Chris Anderson - Earth Train Panama
Week 7

The Wonders and Beauty of Adaptations in a Neotropical Forest

            Everything around you seem oppressive, the heat, the humidity, even the green.  The mottled browns, oranges, reds and occasional greens of the forest floor are a dull, muted.  Less than one percent of light passing through the canopy reaches a rainforest floor.  The sounds of life around you are not so much a hum rather than a tumultuous cacophony of countless calls, whistles, hums, chirps, and caws.  Raised from birth in a society that doesn’t always relish the unknown or alien, you’re almost certain that the crack of a broken branch nearby was caused some Lovecraftian leviathan, all terrible teeth and sinewy muscle, crashing through the underbrush to initiate an untimely and bloody demise. Ironically, a group of creatures that might be the least of concern to you can do the most harm.  A common denizen of the forest around you, the bullet ant, is named such because the pain inflicted by its bite is comparable to being shot with a gun.  Common mosquitoes are vectors of such pleasant tropical diseases as malaria and dengue while botflies have nasty habit of laying eggs in hosts that can be incredibly painful to remove when they hatch into larvae.  And since insects are the most prolific creatures in a rainforest by an astronomical margin, you can be sure that you’ll come into contact with such insects.  Truly you must be in some sort of “green hell”.

            A jungle certainly isn’t the most welcoming environment on the planet, but if you spend any amount of time within the confines of one and you start to really appreciate what a beautiful and remarkable place you are in.  You start to realize that things in the forest seem much less threatening.  Sure, a wound caused by the spine of a black palm, Astrocaryum standleyanum, (think palm tree with cactus spikes) will still invariably become infected because of an irritating chemical that the tree secrets, but you can start to appreciate what an amazing adaptation that is.  It’s a palm tree with cactus spikes that will cause infected wounds for Christ’s Sake!  How can such a tree fail to be interesting?  Examples of life like the black palm are literally everywhere in a Neotropical Rainforest.  The adaptations that plants and creatures have made in order to live with one another are staggering in their breadth and sheer creativity.  There are species of bats that can fold and sew leaves for temporary tents, trees that produce only enough fruits as to coerce agoutis (squirrel like creatures) to bury the seeds to propagate another generation, a species of fly that lays eggs only in the fungi farming leaf cutter ants and on and on and on.  The tapestry woven by the countless, subtle interactions in a rainforest is both incredibly intricate and staggering.  The incremental appreciation of which and a scientific mind has allowed me to no longer find the forest intimidating, but rather become intrigued in all of the various and creative ways it could manage to inflict pain upon and kill me.  Rather than become overwhelmed by a big picture that is still beyond comprehension, I’m finding myself more concerned with the details and the deeper I delve the more I find myself having to stand back with the sentiment:  “Well isn’t that just mind-blowing.  How does it do that? And in the case with most poisonous snakes, “Oh, so that’s how fast it could kill me.  Cool.”  The understanding of the bigger picture will come in time, but at the moment I’m having far too much fun with the “little” things to care in the slightest.