Author: grinnell

In the 1960s, an American scientist and entomologist (a person who studies insects) interested in plant-insect interactions came to Costa Rica as part of a Tropical Ecology course. From that start as a student, Dan Janzen has dedicated almost 60 years to understanding the insect diversity of the dry forests of the Guanacaste province, eventually…

22-01-17 Palo Verde Research Station Most of the waterfowl in Minnesota (ducks, geese, herons, sandpipers) fly south for the winter. Most only go as far as they need to to escape the cold and find food, but if everyone stopped as soon as they found warmth there would be a lot of competition, so some…

22-01-21 Monteverde Our guide, Raquel, says the difference between rain forest and cloud forest is the elevation. Of course, wrapped up in that one variable are a lot of effects. Orogenous rainfall (that caused by air masses being pushed up a mountainside, expanding, cooling, and dropping its water) is one. But something even more fundamental…

22-01-16 On January 10 we had a Zoom call from Dr. Pilar (“Bibi”) Santidrian Tomillo about sea turtles in the age of climate change. On a bright moonlit beach last night we saw them. Dr. Santidrian is the research director of The Leatherback Trust, an organization working to monitor, understand, and conserve the three species…

22-01-14 Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who loved a commoner. Her father found out, captured the young man, and threw him into the volcano. She pined for him ever after, staying near the crater until she was an old woman hunched over her steaming, sulfurous cauldron. Thus goes one explanation for…

22-01-15 Playa Hermosa We made a good attempt today at seeing firsthand the plight of coral reefs and their many species, but nature and humans both conspired against us. Coral, an animal polyp that relies upon a symbiotic alga to survive, are sensitive to lots of conditions altered by a warming climate: temperature, sedimentation, more…

22-01-09 “La selva” means “the rainforest” and in this case it refers to a biological research station in that ecosystem that was established in the late 1950s and gradually expanded over the years through the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation and various US and Costa Rican universities. It is now run by the…

Once upon a time a volcano rose along the western Caribbean coast after millennia of marine depositions building up. The new igneous cone, driven by the collision and subduction of the Cocos under the Caribbean tectonic plates, fragmented the earlier rocks into a jumbled landscape. Add in a few tens of millions of years of…

22-01-06 The president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, describes the country’s response to COVID as “el baile y el martillo,” the dance and the hammer. If infections are down and the population is being careful, everyone can dance and enjoy themselves. If infections rise, then down comes the hammer: curfews, capacity limits, closings, and such.…

We have retreated from campus to our family hearths for a little while, but after the holidays we will gather, like a secret society meeting in the middle of the night, at 3:45am on January 4 at the United desk in MSP. At that point we will embark on the first leg of our adventure.