Day 5 – With My Head In The Clouds

Monteverde Cloud Forest (http://www.monteverdecostarica.com/)

Monteverde is an interesting place but in some ways represents the lull in our trip. The region is home to a rare type of ecohabitat called cloud forest which is characterized by low-level clouds that sit at canopy-level among the trees. The constant presence of the clouds means the forest is always wet and mossy. The composition of flora and fauna tends to be very different here than elsewhere in Costa Rica. However, wildlife is harder to see here, thus a tricky endeavor during shorter visits like our own. Most people are better served here by an interest in plants. There are hundreds of epiphytic species that use stronger, hardier plants for structural support, but typically derive nutrients from the air that surrounds them (“All I need is the air that I breath…”) and from detritus that accumulates around their roots.

Leaf edges serrated by a bat (Copyright: Robert Schuman 2011)

There are two reserves to visit, the Monteverde Reserve, and the Santa Elana Reserve, named for a nearby town. We choose to visit the Santa Elena Reserve as it’s close to some other interesting local attractions, including the Selvatura Park.

Copyright: Robert Schuman 2011

As we are about to start out for a relaxed hike, we meet a group of graduate students including a PhD canidate from UConn researching ants, who tell us they are headed to biological research station somewhere nearby.  After searching online, their description most likely fits the Monteverde Conservation League, a non-profit dedicated to research, outreach, education, and the preservation of the cloud forest. This work seems even more timely as cloud forests are extremely sensitive to the effects of climate change. Though they have been resilient in response to historical temperature fluctuations, too much warming could affect the characteristic cloud cover here and completely change the hydrological regime.

We start our walk through the forest and start to appreciate most of the diversity we see on a more micro scale. Tiny dew drops that refract the incoming bursts of light. The forest is abuzz with texture, smells, and sounds. Just like every location we will visit during our stay, we hear the constant throb of cicadas in the background, a sort of gregorian chant celebrating the sheer grandiosity of the life force surrounding us.

Small epiphytic plants are abundant in the Costa Rican cloud forest (Copyright: Robert Schuman 2011)

Cloud Forest epiphyte (Copyright: Robert Schuman 2011)

Monteverde Cloud Forest Canopy - light from above (Copyright: Robert Schuman 2011)

There are a few errant clips of bird song and we do manage to spy a collared red start hopping along the path – one of the happiest looking birds I’ve ever seen. Though we’re never lucky enough to see one, Monteverde is also home to a renowned bird called the quetzal.

Collared redstart (http://www.billhubick.com/costaRica.html)

Quetzal (http://www.billhubick.com/costaRica.html)

The last thing we do before heading back to the lodge, is visit the Insect exhibit, “Jewels of the Rainforest.” in Selvatura Park. Both my Lonely Planet and Moon guide list this as a not-to-miss stop. The collection, one of the largest in the world, is the culmination of years of collecting by entomologist Richard Whitten , who moved with his wife to Costa Rica to begin collecting and studying metallic beetles, most likely in the Buprestidae family. The exhibit covers all manner of creepy crawlies however, with wall after wall of them encased in glass.

Costa Rican metallic beetles (http://www.sciencenewsblog.com/pics/costa_rica_metallic_beetles.jpg)

The highlight of the collection are most certainly the iridescent butterflies positioned ornately in spirals and geometric arrangements, or against other beautiful objects, like peacock feathers, that serve to enhance their natural elegance (Roger Whitten’s wife was said to be responsible). The morpho, a very large shimmering blue butterfly we’ve already seen around the country, is featured heavily in the exhibit. I also love the many delicate examples of glass butterflies, with their barely-there transparent wings on display.

Morpho butterfly - Jewels of the Rainforest Exhibit (http://www.flickr.com/photos/12928926@N06/sets/72157621807255630/)

There are many other examples of insects with less friendly personas. Viewing bird tarantulas, whip spiders, millipedes, parasitic wasps, and Giant Goliath beetles make my skin alight with a crawling sensation. There are walls dedicated to insects vectoring disease in Costa Rica and another showing the great variety of species in Monteverde alone including several ridiculously large spiders and more bullet ants. Though we saw sparse wildlife on our earlier hike, it’s a little unsettling to know what’s going on off trail.

We stop for a little while in the town of Santa Elana and have lunch at a local soda called the traveling man. Rice with pollo (chicken), crispy yucca, plantains, and some variety of local orange soda. The town is small, essentially a triangle of streets loaded with tourist traps, and a few interesting places we make a mental note to visit the next day. We work our way back to the Cloud Forest Lodge for a quiet night. There is yet another cat who seems to target the foreigners for love and affection. He (we’ll just call him “Alejandro”) makes no qualms about following us into our room, curiously checking out our luggage, and making sure to lounge on every inch of free shelf space we have to put our things.  We will later hear him pulling the same con on new arrivals, and meowing with loud intent the next morning at the door of everyone who just might listen…

Repost from Wired.com: Sea Creatures Hint at Recent Trans-Antarctic Seaway

The discovery of nearly identical sea creatures on either side of a now solid Antarctic ice sheet — 1,500 miles wide and over a mile thick — points to an open ocean passage there as recently as 125,000 years ago.

A schematic of a seaway created by the partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (on left).

The new evidence adds to geologic clues indicating the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has collapsed at least once in the last million years, and could do so again in a warmer climate. The complete collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise global sea level by 11 to 16 feet.

“The West Antarctic Ice Sheet can be considered the Achilles heel of Antarctica,” biologist David Barnes of the West Antarctic Survey, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “Our research provides compelling evidence that a seaway stretching across West Antarctica could have opened up only if the ice sheet has collapsed in the past.”

As part of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life, scientists were looking at the distribution of different species of bryozoans, small filter-feeders that are attached to the sea floor as adults (top image). They found that the populations of bryozoans were remarkably similar in two different seas separated by the ice sheet, the Weddell and the Ross.

“Because the larvae of these animals sink and this stage of their life is short — and the adult form anchors itself to the sea bed — it’s very unlikely that they would have dispersed the long distances carried by ocean currents,” Barnes said. “Our conclusion is that the colonization of both these regions is a signal that both seas were connected by a trans-Antarctic sea way in the recent past.”

“This biological evidence is one of the novel ways that we can look for clues that help us reconstruct Antarctica’s ice sheet history,” Barnes said. The study appears in Global Biological Change.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is already considered to be highly vulnerable to climate change, but estimates of when it might collapse vary from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/antarctic-passage/#ixzz0yH1cDspW

Ocean Acidification – The “Other” Inconvenient Truth

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has just produced a film called “Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification.”  The short film, which clocks in at about 21 minutes, features narration by Sigourney Weaver who also lent her voice to the recent Planet Earth series (although I happen to have the David Attenborough version, as I have a great deal of reverence for him and his narrative skills).

Most of us think of “carbon” as a buzzword intimately connected to the concept of global warming (the more apt word really is “climate change” as increased CO2 can, through complex and interesting ways, actually lead to cooling trends; but that’s a whole other topic…) but in terms of the ocean can lead to other unfortunate repercussions. The ocean has always been a major sink for CO2 and for quite some time has resisted strong ill effects due to its natural buffering system. A buffering system in chemistry terms allows a liquid (in this case, our “liquid” would be the entirety of the world’s oceans) to resist changes in pH when either acids or bases are added…. to a point. At some level, the system becomes “overwhelmed” and can no longer resist radical changes in pH.

The phenomenon’s name, “ocean acidification”, indicates the oceans are dropping in their pH, increasing in Hydrogen ions, and becoming more acidic in their composition. As more carbon pours into the sea, free carbonate ions (CO3) which are part of the oceans buffering system end up being tied up by the addition of extra CO2 (for the chemistry of this, check out the Center For Ocean Solutions’ Ocean Acidification page – the link is provided in resources at the end of this post). Unfortunately, carbonate is also a very necessary ingredient for the formation of the shells of a variety of organisms – corals, shellfish, pterapods, some types of plankton, etc. The lack of a supply of these carbonate ions actually can cause the shells of these creatures to dissolve, greatly increasing these species’ mortality.

The decalcification issue is also thought to be a stressor in what has been suggested as the return of the ocean to a primordial state, marked by a decrease in marine biodiversity and among other things, an increase in gelatinous marine organisms, most notably jellyfish. There are certainly a mix of reasons for the increase of jellies, but the decrease in shelled organisms helps release their gelatinous counterparts from competition for resources.

According to the Center for Ocean Solutions, other negative impacts include acidosis (a build-up of carbonic acid in marine organisms’ tissues leading to decreased immune response and other health consequences) and changes to the way sound travels underwater, resulting in the absorption of low frequency sounds which can inhibit communications and other uses of sound between sea creatures.

It’s yet another real and present danger we’re facing in today’s oceans.

Resources:

Chemtoons: Animations about how acids, bases, and buffers work

Center for Ocean Solutions: Decalcification

Center for Ocean Solutions: Ocean Acidification

Karl Grossman: The Jellyfish Revenge

NRDC – Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 Problem

Sperm Whales Get a Bum Rap – Who are you, the carbon police?

Okay, so just a warning, the first half of this post is a mini-lesson on carbon in the ocean for those over achievers who just need to know. To get to the Sperm whale nitty gritty, jump to the section after the asterisks.

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So the name of the game with this climate change thing is carbon – the movement and interchange of carbon in and out of major reservoirs.

This ocean is massively important in the storage of this life sustaining element, and serves mostly as a sink for carbon (in terms of carbon, sinks are where it goes, and sources, where it comes from). It can hold roughly 50 times the amount normally held in the atmosphere.

There is however is robust carbon interplay between the ocean and the living things in it. All the living “stuff” in the ocean can be both sources of carbon (Respirers, like the creepy heavy breather on the other side of the phone line…) or can help move it along into deeper ocean depths where it tends to stay for an extended vacay. The movement of carbon to the ocean bottom is called the biological pump (note, I describe this in simplified terms. Carbon can take little forays off of this cycle – to see what a full cycle looks like, search for biological pump in google images).

Generally, plankton (oh yes, I know there is a definite possibility you are now picturing an ugly, one-eyed bad guy from the enthralling world of sponge-bob, but these are actually real, not just animated-real), the minuscule  plants and animals in the ocean, drive the pump. Copepods, tiny planktonic crustaceans, release feacal pellets (read: poop) after eating that hopefully sink to the bottom. Also carbon can help increase plankton populations, and when plankton die (I wish I could insert a clip of taps that played right when you read this…), they sometimes sink to the bottom as detritus, moving alot of the carbon that was just hanging out in the surface down to the sea floor. Carbon in deep waters has a residence time of approximately 1000 years. For it to stay longer, it needs to actually be sequestered (fancy word for “buried”) in sediments, which happens to less than 1% of the carbon entering surface waters. (Note: it’s been suggested injecting carbon into the deep sea or sediments can solve our human carbon-emissions problem, but it comes at a price. See my post on ocean acidification, or my upcoming article on the subject that will be in the spring issue of the online Gulf of Maine Times.)

So, now you know…

And knowing is half the battle….

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According to this article – Sperm Whales as Carbon Sinks -, there were rumors going around that Sperm Whales were respiring out a large amount of carbon being introduced into the Southern Ocean.  So they were essentially playing the role of carbon source rather than sink while oblivously swimming around and doing that whale thing they do.  But as often happens, we’ve allegedly gotten better at the math, and now it appears they may be more helpful than deleterious in keeping the carbon where it’s supposed to be. When they dive into colder,more nutrient-rich waters to eat squid (See my blog entry on squid, it’s rockin) they bring some of the nutrients back with them which stimulates plankton growth. When the plankton die and sink (or release feacal pellets that sink), they’re setting the balance right and bringing carbon way down deep.

And the best part is these mammoth creatures glide about in their day to day lives, blissfully ignorant of their role in life, the universe, and everything.