Experimental Biology 212: 566-575

Brian is the FFT Herpetofauna Team Coordinator

Hi Everyone,

I will try to show you one day in the jungle during the Fauna Forever Tambopata volunteer program. I am in a mammal team and in the lodge Reserva Amazonica I was the only member of the mammal team except of the coordinator, Abraham.

One day we were doing our usual morning monitoring in C3. We did not see anything and I was a little bored, I must say. So when Abraham saw very nice and colourful spider I really wanted to take picture of it. But it was in an awkward position. I was trying and trying, maybe for about 10 minutes. Suddenly, I noticed movement just in the corner of my eye, and there it was – a Taira (Eira barbara). She was just 3m from me, jumping over a tree butress. But my hands of ¨professional¨ photographer stayed focused on the spider (it was very nice spider)! Then she saw me and ran away. I was so excited that when I turned back to Abraham with my wide-open eyes and speechless opening mouth he thought that something wrong happened. In some seconds I was able to tell him that I just saw a Taira. So we were writing a record of this observation, when we heard other movement. Breathlessly we waited for the animal to appear. And it was the same Taira who was curious to see us. But, waiting breathlessly for anything is not very good – my brain without air forgot to send a signal to my hands: ´take camera and make video´. So although our lovely Taira walked around at distance of about 2 metres, and made a half circle around us, the only picture I have is the picture of the very nice and colourful spider.

But it was not end for our day. In the afternoon we monitored B trail. Again the same situation. We were walking and not seeing very much. But, we came to the first footprint trap that we had made with Abraham 3 days ago and there in the mud trap I saw them! I asked Abraham: ¨What is it?¨ and he said: ¨Deer¨ and I repeated the question and he repeated the answer. So I pointed to the footprint trap again and repeated the question. And? There they were plain to see… a couple of perfectly clear JAGUAR footprints. Just next were also footprints of a Grey brocket deer and of a Coati too. My dance of joy above was soon interrupted with Abraham´s: ¨Sh*t! We have to go, it’s late and it’s getting dark.¨ I was so, so excited, as you can imagine. When we came to the second footprint trap, we found foot prints of a Giant anteater as well.

I would say – a very, very successful day!

Meta is a volunteer on the FFT Mammal Team

In time for Halloween, during training week at Explorer’s Inn I saw one of the weirdest and freakiest things I’ve seen in this forest. It got me thinking about the myriad parasite life cycles that exist and how they build the biodiversity of the entire rainforest.

One very large caterpillar lay upside down on a branch about one and a half meters off the ground. I could tell it was dead since it wasn’t moving and had turned brown as if desiccated. That’s when I noticed what was attached to the caterpillar itself. More than a hundred lines of silk were dangling from all over its body. It looked like the door at a Chinese restaurant. At the end of each strand of silk was one miniscule little larva, squirming as if each had laid its own line of silk.

Obviously the reproductive stage of the caterpillar would be some kind of butterfly, so this couldn’t have been part of its life cycle. This was a foreign organism that was using the caterpillar’s body in one fashion or another. Three life strategies come to mind. 1) Scavenger: using the carcass of a caterpillar as a medium for its reproduction – your typical maggot. 2) Predator: although I can’t imagine how one hundred tiny caterpillars take down one huge one as their prey. If the image was reversed from upside down caterpillar to right-side up larva it would resemble the glow worm: a lacewing that attracts its prey with bioluminescence, then catches it in sticky silk. The target is of the same order but from a different life stage. Or 3) Parasite: using the live caterpillar as its unwittingly host--brooding hundreds of offspring in its living body. This is the case with the parasitoid wasp, which paralyzes its host with its sting so it can lay eggs in the host body. The young wasps devour the host from the inside out, sometimes while it’s still alive. But this particular case seemed more dramatic. Often a parasitoid wasp lays one egg per host body. Plus, silk is an adaptation associated more with lepidopterans – as if one caterpillar was consuming another in a strikingly horrific way. These and other possibilities for the exact identity of the parasite abound. Once again I am forced to spin the wheel and name that life cycle, as I am often confronted with puzzling life forms in this forest with unique and brilliant survival strategies.

Brian is the FFT Herpetofauna Team Coordinator

Welcome back to our next phase of research and monitoring and welcome to our brand new team of volunteers!

We'll soon be posting up personal accounts from our new recruits, latest news and more pics from the field, so keep checking right here.

We'd like to send a very big thanks to all the volunteers who helped add to our blog over phase 1 and wish them all the very best for their onward journeys.

From Tambopata with love,

The FFT Team

8/22/09 10:30pm:
So we’ve gotten back into a bit of a groove after changing our plans around. Unfortunately that groove includes waking up 5 am to do our bio-inventories—but hey, what’s good science if not mundane, repetitive tasks at uncomfortable hours? At least that’s the one time of day it’s cool out. When it was bad a few days ago I was still sweating, at rest, until about midnight.

Our time in Puerto has also given us a chance to get more of the local color. For instance we wound up being coerced into sharing several beers with a nice, but very aggressive, Peruvian woman, who then proceeded to show us rather racy pictures of her daughter, an adolescent professional dancer (who was present at the time) on her cell phone. Alex had mentioned the warnings he’d gotten in the past about the girls here latching on to guys as a ticket out of Puerto Maldonado, which is the Peruvian equivalent of a small, agricultural city in the US, but this was the first time I’d seen it in action. Alex says I just haven’t been in the right bars on a Saturday yet.

8/26/09 6:13pm: Obelisco
This afternoon we went to the Obelisco, a cool observation tower in the center of town and arguably Puerto’s biggest tourist destination. It’s about 70 ft tall, which as far as observation towers go isn’t remarkable, but it is easily the tallest building in Puerto by 30 ft. At the top of the obelisk you get an interesting perspective of how limited the town is. At street level the town feels like more or less like any other in the developing world, but from the tower you realize the entire developed area fits neatly into a square a few kilometers with well defined edges that abruptly transition into dense rainforest. You also don’t think of it from the ground, but the Amazon basin appears incredibly flat once you’re far enough above the canopy, almost to an unnatural degree. Joel accurately commented it seemed a lot like we were inside a game of Sim City. We got there just at sunset too, and the clouds were incredibly diverse along the sky line, creating an incredibly beautiful and dynamic scene as the colors shifted with time.

While we were up there we also saw a local marathon, or at least some sort of street race. It was confusing at first though because they hadn’t blocked off the streets. Our only initial hint was a motorcycle policeman with his lights and siren going, but only driving about 10 km/hr. At first we thought it was Peru’s slowest car chase, but then we saw the runners behind him. The whole time we were up there though, about 30 min, we probably only saw a maximum of 20 runners, which made us wonder why they did it at all. But then again, despite the police escorts, traffic just weaved between the runners the whole time, so I guess it really wasn’t much of a burden on the public. The guy in last place had to feel a little embarrassed though considering the race had created enough congestion to stack up a couple dozen cars and moto-taxis behind him.

It also turns out we may have missed the chance to get to know an up and coming Peruvian star. Before we went to the Obelisco, we cruised through the market to pick up some maracuyás and platanitos, and while we were there we casually cruised through the DVD section. As we were about to leave, I took one last look at one of the booths, and to my astonishment, found a Peruvian dance movie with none other than the racy picture of the girl we met at the bar on the cover.

Tomorrow we head out up river to the Sachavacayoc Center for a few days to meet up with the other Stanford students and the Fauna Forever team working there. I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve heard good things about it and I’m looking forward to going.

8/29/09 6:45pm: Sachavacayoc
Our time here at Sacha has been absolutely fantastic, and it’s hard to believe it’s over already. Compared with the other lodges it’s a lot simpler. There aren’t any tourists so we have the whole station to ourselves and our relationship with the staff is much less strained because of it. The food is good, the beds are comfortable and the company is good. Alex’s brother Ian and his friend Kelsey are here studying dung beetles (which I’ll simply say involves some rather unsavory practices to bait the traps), and most of the Herpetology team is still here too. There’s even a guitar here, and I’ve managed to relearn the first half of “Green Sleeves”, which I had learned just before I left.

The wildlife here has also apparently been great with people seeing tapirs, herds of peccary and the Herp team even catching a magnificent rainbow boa which was profusely photographed. We haven’t had much time to get out, but on the walks I’ve been on we’ve seen some great rantulas and wolf spiders almost the size of your hand, spectacled caiman, a coral snake and a tamandua, which is basically a really cute, small anteater that whistles and climbs around in the trees. There are also these small beetles that have glowing, neon green spots behind their heads, which glow bright orange when they fly, and when you hold them, they snap themselves as a defense mechanism that makes it feel like you’re being shocked - weird.

Yesterday we also got to take an overnight trip to Lake Sachavacayoc. It was about a 5 km hike to the lake where they have a thatched, open-air platform on with pads to sleep on and ropes to hang mosquito nets from. Joel and I got there at just before sunset, and we took one of the old, wooden canoes out from the dock to meet up with the other group members who were already on the lake watching the sunset. Needless to say, the sunset was gorgeous, and in total our group probably took a couple hundred photos of it.

This was in large part because of Joel’s recent discovery of a photography technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR), where you take three pictures of something at various exposures. Then you apply software that takes out the underexposed portions of the properly exposed picture—say the dark, backlit trees in the sunset—and replaces them with the corresponding portions from overexposed picture–in this case, the adequately lit trees from the overexposed sunset picture. The result is a more vibrant picture that much better captures what it was like to actually be there. This is because a camera can’t capture in a single photograph the same range of color and contrast as the human eye. You can also take things even further by tweaking the software to make the pictures have an absolutely stunning, surreal quality to them. Unfortunately when applied to people, however, it just highlights all your flaws and basically predicts what you would look like in 20 years if you dedicated yourself to a career sweeping chimneys around Chernobyl. Definitely a technique worth looking into though, if you’re into photography.

We stayed out on the lake well after sunset and enjoyed the stars and the moonlight on the lake. Our expectations weren’t very high, but Joel tried taking some long exposure shots, as in 5-30 seconds, with the camera resting on the boat, while I tried as hard as I could to lie perfectly still. Surprisingly, they actually turned out remarkably well and in one of the 30 second exposures I’m virtually completely illuminated by the moon. It was also surprising how much red you could still pick up in the sky when you left the shutter open so long—or at least so Joel told me. Since the boat was slightly rocking, the picture also has a cool a contrast between me who was in focus rocking with the camera, and the sky which became slightly blurred. It was incredible how still the lake was though since it had virtually no flow in or out. This is actually fairly common though for oxbow lakes, which are old sections of river, named for their shape, that have broken off as the river has slowly changed course.

The next morning we woke up at 5 am so we could eat our breakfast of crackers, bread, marmalade and manjar (i.e. caramel made from condensed milk) as we watched the sunrise. For those of you who have tried to wake me up in the morning, it will be no surprise to you that I was the last one down to the docks, and that I pointed out repeatedly that we had at least another half hour before you could actually see the sun above the tree line. It, in fact, took about 50 min. Never the less, it was quite beautiful, and afterwards we took the two canoes around the lake before napping again and then walking back to Sacha.

Once we were back, the group decided to take a swim in the quebrada, which, unlike the lake, was relatively caiman-free. It had been higher before we came, and people had been jumping in off the bridge, a drop of about 25 ft. It was much too low when we got there though, but we still had a great time crawling up the rapids, tossing around the frisbee and sharing a couple beers as we tried (with only moderate success) to avoid dashing ourselves on the jagged rocks hidden below the exceptionally murky water.

9/1/09 10:35pm: Back in Puerto Maldonado
We’ve just said goodbye to Joel and Jane who left today. To send them off last night we took one last stroll through the plaza near our hostel. There is a really cool landscape painter who works in the plaza at night, and what’s really impressive is that he only uses spray paint. He has a myriad of different techniques using sponges, newspaper, cardboard and a razor, and it is truly remarkable how precisely he can fade, smudge and blot the paint around the canvas. And just to make it even more of a show, he routinely lights his paints and canvas on fire to dry the paint faster.

Shortly after watching the painter we were looking at a couple comedians, one of who was in drag, who had gathered quite a crowd around them lip-syncing. Within a minute one of them sees Alex and Joel wearing their somewhat conspicuous Peruvian soccer jerseys and drags first Alex, and then also Joel, into the circle. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow exactly what he was saying, but Jane translated for us as best she could. The performers weren’t particularly clever, and most of the humor was simply derived from a couple gringos being put on the spot, with a dash of lewd humor to keep Alex and Joel uncomfortable. All things considered Alex and Joel handled it very well, and escaped relatively unscathed, though Alex now gives the crowds a comfortable berth when we walk through the plaza.

Alex’s mom, Pat, is also here now and we’ve been hanging out in her room at Cabana Quinta as much as we can since it has AC. She’s also a pathologist so naturally we got around to talking about all the diseases we can get here and we’ve come to the conclusion we almost definitely have giardia. The symptoms have been very mild for me and only lasted a couple days a while back, so I may have already cleared it, but I could just be asymptomatic. Alex has had it worse, and one of the members of the Herp team was also diagnosed with it though so it’s pretty likely we all got it somewhere. We looked up the recommended treatments on the CDC website and then visited a pharmacy here to see if we could find anything. We actually got really lucky and they had our top choice, Nitazoxanide, since it didn’t have any mentioned side effects and it was really cheap too. We also met a guy who had been bitten by a bat at one of the research stations and now had to get a series of rabies jabs, which is apparently brutal and takes a week, so we definitely felt like we got off easy. However, we did discover our meds did, in fact, have the side effect of turning your urine an alarmingly dark, neon yellow.

9/5/09 5:38 pm
And thus our great trip is coming to a close. We’ve just gotten back from the TRC where we saw those of the team that were still there and got one last hurrah in the jungle. The boat ride up was absolutely spectacular. While it was still light we saw an entire family of half a dozen Capybara, but we had gotten a late start and so later we wound up driving straight into another particularly beautiful sunset on the river. And as if this weren’t enough, as the light from the sunset faded, the almost full moon was rising in the sky to our left as an enormous lightning storm started flashing behind us. It was far enough away that we couldn’t hear the thunder, but it must have been several miles wide, and the strikes were absolutely incessant, brilliantly lighting up the hazy thunderheads every second or two. Eventually another storm cropped up in front us, and our boat was surrounded on all four sides by the moon glinting off the river, the dimming glow of the sunset and the luminous bursts from the storms.

Once we got off the boat, however, we had the herculean task of hauling 12 people’s backpacks and equipment the mile or so to the lodge (which was built so far back to avoid the sand flies near the river which carry leishmaniasis, a flesh eating parasite that is exceptionally difficult to treat) with a single cart. The result was (in retrospect) a rather comical scene of us strapped with bags on every limb trying to keep the equipment from falling off the cart as we hauled it was best we could through the jungle.

Fortunately the food this time around at TRC was far better than last time. Perhaps they were better prepared for us this time, or now they simply weren’t running out of food, but it made things much more pleasant. Plus they let us eat in the dining area with the tourists, and even made cakes for Dennis’s and then Alex’s consecutive birthdays. My present to Alex was a Spanish pocket guide to diseases of the digestive track.

It was sad to leave the rest of the team at TRC. By now it’s happened quite a few times in my life, but it still gives me quite a peculiar feeling to realize I’ll likely never see these people I’ve become friends with again. I’m glad to be going home though. There are certain things I’ve simply been away from for too long: hot showers, dry air, meals that don’t get half their caloric value from white rice. The trip has certainly been spectacular though, and I certainly hope to come back one day.