IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The GEOG 493: Sustainability Issues Across the Americas course participants with leaders Denice Wardrop and Joe Bishop, and Karl Zimmerer after his meeting and guest lecture to the course on May 15, 2015, at the facilities of the Hotel Señorial in Lima, Peru.
GOOD NEWS
- Clio Andris talks with Evan and Deb on Senior Voice America radio about her research on social flows (Her segment starts at 27:30)
- Sunil Yapa’s (B.S. ’02 and son of Faculty member Lucky Yapa) first novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, will be published in January 2016.
NEWS
Geography Alumni Program Group Reception at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel
The Geography Alumni Program Group will meet on Monday, June 15, 2015 from 4:30-6:30 p.m. EDT. We invite alumni of all Penn State geography programs …
Travel Note 3 – Jaguars, bot flies, rain, and gold mining
The final 24 hours at Los Amigos is worth reporting on, since it was full of the adrenaline rushes and challenges of a field station on the Madre de Dios. It all started innocently enough, with field sampling in a palm swamp that is defined by the particular species of palm, Mauritius flexuosa, locally known as “aguaje.” It is a magnificent tree, bearing fruits that are highly prized by us for their plant estrogens and vitamin D content, and by blue and gold macaws as nesting sites. This particular palm swamp is a bit more famous after the rather ridiculous Discovery Channel program where a man in a special suit tries to get himself swallowed by an anaconda. While a 20-foot anaconda does indeed live in this palm swamp, they couldn’t manage to convince it to eat the guy in the suit, and they couldn’t quite persuade the “actor” anaconda to do the same. So much for reality TV. We never saw the anaconda, but successfully did our methane emissions work, and pulled a lovely sediment core for analysis of carbon accretion. We were back in time for lunch, a short siesta, and an afternoon of class work and sample processing. It was good to be rested, for the evening was full.
A woman named Dara Andrews is here from Ohio State, working on predator-prey interactions and, more specifically, the alarm calls of bare-faced saki monkeys to cats, boa constrictors, and harpy eagles. A saki monkey is a curious site: rather large, completely fluffy, with a long and bushy tail; we were lucky enough to see them on our hike yesterday (it is hard to imagine why so much fur would be advantageous in the rainforest, they looked like small Eskimos in the treetops). While the monkeys are certainly charismatic, it is the feline predators that take the spotlight. Los Amigos is home to five species of cats: the large jaguars and pumas, and the smaller ocelots, jacarandas, and margays. It can also boast of some of the highest recorded densities of jaguars, as well as the other four cats; Dara has ten camera traps positioned around the trail system of Los Amigos, and over a 45-day period recorded 56 separate interactions of cats with cameras. A great short video montage of some of the footage can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P0eaZRUtC8&sns=em or if you google on: “Beneath the Canopy: A Camera Trap Survey in the Peruvian Amazon.” I’d encourage you to check it out, it’s simply wonderful to watch these magnificent creatures exhibit the very same behaviors as Lispeth at home, on a much larger scale. It is also incredibly heartening to know that they thrive in this large patch of forest, although the knowledge that they are often caught on camera close to the station, or around our cabins, is a bit disconcerting to notions of midnight trips to the Dining Hall for cookies. A previous class of ours had installed camera traps at Los Amigos, and Joe and I were rewarded with magnificent photos of the same cats, as well as a short-eared dog.
But the evening was just getting started. Bot flies (Dermatobia hominis) are not unknown to folks who spend lots of time in the rainforest, although I will tell you that neither Joe, myself, or any student has ever had the experience. But a charming young grad student from Michigan State, Sean Williams, has had the dubious honor of more than a few, probably because of the co-occurrence of his field area with a well-known bot fly heaven of sorts. Bot flies have an ingenious method of getting to their preferred hosts, which are warm and dexterous mammals like ourselves. Lacking a method of attaching themselves directly (owing to our ability to perceive them and brush them off), they’ve devised an admirably sneaky and indirect approach: an egg-laden female turns a female mosquito on her back, attaches her eggs to the underbelly of said mosquito, gently lets her go, and the eggs fly with the mosquito as she lands gently on you in the tropics. The heat of your body causes the eggs to hatch, and the young botfly arrives rather unceremoniously on its human host. They burrow in, and your knowledge of them only begins when a mosquito bite turns into a large, raised bump. One visually interesting treatment consists of strapping a piece of bacon onto the site of the bot fly (although the pragmatism of this treatment depends upon where the botfly is), and it is supposedly effective, since the bot fly will move into the bacon, trying not to suffocate, and then botfly and bacon can be discarded. However, the preferred one amongst researchers is to wait until the bot fly site becomes enlarged and ripe for squeezing it out (waiting for this opportune moment poses no risk, since the botfly saturates its home with an antibiotic to keep its food fresh). Due to the lack of video and Xboxes, this becomes somewhat of an entertainment event, and so the class willingly participated in the extraction. While Sean exposed his shoulder, another researcher named Gideon squeezed the welt, the bot fly poked its little snorkel-like breathing spiracle out, and our very own Dara manned the tweezers and pulled slowly; a steady hand is necessary since the botfly has two little hook-like apertures on the back end. The whole thing was rather anticlimactic, since the bot fly turned out to be a very unimpressive 7mm. In this instance, size didn’t seem to matter, since a jolly time was had by all.
Gideon (the bot fly assistant surgeon) teaches a great field methods course here with his wife Minny, and he gave us a short talk on the course and his reasons for creating it. Field method courses are rare, and his is a fantastic one: three weeks covering a range of methods for a large number of taxonomic groups (e.g., primates, mammals, birds, insects). In addition, they utilize the funds to support ongoing research, a great model that seems to benefit all. Gideon and his wife allowed 6 of our students to accompany them while they tracked troops of monkeys on the first day; they are wonderfully generous and committed and well organized, and their field course offering can be found at fieldprojects.org.
We left to pack up, and awoke at 3:00 a.m. to absolutely torrential rain that hasn’t stopped since (while it is officially the end of the rainy season, they apparently don’t call it the rainforest for nothing). It is now 10:00 a.m., we are headed downriver, and we are all living under heavy blue plastic ponchos because if you stick your head out, you will be soaked in an instant. So this is being written under cover in my homey blue plastic tent, while the wind whips by and the world is only as big as the poncho. When I stick my head out I am likely to see gold mining activity on the banks of the Madre de Dios. The presence of a reserve like Los Amigos in the midst of a heavily mined area is an articulation of the tension between livelihoods, demand for gold, and environment. Gold is found not only in jewelry, it is but also in all of our electronic devices, and so we are all a part of the supply chain; demand is highest in India, followed by the U.S.
Most of the rural land in Peru is owned by the government, and concessions are ceded to applicants for one of six activities: conservation (Los Amigos was the first of these in the country, holding over 150,000 acres), gold mining, agriculture, ecotourism, and logging. A concession holds for five years, and you must demonstrate to the government that you are utilizing the land for the purpose of the concession, i.e., if you hold a mining concession, you must actively mine it. Los Amigos actually holds a mining concession on the river, for the purposes of at least knowing that the mining that is done there is performed in a responsible way. The station utilizes the small amount of profit that it makes from usage fees to hire a guard to ensure that illegal mining does not occur upriver on the Madre de Dios (any mining would be illegal since there are no concessions available). And so, in addition to the production of knowledge, the station contributes much to the preservation of a magnificent piece of forest. The intact piece of forest in this area is equivalent to being able to walk from Boston to Chicago without a break in the tree cover. Something wonderful to ponder, and we are so thankful to experience it and much of what it allows to be.
Penn State mapping tool could help save seabirds
Spotting a scarlet tanager perched delicately on a nearby branch, David Wiedenfeld peers through his binoculars to get a closer look at the small bird’s ruby plumes. Wiedenfeld, a long-time birder, often stops at a favorite wooded area near his home just west of Washington D.C. for an early-morning songbird sighting. He also appreciates the beauty of the seabirds he observes just a few dozen miles down the road at the Chesapeake Bay.
Fracking book chosen for program
The 2015-16 Penn State Reads common book, which is being given to all incoming freshmen this summer, is The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World published in 2014 and written by Russell Gold
A set of resources is being compiled by the Penn State Reads steering committee that will be added to the Penn State Reads web site to supplement the book. If you have any resources to share, then please provide them to Linda Spangler, who will forward them on to the steering committee.
Is Pittsburgh’s Bad Air Putting Cyclists at Risk?
It’s pretty much taken for granted that riding a bike is good for you. Studies have shown that biking not only benefits your physical health, it’s good for your mental health too. But cycling also carries some potential health risks—and not just the ones that come from a car door opening into your bike lane or riding without a helmet. Air pollution can also be a big problem for cyclists when they share the road with motorists.
DOG OF THE WEEK
The previous dog was Lucy, a 3-month-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and part of Rachel Passmore’s (B.S. ’14) family. Send a photo of your dog to geography@psu.edu for our mystery dog of the week!