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[post_content] => The Andes as seen from a Villa Carmen lookout point
As SFS-Peru begins its second month into the program, it almost feels like it's starting its third. In just five weeks we have seen such a variety of environments, and experienced so many sides of the social and cultural life of the country, that it would make any seasoned traveler jealous. After three initial weeks in the Inca heartland we've finally descended through the moss- and fern-clad eastern flanks of the Andes into the Amazon rainforest, which will be our home through the remainder of the program. No place in the world is better suited to explore the forces that drive the multiplication of life forms than here, because nowhere else are there as many species.
One of the many species of butterflies we have encountered on the trails of Villa Carmen
Hiking on trails old and new, including one fitted with more than 600 year old Inca steps, students have been able to see firsthand the staggering diversity of plant forms and the hundred times larger diversity of their preternatural friends and foes, the insects. Combining field exercises with visits to attractive waterfalls, past giant trees draped in hanging gardens and graced by acrobatic monkeys, students have learned how the top-down forces of herbivory and predation, exerted by animals, together with the bottom-up forces of chemical defense or reward, exerted by plants, have conspired to create a speciation pump and a kaleidoscopic ecological niche buffet.
The dazzling array of rainforest colors owes much to the evolution of signals that point at what can be eaten, say the nectar inside a pink Heliconia flower, and to what cannot, such as the toxic black and yellow Heliconius butterfly (no relation to the flower). If you encounter an insect flashing indigo blue and flaming orange, odds are that it is advertising a chemical protection acquired from its poisonous food plant, that it is imitating one that does, or both. The rule applies even to creatures you would never imagine to be pretty. If you doubt that a cockroach can be beautifully metallic green and red, it is time to leave your temperate latitudes and join SFS-Peru. I am pleased that our current cohort of intrepid students has done just that, and can see for themselves the ecological and evolutionary show that is the Amazon rainforest, biodiversity's ground zero.
Glittery nymphs of the cockroach Melyroidea magnifica prowl the forest floor at Villa Carmen→ Biodiversity and Development in the Andes-Amazon, Peru
[post_title] => Biodiversity's Ground Zero
[post_excerpt] => After three initial weeks in the Inca heartland we've finally descended through the moss- and fern-clad eastern flanks of the Andes into the Amazon rainforest, which will be our home through the remainder of the program.
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[post_content] => What is wilderness, and where does it begin? This past weekend, the SFS Peru students and instructors took a trip beyond the foothills of the Andes and into the vast Amazon lowlands, where our global civilization and what remains of the Stone Age come face to face. On narrow boats, following the footsteps of late 19th century explorers, we descended the Madre de Dios river, of which Aldo Leopold’s 1924 description still seems fitting today:
...ever since some maps of South America have shown a short heavy line running eastward beyond the Andes, a river without beginning and without end, and labeled it the River of the Mother of God...That short heavy line flung down upon the blank vastness of tropical wilderness has always seemed the perfect symbol of the Unknown Places of the earth.
Staying at a comfortable birdwatchers' lodge built in this remote corner of South America, students had the opportunity to see firsthand a pristine Amazonian forest in all its grandeur, beyond the gun and the chainsaw. After barely two hikes, our tally of wondrous rainforest sights was outstanding, including five species of monkeys, unafraid macaws and tapirs at salt licks, caimans and a plethora of frogs and spiders at night, plus expansive views of the forest canopy from atop a giant kapok tree.
During walks and lectures, students and professors discussed the intricate co-evolution of plants with their animal pollinators and seed dispersers, the basin-wide dynamics of sodium and its unexpected implications for animal behavior and conservation, and reflected on the dynamics of ecotourism as a promise of habitat preservation but also of irreversible social and economic change.
As it did a hundred years ago, true tropical wilderness, where our expanding global society gives way to Nature’s primordial web of ecological interactions, begins in Madre de Dios. At the river port on the first day of our trip, we noticed a government sign warning travelers who venture this far to stay away from un-contacted indigenous people on the unlikely event that a tribe attempts to make contact. Instead of bringing any danger to outsiders, a close encounter could risk the life of a whole tribe, as diseases harmless to us but fatal to un-contacted people, are inadvertently transferred in gifts of food, cloth, or metal tools.
In spite of the small odds, one such group did appear on the banks of the Madre de Dios on the day of our descent. As we passed by and looked at each other across the wide river, a collective uneasy feeling of belonging to a species that cannot reconcile a burgeoning technology with the primeval life of the forest dweller was impossible to repress. This real is the edge of global civilization that SFS Peru had the privilege to visit just a few days ago.
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[post_content] => Where the Amazon washes into the Andes, the greatest concentration of species on Earth occurs, a rapid succession of plant and animal communities that in just a few hours by car change from dark jaguar lowlands, to sunny alpine meadows, the domain of the elusive spectacled-bear. Right before getting into Finals’ rush, the SFS Peru team spent a week at the Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, 10,000 feet above sea level, near the Andean tree-line. There we cooled our bones, breathed in the crisp mountain air, and were reminded that plentiful oxygen is a luxury of the lowlands.
Walking on centuries-old Inca trails, students and professors alike appreciated the puzzling ecology of the elfin cloud forest, whose spongy moss carpets absorb water from the air and release it slowly into the ground to fill the mighty Amazon below. The bouncy leaf litter mass beneath our feet, we discussed, concealed a giant carbon sink: ever faster growing roots that pump CO2 straight into the bedrock. The quietness of the Lord-of-the-Rings-landscape was only broken here and there by colorful mixed-species flocks of birds, and by a startled masked trogon, which we inadvertently flushed out of its trailside nest.
Further away, in the drier valleys beyond the clouds, we explored the complex vertical ecology of highland agriculture and witnessed with concern how low-profit cattle ranching and associated fires eat away at the cloud forest, our much needed ally in the fight against climate change. Can we substitute deeply-rooted economic traditions for more profitable and climate friendly practices in the high Andes? The solution may be complex, but the first step to find an answer is to be out here.
[post_title] => A Carbon Sink in the Clouds
[post_excerpt] => Right before getting into finals’ rush, the SFS Peru team spent a week at the Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, 10,000 ft. above sea level.
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[post_content] => At the start of every new semester at SFS Peru, students take a head-on plunge into biodiversity. Nowhere else in the world there are as many species of plants, insects, fish, frogs, birds, and mammals as in the Amazon headwaters, where our field center is located. A unique combination of plentiful, year-round rainfall and sunlight, plus relatively fertile soils derived from the Andes Mountains has created an unparalleled richness of living forms. Among our closest relatives, the mammals, no group in the Amazon has taken this biodiversity race to such an extreme as bats, which are unmatched in their variety of species, shapes and lifestyles.
Bats were the superstars of the Tropical Ecology course at SFS Peru this past week. On an evening field excursion, students and instructors set up mist nets and captured bats to explore the astonishing morphological and functional diversity of these rarely seen mammals. The bats were carefully removed from the nets by faculty trained in wildlife handling and treated as celebrities surrounded by fourteen student paparazzi. We spoke of how short-faced bats are adapted to crunching fruit; long-eared bats to capturing large insects; long-tongued bats to drinking nectar from flowers; large, broad-winged bats to hunting small vertebrates; and nose-leaf bats to echolocating through their noses and thus fly off with food in their mouths to the safety of a night roost.
Bat ecological diversity does not stop there, and continues on to include species that feed on spiders, pollen, frogs, fish, and blood. Just by looking at how diverse body shapes are in a given bat community, an ecologist can figure out how complex it is in terms of dietary diversity, and gauge the beneficial impact these animals have in the ecosystem as pollinators, seed dispersers, and regulators of crop pests.
By becoming the first nocturnal flying mammals, bats opened up a whole new unexploited ecological dimension and diversified into feeding niches that no other mammal has ever tackled as a group. Seventy million years ago, when bats took off the ground, they set out to become masters of the Amazon’s warm tropical night and mammalian world champions of biodiversity. At SFS Peru, we are lucky to have so many of them as close neighbors.
[post_title] => Biodiversity Takes Off
[post_excerpt] => Bats were the superstars of the Tropical Ecology course in Peru this past week.
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[post_content] => The rainforest is a battleground. Ants big, small, yellow, red, brown, black, or blue, sting, chew, and bombard each other with chemicals in permanent warfare over resource-rich territories. As colonies expand and contract, creating a shifting mosaic of local dominance, only one kind of ant bows to none and knows no boundaries, the army or legionary ants. Several million strong, an army ant colony has no permanent nest, but wanders incessantly scouring the landscape for insects to feed on. Covering as much as an acre of land with voracious legions that drift continuously for weeks before retiring to temporary home bases, they are the terror of the rainforest. I like to think of our students as army ants, hungry not for bugs, or so I hope, but for knowledge.
Ashley Gingeleski monitors temperature in a research tree fern plot.
At SFS Peru, we are entering the second week of data collection of our Directed Research month. Thanks in part to their larger size relative to ants, our data-hungry students cover not one but 30,000 acres in a rainforest valley teeming with unanswered questions. How big are the local jaguar and monkey populations? Are they threatened by current hunting levels? Where have the people in the valley come from? Are forest or town dwellers most susceptible to tropical diseases? How can we best use local medicinal plants? Are these plants threatened by global warming?
Even after only one week of data collection, the preliminary answers to those questions are tantalizing but, as much as I would like to share them with you, I do not want to spoil the grand finale: a town-wide meeting where local students, authorities, professionals, and anyone who wants to join in will eagerly listen to what our students have to say about their findings. Stay tuned for the news, as, in the meantime, the SFS Peru student research legion continues scouring the landscape for scientific data.
Charlie Longtine inspects the antibiotic properties of tree fern sap.Jadmin Mostel measures the effect of temperature stress on tree ferns from different elevations.
[post_title] => A Research Legion
[post_excerpt] => I like to think of our students as army ants, hungry not for bugs, or so I hope, but for knowledge.
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[post_content] => A new semester begins for SFS Peru and the excitement of discovery is in the air. This semester started with a geographic reconnaissance of the area around the Center, which, right at the meeting of the Andes and the Amazon, is a crossroads of cultures and ecosystems, and the richest display of life on Earth. Climbing hills and navigating beaches, every day we find something unique and dazzling: a parade of brilliant caterpillars here, a jumping spider there, a basking coral snake keeping would-be predators away with its warning coloration, and more kinds of plants than anywhere in the world. As one student put it, we have seen so much in only our first week that it seems we have been here for a month. With a nearly whole semester still ahead, just imagine the endless wonders that await this group of Amazonian explorers!
[post_title] => Amazonian Explorers
[post_excerpt] => A new semester begins for SFS Peru and the excitement of discovery is in the air.
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[post_content] => Exploring the 1,000 year old Wari ruins of PikillactaStudents feed alpacas at the Awanacancha South American Camelid Exhibition CenterTaking a quiz at the Pisac Botanical GardensAt the Pleistocene glacial lake of Yanacocha, 4,000 meters (~13,000 feet) above sea levelStudents and staff explore a relictual forest of Polylepis subserica trees at Yanacocha
Descent from Yanacocha→ Biodiversity & Development in the Andes-Amazon Semester Program in Peru
[post_title] => Snapshots from Peru
[post_excerpt] => Recent photos from the Spring 2016 semester program in Peru.
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[post_content] => The Andes as seen from a Villa Carmen lookout point
As SFS-Peru begins its second month into the program, it almost feels like it's starting its third. In just five weeks we have seen such a variety of environments, and experienced so many sides of the social and cultural life of the country, that it would make any seasoned traveler jealous. After three initial weeks in the Inca heartland we've finally descended through the moss- and fern-clad eastern flanks of the Andes into the Amazon rainforest, which will be our home through the remainder of the program. No place in the world is better suited to explore the forces that drive the multiplication of life forms than here, because nowhere else are there as many species.
One of the many species of butterflies we have encountered on the trails of Villa Carmen
Hiking on trails old and new, including one fitted with more than 600 year old Inca steps, students have been able to see firsthand the staggering diversity of plant forms and the hundred times larger diversity of their preternatural friends and foes, the insects. Combining field exercises with visits to attractive waterfalls, past giant trees draped in hanging gardens and graced by acrobatic monkeys, students have learned how the top-down forces of herbivory and predation, exerted by animals, together with the bottom-up forces of chemical defense or reward, exerted by plants, have conspired to create a speciation pump and a kaleidoscopic ecological niche buffet.
The dazzling array of rainforest colors owes much to the evolution of signals that point at what can be eaten, say the nectar inside a pink Heliconia flower, and to what cannot, such as the toxic black and yellow Heliconius butterfly (no relation to the flower). If you encounter an insect flashing indigo blue and flaming orange, odds are that it is advertising a chemical protection acquired from its poisonous food plant, that it is imitating one that does, or both. The rule applies even to creatures you would never imagine to be pretty. If you doubt that a cockroach can be beautifully metallic green and red, it is time to leave your temperate latitudes and join SFS-Peru. I am pleased that our current cohort of intrepid students has done just that, and can see for themselves the ecological and evolutionary show that is the Amazon rainforest, biodiversity's ground zero.
Glittery nymphs of the cockroach Melyroidea magnifica prowl the forest floor at Villa Carmen→ Biodiversity and Development in the Andes-Amazon, Peru
[post_title] => Biodiversity's Ground Zero
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[post_content] => What is wilderness, and where does it begin? This past weekend, the SFS Peru students and instructors took a trip beyond the foothills of the Andes and into the vast Amazon lowlands, where our global civilization and what remains of the Stone Age come face to face. On narrow boats, following the footsteps of late 19th century explorers, we descended the Madre de Dios river, of which Aldo Leopold’s 1924 description still seems fitting today:
...ever since some maps of South America have shown a short heavy line running eastward beyond the Andes, a river without beginning and without end, and labeled it the River of the Mother of God...That short heavy line flung down upon the blank vastness of tropical wilderness has always seemed the perfect symbol of the Unknown Places of the earth.
Staying at a comfortable birdwatchers' lodge built in this remote corner of South America, students had the opportunity to see firsthand a pristine Amazonian forest in all its grandeur, beyond the gun and the chainsaw. After barely two hikes, our tally of wondrous rainforest sights was outstanding, including five species of monkeys, unafraid macaws and tapirs at salt licks, caimans and a plethora of frogs and spiders at night, plus expansive views of the forest canopy from atop a giant kapok tree.
During walks and lectures, students and professors discussed the intricate co-evolution of plants with their animal pollinators and seed dispersers, the basin-wide dynamics of sodium and its unexpected implications for animal behavior and conservation, and reflected on the dynamics of ecotourism as a promise of habitat preservation but also of irreversible social and economic change.
As it did a hundred years ago, true tropical wilderness, where our expanding global society gives way to Nature’s primordial web of ecological interactions, begins in Madre de Dios. At the river port on the first day of our trip, we noticed a government sign warning travelers who venture this far to stay away from un-contacted indigenous people on the unlikely event that a tribe attempts to make contact. Instead of bringing any danger to outsiders, a close encounter could risk the life of a whole tribe, as diseases harmless to us but fatal to un-contacted people, are inadvertently transferred in gifts of food, cloth, or metal tools.
In spite of the small odds, one such group did appear on the banks of the Madre de Dios on the day of our descent. As we passed by and looked at each other across the wide river, a collective uneasy feeling of belonging to a species that cannot reconcile a burgeoning technology with the primeval life of the forest dweller was impossible to repress. This real is the edge of global civilization that SFS Peru had the privilege to visit just a few days ago.
[post_title] => At the Edge of Global Civilization
[post_excerpt] => What is wilderness, and where does it begin?
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[post_content] => Where the Amazon washes into the Andes, the greatest concentration of species on Earth occurs, a rapid succession of plant and animal communities that in just a few hours by car change from dark jaguar lowlands, to sunny alpine meadows, the domain of the elusive spectacled-bear. Right before getting into Finals’ rush, the SFS Peru team spent a week at the Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, 10,000 feet above sea level, near the Andean tree-line. There we cooled our bones, breathed in the crisp mountain air, and were reminded that plentiful oxygen is a luxury of the lowlands.
Walking on centuries-old Inca trails, students and professors alike appreciated the puzzling ecology of the elfin cloud forest, whose spongy moss carpets absorb water from the air and release it slowly into the ground to fill the mighty Amazon below. The bouncy leaf litter mass beneath our feet, we discussed, concealed a giant carbon sink: ever faster growing roots that pump CO2 straight into the bedrock. The quietness of the Lord-of-the-Rings-landscape was only broken here and there by colorful mixed-species flocks of birds, and by a startled masked trogon, which we inadvertently flushed out of its trailside nest.
Further away, in the drier valleys beyond the clouds, we explored the complex vertical ecology of highland agriculture and witnessed with concern how low-profit cattle ranching and associated fires eat away at the cloud forest, our much needed ally in the fight against climate change. Can we substitute deeply-rooted economic traditions for more profitable and climate friendly practices in the high Andes? The solution may be complex, but the first step to find an answer is to be out here.
[post_title] => A Carbon Sink in the Clouds
[post_excerpt] => Right before getting into finals’ rush, the SFS Peru team spent a week at the Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, 10,000 ft. above sea level.
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[post_content] => At the start of every new semester at SFS Peru, students take a head-on plunge into biodiversity. Nowhere else in the world there are as many species of plants, insects, fish, frogs, birds, and mammals as in the Amazon headwaters, where our field center is located. A unique combination of plentiful, year-round rainfall and sunlight, plus relatively fertile soils derived from the Andes Mountains has created an unparalleled richness of living forms. Among our closest relatives, the mammals, no group in the Amazon has taken this biodiversity race to such an extreme as bats, which are unmatched in their variety of species, shapes and lifestyles.
Bats were the superstars of the Tropical Ecology course at SFS Peru this past week. On an evening field excursion, students and instructors set up mist nets and captured bats to explore the astonishing morphological and functional diversity of these rarely seen mammals. The bats were carefully removed from the nets by faculty trained in wildlife handling and treated as celebrities surrounded by fourteen student paparazzi. We spoke of how short-faced bats are adapted to crunching fruit; long-eared bats to capturing large insects; long-tongued bats to drinking nectar from flowers; large, broad-winged bats to hunting small vertebrates; and nose-leaf bats to echolocating through their noses and thus fly off with food in their mouths to the safety of a night roost.
Bat ecological diversity does not stop there, and continues on to include species that feed on spiders, pollen, frogs, fish, and blood. Just by looking at how diverse body shapes are in a given bat community, an ecologist can figure out how complex it is in terms of dietary diversity, and gauge the beneficial impact these animals have in the ecosystem as pollinators, seed dispersers, and regulators of crop pests.
By becoming the first nocturnal flying mammals, bats opened up a whole new unexploited ecological dimension and diversified into feeding niches that no other mammal has ever tackled as a group. Seventy million years ago, when bats took off the ground, they set out to become masters of the Amazon’s warm tropical night and mammalian world champions of biodiversity. At SFS Peru, we are lucky to have so many of them as close neighbors.
[post_title] => Biodiversity Takes Off
[post_excerpt] => Bats were the superstars of the Tropical Ecology course in Peru this past week.
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[post_content] => The rainforest is a battleground. Ants big, small, yellow, red, brown, black, or blue, sting, chew, and bombard each other with chemicals in permanent warfare over resource-rich territories. As colonies expand and contract, creating a shifting mosaic of local dominance, only one kind of ant bows to none and knows no boundaries, the army or legionary ants. Several million strong, an army ant colony has no permanent nest, but wanders incessantly scouring the landscape for insects to feed on. Covering as much as an acre of land with voracious legions that drift continuously for weeks before retiring to temporary home bases, they are the terror of the rainforest. I like to think of our students as army ants, hungry not for bugs, or so I hope, but for knowledge.
Ashley Gingeleski monitors temperature in a research tree fern plot.
At SFS Peru, we are entering the second week of data collection of our Directed Research month. Thanks in part to their larger size relative to ants, our data-hungry students cover not one but 30,000 acres in a rainforest valley teeming with unanswered questions. How big are the local jaguar and monkey populations? Are they threatened by current hunting levels? Where have the people in the valley come from? Are forest or town dwellers most susceptible to tropical diseases? How can we best use local medicinal plants? Are these plants threatened by global warming?
Even after only one week of data collection, the preliminary answers to those questions are tantalizing but, as much as I would like to share them with you, I do not want to spoil the grand finale: a town-wide meeting where local students, authorities, professionals, and anyone who wants to join in will eagerly listen to what our students have to say about their findings. Stay tuned for the news, as, in the meantime, the SFS Peru student research legion continues scouring the landscape for scientific data.
Charlie Longtine inspects the antibiotic properties of tree fern sap.Jadmin Mostel measures the effect of temperature stress on tree ferns from different elevations.
[post_title] => A Research Legion
[post_excerpt] => I like to think of our students as army ants, hungry not for bugs, or so I hope, but for knowledge.
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[post_content] => A new semester begins for SFS Peru and the excitement of discovery is in the air. This semester started with a geographic reconnaissance of the area around the Center, which, right at the meeting of the Andes and the Amazon, is a crossroads of cultures and ecosystems, and the richest display of life on Earth. Climbing hills and navigating beaches, every day we find something unique and dazzling: a parade of brilliant caterpillars here, a jumping spider there, a basking coral snake keeping would-be predators away with its warning coloration, and more kinds of plants than anywhere in the world. As one student put it, we have seen so much in only our first week that it seems we have been here for a month. With a nearly whole semester still ahead, just imagine the endless wonders that await this group of Amazonian explorers!
[post_title] => Amazonian Explorers
[post_excerpt] => A new semester begins for SFS Peru and the excitement of discovery is in the air.
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[post_content] => Exploring the 1,000 year old Wari ruins of PikillactaStudents feed alpacas at the Awanacancha South American Camelid Exhibition CenterTaking a quiz at the Pisac Botanical GardensAt the Pleistocene glacial lake of Yanacocha, 4,000 meters (~13,000 feet) above sea levelStudents and staff explore a relictual forest of Polylepis subserica trees at Yanacocha
Descent from Yanacocha→ Biodiversity & Development in the Andes-Amazon Semester Program in Peru
[post_title] => Snapshots from Peru
[post_excerpt] => Recent photos from the Spring 2016 semester program in Peru.
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Amazonian Explorers
Posted: September 21, 2015
By: Adrian Tejedor, Ph.D. - Resident Lecturer in Tropical Ecology
Peru
A new semester begins for SFS Peru and the excitement of discovery is in the air. This semester started with a geographic reconnaissance of the area around the Center, which, right at the meeting of the Andes and the Amazon, is a crossroads of cultures and ecosystems, and the richest display of life on Earth. Climbing hills and navigating beaches, every day we find something unique and dazzling: a parade of brilliant caterpillars here, a jumping spider there, a basking coral snake keeping would-be predators away with its warning coloration, and more kinds of plants than anywhere in the world. As one student put it, we have seen so much in only our first week that it seems we have been here for a month. With a nearly whole semester still ahead, just imagine the endless wonders that await this group of Amazonian explorers!
The Andes as seen from a Villa Carmen lookout point
As SFS-Peru begins its second month into the program, it almost feels like it's starting its third. In just five weeks we have seen such a variety of environments, and experienced so many sides of the social and cultural life of the country, that it would make any seasoned traveler jealous. After three initial weeks in the Inca heartland we've finally descended through the moss- and fern-clad eastern flanks of the Andes into the Amazon rainforest, which will be our home through the remainder of the program. No place in the world is better suited to explore the forces that drive the multiplication of life forms than here, because nowhere else are there as many species.
One of the many species of butterflies we have encountered on the trails of Villa Carmen
Hiking on trails old and new, including one fitted with more than 600 year old Inca steps, students have been able to see firsthand the staggering diversity of plant forms and the hundred times larger diversity of their preternatural friends and foes, the insects. Combining field exercises with visits to attractive waterfalls, past giant trees draped in hanging gardens and graced by acrobatic monkeys, students have learned how the top-down forces of herbivory and predation, exerted by animals, together with the bottom-up forces of chemical defense or reward, exerted by plants, have conspired to create a speciation pump and a kaleidoscopic ecological niche buffet.
The dazzling array of rainforest colors owes much to the evolution of signals that point at what can be eaten, say the nectar inside a pink Heliconia flower, and to what cannot, such as the toxic black and yellow Heliconius butterfly (no relation to the flower). If you encounter an insect flashing indigo blue and flaming orange, odds are that it is advertising a chemical protection acquired from its poisonous food plant, that it is imitating one that does, or both. The rule applies even to creatures you would never imagine to be pretty. If you doubt that a cockroach can be beautifully metallic green and red, it is time to leave your temperate latitudes and join SFS-Peru. I am pleased that our current cohort of intrepid students has done just that, and can see for themselves the ecological and evolutionary show that is the Amazon rainforest, biodiversity's ground zero.
Glittery nymphs of the cockroach Melyroidea magnifica prowl the forest floor at Villa Carmen
→ Biodiversity and Development in the Andes-Amazon, Peru
[post_title] => Biodiversity's Ground Zero
[post_excerpt] => After three initial weeks in the Inca heartland we've finally descended through the moss- and fern-clad eastern flanks of the Andes into the Amazon rainforest, which will be our home through the remainder of the program.
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[post_content] => What is wilderness, and where does it begin? This past weekend, the SFS Peru students and instructors took a trip beyond the foothills of the Andes and into the vast Amazon lowlands, where our global civilization and what remains of the Stone Age come face to face. On narrow boats, following the footsteps of late 19th century explorers, we descended the Madre de Dios river, of which Aldo Leopold’s 1924 description still seems fitting today:
...ever since some maps of South America have shown a short heavy line running eastward beyond the Andes, a river without beginning and without end, and labeled it the River of the Mother of God... That short heavy line flung down upon the blank vastness of tropical wilderness has always seemed the perfect symbol of the Unknown Places of the earth.
Staying at a comfortable birdwatchers' lodge built in this remote corner of South America, students had the opportunity to see firsthand a pristine Amazonian forest in all its grandeur, beyond the gun and the chainsaw. After barely two hikes, our tally of wondrous rainforest sights was outstanding, including five species of monkeys, unafraid macaws and tapirs at salt licks, caimans and a plethora of frogs and spiders at night, plus expansive views of the forest canopy from atop a giant kapok tree.
During walks and lectures, students and professors discussed the intricate co-evolution of plants with their animal pollinators and seed dispersers, the basin-wide dynamics of sodium and its unexpected implications for animal behavior and conservation, and reflected on the dynamics of ecotourism as a promise of habitat preservation but also of irreversible social and economic change.
As it did a hundred years ago, true tropical wilderness, where our expanding global society gives way to Nature’s primordial web of ecological interactions, begins in Madre de Dios. At the river port on the first day of our trip, we noticed a government sign warning travelers who venture this far to stay away from un-contacted indigenous people on the unlikely event that a tribe attempts to make contact. Instead of bringing any danger to outsiders, a close encounter could risk the life of a whole tribe, as diseases harmless to us but fatal to un-contacted people, are inadvertently transferred in gifts of food, cloth, or metal tools.
In spite of the small odds, one such group did appear on the banks of the Madre de Dios on the day of our descent. As we passed by and looked at each other across the wide river, a collective uneasy feeling of belonging to a species that cannot reconcile a burgeoning technology with the primeval life of the forest dweller was impossible to repress. This real is the edge of global civilization that SFS Peru had the privilege to visit just a few days ago.
[post_title] => At the Edge of Global Civilization
[post_excerpt] => What is wilderness, and where does it begin?
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[post_content] => Where the Amazon washes into the Andes, the greatest concentration of species on Earth occurs, a rapid succession of plant and animal communities that in just a few hours by car change from dark jaguar lowlands, to sunny alpine meadows, the domain of the elusive spectacled-bear. Right before getting into Finals’ rush, the SFS Peru team spent a week at the Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, 10,000 feet above sea level, near the Andean tree-line. There we cooled our bones, breathed in the crisp mountain air, and were reminded that plentiful oxygen is a luxury of the lowlands.
Walking on centuries-old Inca trails, students and professors alike appreciated the puzzling ecology of the elfin cloud forest, whose spongy moss carpets absorb water from the air and release it slowly into the ground to fill the mighty Amazon below. The bouncy leaf litter mass beneath our feet, we discussed, concealed a giant carbon sink: ever faster growing roots that pump CO2 straight into the bedrock. The quietness of the Lord-of-the-Rings-landscape was only broken here and there by colorful mixed-species flocks of birds, and by a startled masked trogon, which we inadvertently flushed out of its trailside nest.
Further away, in the drier valleys beyond the clouds, we explored the complex vertical ecology of highland agriculture and witnessed with concern how low-profit cattle ranching and associated fires eat away at the cloud forest, our much needed ally in the fight against climate change. Can we substitute deeply-rooted economic traditions for more profitable and climate friendly practices in the high Andes? The solution may be complex, but the first step to find an answer is to be out here.
[post_title] => A Carbon Sink in the Clouds
[post_excerpt] => Right before getting into finals’ rush, the SFS Peru team spent a week at the Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station, 10,000 ft. above sea level.
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[post_content] => At the start of every new semester at SFS Peru, students take a head-on plunge into biodiversity. Nowhere else in the world there are as many species of plants, insects, fish, frogs, birds, and mammals as in the Amazon headwaters, where our field center is located. A unique combination of plentiful, year-round rainfall and sunlight, plus relatively fertile soils derived from the Andes Mountains has created an unparalleled richness of living forms. Among our closest relatives, the mammals, no group in the Amazon has taken this biodiversity race to such an extreme as bats, which are unmatched in their variety of species, shapes and lifestyles.
Bats were the superstars of the Tropical Ecology course at SFS Peru this past week. On an evening field excursion, students and instructors set up mist nets and captured bats to explore the astonishing morphological and functional diversity of these rarely seen mammals. The bats were carefully removed from the nets by faculty trained in wildlife handling and treated as celebrities surrounded by fourteen student paparazzi. We spoke of how short-faced bats are adapted to crunching fruit; long-eared bats to capturing large insects; long-tongued bats to drinking nectar from flowers; large, broad-winged bats to hunting small vertebrates; and nose-leaf bats to echolocating through their noses and thus fly off with food in their mouths to the safety of a night roost.
Bat ecological diversity does not stop there, and continues on to include species that feed on spiders, pollen, frogs, fish, and blood. Just by looking at how diverse body shapes are in a given bat community, an ecologist can figure out how complex it is in terms of dietary diversity, and gauge the beneficial impact these animals have in the ecosystem as pollinators, seed dispersers, and regulators of crop pests.
By becoming the first nocturnal flying mammals, bats opened up a whole new unexploited ecological dimension and diversified into feeding niches that no other mammal has ever tackled as a group. Seventy million years ago, when bats took off the ground, they set out to become masters of the Amazon’s warm tropical night and mammalian world champions of biodiversity. At SFS Peru, we are lucky to have so many of them as close neighbors.
[post_title] => Biodiversity Takes Off
[post_excerpt] => Bats were the superstars of the Tropical Ecology course in Peru this past week.
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[post_content] => The rainforest is a battleground. Ants big, small, yellow, red, brown, black, or blue, sting, chew, and bombard each other with chemicals in permanent warfare over resource-rich territories. As colonies expand and contract, creating a shifting mosaic of local dominance, only one kind of ant bows to none and knows no boundaries, the army or legionary ants. Several million strong, an army ant colony has no permanent nest, but wanders incessantly scouring the landscape for insects to feed on. Covering as much as an acre of land with voracious legions that drift continuously for weeks before retiring to temporary home bases, they are the terror of the rainforest. I like to think of our students as army ants, hungry not for bugs, or so I hope, but for knowledge.
Ashley Gingeleski monitors temperature in a research tree fern plot.
At SFS Peru, we are entering the second week of data collection of our Directed Research month. Thanks in part to their larger size relative to ants, our data-hungry students cover not one but 30,000 acres in a rainforest valley teeming with unanswered questions. How big are the local jaguar and monkey populations? Are they threatened by current hunting levels? Where have the people in the valley come from? Are forest or town dwellers most susceptible to tropical diseases? How can we best use local medicinal plants? Are these plants threatened by global warming?
Even after only one week of data collection, the preliminary answers to those questions are tantalizing but, as much as I would like to share them with you, I do not want to spoil the grand finale: a town-wide meeting where local students, authorities, professionals, and anyone who wants to join in will eagerly listen to what our students have to say about their findings. Stay tuned for the news, as, in the meantime, the SFS Peru student research legion continues scouring the landscape for scientific data.
Charlie Longtine inspects the antibiotic properties of tree fern sap.
Jadmin Mostel measures the effect of temperature stress on tree ferns from different elevations.
[post_title] => A Research Legion
[post_excerpt] => I like to think of our students as army ants, hungry not for bugs, or so I hope, but for knowledge.
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[post_content] => A new semester begins for SFS Peru and the excitement of discovery is in the air. This semester started with a geographic reconnaissance of the area around the Center, which, right at the meeting of the Andes and the Amazon, is a crossroads of cultures and ecosystems, and the richest display of life on Earth. Climbing hills and navigating beaches, every day we find something unique and dazzling: a parade of brilliant caterpillars here, a jumping spider there, a basking coral snake keeping would-be predators away with its warning coloration, and more kinds of plants than anywhere in the world. As one student put it, we have seen so much in only our first week that it seems we have been here for a month. With a nearly whole semester still ahead, just imagine the endless wonders that await this group of Amazonian explorers!
Exploring the 1,000 year old Wari ruins of Pikillacta
Students feed alpacas at the Awanacancha South American Camelid Exhibition Center
Taking a quiz at the Pisac Botanical Gardens
At the Pleistocene glacial lake of Yanacocha, 4,000 meters (~13,000 feet) above sea level
Students and staff explore a relictual forest of Polylepis subserica trees at Yanacocha
Descent from Yanacocha
→ Biodiversity & Development in the Andes-Amazon Semester Program in Peru
[post_title] => Snapshots from Peru
[post_excerpt] => Recent photos from the Spring 2016 semester program in Peru.
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[post_title] => Adrian Tejedor, Ph.D.
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