(Published in my college newspaper, the Randolph-Macon Yellow Jacket, in 2008)
Imagine wandering into the depths of a neotropical rainforest and taking in the sight of hundreds of plants in vibrant greens towering high above your head. Imagine inhaling a strong musk and seeing its owner, the pig-like peccary, trot past into another patch of forest. Imagine if your 5am alarm clock was a roaring howler monkey greeting the daylight.
These are some of the vivid sensory experiences that eight Randolph-Macon students in Professor Barry Knisley’s Tropical Biology and Conservation course witnessed this January in Costa Rica. The class consisted of Environmental Studies and Biology majors, including Matt Brim, Kim Schneller, Jennifer Baird, Kaitlyn Vernier, Katie Garin, Christine Ebert, Jill Dixon, and me.
Traveling to Costa Rica has piqued our understanding of the crucial ecosystems within the neotropics. We can surely read in textbooks about the massive deforestation that occurs day after day, year after year. We know that the rainforest is losing several species to extinction each week and may be completely destroyed in the next 170 years. But only when we step into its boundaries can we truly embrace its diversity, its intricate and interdependent web of organisms, rapidly shrinking with our own expansion.
After our arrival in the capital of San Jose on January 14, we walked through the rainforest in both Braulio Carrillo National Park and La Selva Biological Station, accompanied by our German guide, Sabine Thönnes. We observed leafcutter ants at work, carrying their prizes back to the nest to culture their special fungus upon which they feed. A boa constrictor sat coiled at the base of a tree, ready to strike if we approached too closely. With sharp eyes, white-faced monkeys were seen climbing high into the magnificent canopy.
Because of its position relative to the sun, the Costa Rican rainforest maintains a constant climate in which evaporation and rainfall are self-contained within a cycle, providing a perfect recipe for diversity. The trees play a vital role in providing nutrients to the other plants, which grow on branches and trunks as epiphytes. In fact, the biomass holds 95 percent of the nutrients in the forest, above the shallow, empty soil. Consequently, deforestation alters the natural rain cycle and removes the essential life force of the forest, leaving just depleted soil behind.
Ecologist Dan Janzen has focused on Costa Rican ecology for many years and has discovered the ability of the forest to regenerate itself from abandoned agricultural land if given a little push. Our class had the chance to visit Ecocentro Danaus, a plot of forest now teeming with life that just 11 years ago was a cleared agricultural field.
There we encountered a baby 3-toed sloth who climbed at top speed, which was actually quite slow, away from where we stood, gawking and snapping photos. Tropical birds such as aracaris, a toucan relative, and bright blue morpho butterflies, zipped through the air.
Costa Rica is not simply a rainforest, though. We have now journeyed to the tropical dry forest on the Pacific side, near the Gulf of Nicoya. At a glance, it is reminiscent of the southwestern United States, but upon closer examination, one will observe some common characteristics with the neighboring rainforest, such as epiphytes (now in the form of cactuses) on the trees and stilt roots for support, oxygen, and nutrients – an adaptation of tropical life to a similar but much drier environment.
It is in this region that we visited Las Pumas, a rehabilitation center for rescued animals, and met the mighty jaguar, who was actually quite irritated by our company. Unfortunately, the jaguar, a keystone species, is extremely rare in the wild, simply because the forests have become too small with the increased development. Even a simple paved road is enough to fragment a jaguar’s habitat, creating an unnatural and impermeable boundary.
As I write this article, we are riding along a winding and dusty dirt road toward the Monteverde Cloud Forest Region. Around me on all sides I see a vast expanse of green rolling hills, freckled with cattle pastures but still untouched by the invasive urban sprawl.
Though Costa Rica has made progressive strides in recent years in the conservation realm, it will take much more to prevent the enormous and irreplaceable loss of species we are currently experiencing. This class has shown me a little taste of the most diverse environment on Earth, and it is crucial that such learning experiences continue – for the sake of the rainforest and those who live within it.