Spiky and Sassy: Sarsaparilla

 

Meet Smilax vanilliodora! She also goes by Sarsaparilla for short, if you're on that level with her. After nursing wounds from her feisty pokes and cradling her all wrapped around your arms, you might just be on that level. Maybe.

So, let's get on that level! And we'll do so in a way inspired by Washington Post Date Lab. For those of you yet to get acquainted with the wonders/cult-following that we call Date Lab, it goes a little like this: two DC singles are set up on a blind date on a budget of $100, and they have to report back for all the entire metro area to read. There's a brief bio of both love-seekers, and both of them recount the date. In Plant Date Lab Jungle Edition, six OTS students are set up to investigate the vivacious vine Smilax vanilliodora. Heading out to greet their match, they have a GPS, latex gloves, plant clippers, and garbage bags in tow. 

Your type...
Sarsaparilla: Being a vine, I have to admit that I am a little bit needy. I'd love someone with a sturdy trunk that I can really lean up against and grab onto. I'm also kind of tall (sometimes over 10 meters!), so I'd prefer a mighty high partner...I love going out in heels!
Danielle:  I'm a big fan of members of the melastomataceae fam. And those bromeliaceae are always a winner. Love me some tropical plants! 

Happiest when...
Sarsaparilla: Stretching up toward the treetops in a humid forest environment in Central America! I love slurping up that agua. People tell me my spunky spikes show off my Latina flair. 

Danielle: Going on night hikes and putting frogs on my face. And whenever I have my headlamp on. It lights up my life when the going gets dark.

Brag a little...
Sarsaparilla: While I boast a gorgeous green exterior, I have the strength of a woody branch. I've also mastered many forms of self defense, as evidenced by my spikey modified leaves. But I'm ain't just brawn with no brains! Besides being an ingredient in some root beer recipes, I also have a number of medicinal uses. Need a Rheumatism treatment? That's me! Blood purification? Hit me up! Skin rashes? Throw a dash of me onto that! Basically I am your everything.

Danielle: I'm short so I can fit into small places! And one time I won a hula-hooping contest. 

8:00 AM, La Finca de Luna Nueva 

Danielle: We got to the forest at little after 8 am. There was only a little foot traffic there and only a few slips in the mud from the prior 48 hours of constant rain. The day before, the professors told our group how the goal on this date was to look into the best growth conditions for this plant and to see if there was any correlation between aboveground plant mass and root mass. 

Saraparilla: It was so nice that this meet-up was right in my neighborhood! I didn't have to move at all. At little after 8, I saw this gangly, confused group of Gringos getting up in my space. I thought it might be them, but I decided to wait for them to come to me.

Danielle: It wasn't the usual type of plant I'd go for, but I'm an open person. I usually prefer plants without spikes, especially if I just have latex gloves to handle them and the spikes tear my gloves open.  

Sarsaparilla: She was really short. That's kinnnnda a deal breaker. 

Danielle: Like most a lot of people today, I tried to do a little background research, a little googling if you will, to dig up the dirt on my plant. From our findings, we knew this was gonna be a spiky vine, but the passive-aggressive term "modified leaves" to describe these spikes does not acutely enough convey the point that these are seriously pointy fellas. And the heights of these plants don't mess around. Craning our necks up sometimes, we failed to spot the end of the plant growth. We hadn't realized how difficult it would be to delicately dig up these scattered and fragile roots or to successfully yank down the whole vine.

Sarsaparilla: This whole group of students was kind of grabby with me. But I'm not gonna lie, I didn't mind the attention.

Danielle: It was really important that we dig up the entirety of the root mass, so we started by finding the base of the vine, and then we used our hands to follow the roots branching from the center. When there were leaf-cover spots of land, we poked around with a stick first just to check to see if there were any third party animals trying to crash our date...we only found one!

An uninvited guest trying to slither into our Sarsaparilla moment

Sarsaparilla: At first I was flattered by all this, but it soon took a turn for the more aggressive. After assaulting me around the roots, these perturbing people started to yank me down from my trees. I don't know, were they jealous of me hugging onto them or something? 

Danielle: While we tried not to have wandering eyes while with our dear Sarsaparilla, we did make sure to count the number of neighboring plants around our favorite vine. We thought that the competing plants might have an effect on root mass! 

Sarsaparilla: And then after pulling me from my home and loved ones as I desperately held onto them with my last ounce of strength, they wrapped me up and stuffed me in these black, plastic garbage bags! Darkness was abound. From what sick, twisted culture do these kidnappers come from?

Danielle: Carrying the plants back in plastic bags, we emerged from the forest to see the first glimpse of sunlight in many days, a strain on the unadjusted eyes. We headed back to our home base at the Luna Nueva Lodge, we laid out our dearest Sarsaparilla to measure it head to toe. 

Sarsaparilla: And then after stretching me uncomfortably, they chopped me up into little pieces to weigh me on a scale! I'd have to rate this date a 1. Actually, can I rate it a negative 1?  Never have I ever been so violated.

Danielle: I'd have to give it a 4. While a little rough on the edges, it was definitely a learning experience in the field! Sarsaparilla was a little feisty at first, but I think we really warmed up to each other. I'm excited to see where things go in the future.

Parting moments with Sarsaparilla

Update: Needless to say, there was no follow up contact between Sarsaparilla and the group of OTS students. But, from their short time together, the students did find a statistically significant positive correlation between the above ground vine mass and the root mass. They also found the there was more root mass in plants with fewer vines in the immediate surrounding area. All these could be useful in future cultivation of the plant! Danielle and the OTS group are now back in Las Cruces, where they have recently finished their final exams in Tropical Medicine and Ethnobiology. They're now working on their final research projects! 

Wrapping Up La Selva

This past week, we also paid a visit to a pineapple plantation...or rather the roads-less-traveled behind these fields! The whole pineapple process makes me want to put my piña purchasing on hold (or go organic!). The current practices prove harmful to both the workers and the environment. Pesticides are abundant, and subject the workers to toxic properties that can lead to debilitating conditions. While the Costa Rican government requires all businesses to supply their employees with necessary gear, these pineapple plantations often hire people on "contracts" no longer than 3 months. In what seems to be a fairly gaping loop hole, companies are allowed to require contractors to provide their own equipment. But, if you're making barely enough to sustain you and your family, scoring a protective mask might not just make the cut for your to-buy list. 

Pineapple plantation

Furthermore, these massive, cultivated plantations essentially suck up everything nutritious and delicious that the soil has to offer. Once planted, you get two harvests over the span of about 2 years, and then the land is fairly out of commission agriculturally speaking. Another environmental pineapple woe that adds insult to injury is that ever-present rain sweeps the pesticides away...into the local water source! 

Drainage to local water source, less than a stone's throw from abundant pesticides. 

As you might imagine, drinking pesticides is no healthier than inhaling them all day. With this undrinkable local water, AyA has to come to the region weekly with a water truck. As you might also imagine, this could be a huge loss of productivity for the community. Instead of going to work one day, they might have to wait around for the water truck, and once they have their water, they'll have to ration it. This will probably lead to poorer hygiene, which ever-so-generously gives piggy back rides to more consequent more diseases present. 

On a slightly less "humans are destroying themselves and the Earth" note, we had a lot of time to explore La Selva more during the day and at night! 

Goblet-shaped mushrooms!

We went on a guided walk around some of the trails. Among our spotted animals were howler monkeys, parakeets, bullet ants, iguanas and frogs!

Strawberry Poison Dart Frog!

Leaf cutter ants workin hard all day err day (except they tend to abandon ship when it rains!)

BULLET ANT

And despite the heavy rain thrashing down like steady streams from the sky, we decided that our last night in La Selva was the ideal time for a night hike! It truly was though, since we had been told that more frogs show their faces and voices after a solid shower. 

8 Legs are better than one, they're twice as fun, ask anyone? (#HIMYM)

Walking into the familiar darkness of the "Cantarrana" (frog song) trail, a steady noise slowly escalated in volume as we arrived. This noise had a buzzing-wasp-nest-meets-chain-saw feel, both in tune and in volume. We weren't quite sure what this orchestra had in store for us, but the overture was slightly terrifying, yet in a fascinating way that draws you in.  The first chair in this ensemble was this fella...

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...and probably the second through n-thousandth chair was also held by his/her species or other Frog and Toad friends. When these guys did their call, the two areas of skin below the mouth would inflate like little balloons, then slowly deflate, releasing their call. Seriously though, at times we needed to shout to be heard over the frogs.

This was definitely the most memorable night walk of them all...and a great end of stay in La Selva! Today, we arrived at Luna Nueva, a hotel, garden and farm near the Arenal Volcano. We'll be here for a few days doing some ethnobiology research!

Dengue Deterrence

From La Selva, we took a day trip to a nearby community to take a sample of the neighborhood's Dengue knowledge and of mosquito larva in standing water breeding grounds. After splitting into groups, we went house to house, doing that good old public health thang that involves education and intervention! 

Well, what is Dengue? How is it transmitted? These are basic questions we asked people, and then tried to fill in any gaping gaps and encourage prevention practices with our newly-obtained Dengue knowledge caps on! Just kidding, there were no such caps. There were, however, multiple layers of DEET striving to starve any mosquitoes from a blood meal, just in case they wanted to give us a personal lesson in Dengue transmission. I mean, they say learning by doing is best, isn't it?

Not for your health! Dengue is a virus that causes fever, chills, muscle and bone pain, rash and a distinctive pain behind the eyes. Interestingly, the fever spikes in the morning and at night, similarly to how the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits it bites mostly at dawn and dusk. Adding onto these oh-so-pleasant symptoms is just the cherry on top: hemorrhaging! Bleeding from basically anywhere that you can bleed from. There are a few different strains of Dengue, and if you have the disease once and you get a different strain of it a second time, the odds are ever in your favor to get hemorrhagic fever. 

Don't get bitten by this mosquito! 

So focusing these public health lenses, we see image one: no dengue...image two: mild, flu-like dengue...or image three: sweltering blood blisters and potential death within 24 hours from hemorrhagic fever. Image one or two--better or worse? Two or three--better or worse? Well there's no need to pull that awkward optometrist-chair moment, since it's clear that option one would be optimal. And achievable if we hurl a giant road block in the middle of the transmission traffic circle: if they can't breed, they can't transmit! 

So, from house to house we went, alerting people of these aforementioned symptoms and going into backyards to check and overturn anything that could cradle enough water for larvae life. Coconut halves, children's toys, pet water dishes, open wells, and plastic containers are just a handful of the culprits. When we did find some little larvae swimming about the surface of the stagnant water, we scooped then in small tubes, and later looked at them under a microscope-type device to see if they were the species that carried Dengue...and some were! The work we did was through an EBAIS that continuously runs education initiatives like this, so hopefully with persistence, fewer breeding grounds will be present in the future.

A brochure about how to prevent Dengue!

Just to throw in a closer-to-home reason you might want to care about vector control. There's a funny little thing called climate change (and by funny I mean straight up tragic), and when it comes knocking on the door, it does so while holding hands with new diseases in new places. There's currently Dengue present in spots in the Southern US. And here's a kicker: if the global temperature rises just 2 degrees Celscius, the potential Dengue maps grows way out of its typical tropical climate reach, perhaps even penetrating as north as Canada.  

Indigenous Immersion: the Bribri and Cabecar

For the past few days, we were visiting the Bribri and Cabecar indigenous territories! These are two separate but overlapping indigenous groups. Their territories overlap, but they have distinctive languages and interact often. Their languages have the same root, and are basically understandable to each other (think Portuguese/Spanish level of similarity). They both believe in the same religion, which contains the idea that the universe is conically shaped, and construct some of their buildings to mimic this. 

Cone-shaped building! There is consistently a small smoky fire going on, which helps seal the roof! 

First, we got dropped off at what appeared to be an arbitrary place along side of the road, where our Cabecer guide met us. With our backpacks strapped on (which were filled with a few days of jungle clothes), we started making our way up to where we'd stay for the night. First though, we stopped at an iguana farm! Upon hearing the phrase iguana farm, I was initially confused if iguanas were being harvested and eaten...but, contrary to my concerned conceptions, they merely breed iguanas so that their population stays steady as other people hunt them down in the wild. Happily hiking more, we reached our lodging destination within an hour. We stayed in this large wooden house, and I slept in my very first mosquito net ever!

Had to document the mosquito net! #publichealth

While Costa Rica clocks in just a handful of Malaria cases yearly (and only in the Limón province), other delightful insect-borne diseases like Dengue and Leishmania strut their stuff in higher numbers. And more so in regions like Limón, but present in the area we stayed as well...thus the precautionary nets (and bug spray! Love me some 40% DEET). It was neat to experience these nets first hand after hearing about them in so many public health classes. Some mosquito net do's and don'ts (you know, for the next time you're prancing around the tropics):

• DO tuck the edges of the net such that you form a little prism of protection in your general sleeping space. Take that mosquitos and other insects that want to bite me--can't get me now! 
• DON'T sleep actually touching the net. If you do this, bugs bite you through it, delivering a sting both to your skin and the effectiveness of the intervention.
• DON'T get feisty and roll around and kick off the net in your sleep. No bueno.
• DO point your head lamp at different spots above you on the net as you fall asleep.
• DON'T freak out after performing aforementioned action when you spot beetles and grasshopper fellas crawling around. It's alright...the net is like that super power you always wished you had, making you untouchable! And it's kinda cool to watch the insects from below.

The "hallway" of the house

The next day, we went on a medicinal plant walk! Our guide referred to the forest as the Bribri's grocery store, pharmacy and hardware store. Basically, if ya need something, the forest has got your back. It's like CVS, Safeway/Schnucks, and Home Depot packed into one. Vines are a particularly hot commodity, with their utility in construction (vines are the new nails) and some species are like a water storage system that you can just slit with your machete and sip out of! We nibbled on one particularly bitter plant that's used to treat malaria and prevent bug bites too.

View from a wooden tower along the plant walk

The next day, we visited with a Bribri women's association that is in the chocolate business! We went to their cacao farms, and learned about the the chocolate making process. In their culture cacao is sacred and, because of religious traditions, the handling of it is a woman's job. You can eat (as we did) the slim meaty part around the cacao seeds in the raw fruit, but the seeds themselves are super bitter--you'll want to spit those out. But, in the chocolate making process, these seeds are collected, shelled, dried, mashed and ground into a paste. And then you can add a metric ton of sugar to get it to the level of bitterness in dark chocolate that we're accustomed to!

We later traveled via boat and bus to yet another part of the territory where we learned about religious rituals and where we also dined. The elders of the group spoke with us, but they only speak in their native language. So a younger Bribri man translated from Bribri to Spanish, and a professor translated from Spanish to English. The younger Bribri man most likely knew the answers to our questions, but out of respect and tradition, would translate and ask the elders for the answers to share with us.

Boats!

View from the boat

Centipede on the river shore! (look at all those little legs!)

Lunch served in a banana leaf plate! 

 Now we're back at La Selva for about a week!

Suspenseful Mornings and Froggy Nights

Hola from the La Selva OTS field station...appropriately named, since selva translates to the word jungle! Rainy, humid and straddling a river, this environment lends itself to widespread walks of wildlife wandering about.

In the mornings, instead of rolling out of bed and crossing Forsyth Blvd. to get to class, I roll out of bed and cross a river via suspension bridge! Although, the similarities basically start and end at the verb crossing. The river below the bridge flows lethargically, almost obligatorily so. But, after a heavy rain (which is err day) it gets feisty. The water clouds up, mimicking the sky above, and foam, mud and branches more rapidly whoosh along the way. Also, crocodiles (which I've yet to see) and caimans (a crocodilian cousin that I have seen there!) chill alongside the river, many meters below the bridge.

When many people walk across at once, the bridge's movement reminds me of many people shaking a bedsheet up and down at once (or like that childhood parachute game with large multicolored fabric when you'd make the plastic Discovery Zone-esque balls bounce! Anyone else know what I'm talking about? Bueller...Bueller?). But, don't worry...this bridge had a sturdy build, and it's only a minor sentiment of this sensation. Definitely the coolest commute to class I've ever had.

My favorite thing about being at La Selva has been going on night hikes. During the day, there's no scarcity of animals out: lizards scoot about and picaries (a wild pig of sorts) poke around as well. But, perhaps because they mimic my sleeping habits of last spring semester, the nocturnal animals resonate more with me. On our first night walk, a professor explained how you should hold your headlamp at eye level as you look around. A multitude of multicolored glimmers will appear before your eyes where your light is hitting.

This is not the spark of a hallucination, but rather the sparkling of the eyes of the animals around you. The headlamp light reflect off of their eyes back into yours! Blue, the most abundant, tips you off to spiders, while amphibians are more yellow, and some mammals are red. It's like a dimmer version of Christmas lights...it's Christmas all year in the jungle! (Sidenote: the weather is Costa Rica during Christmas is usually really warm and pleasant, so on really nice days the Ticos will say "Oh this is just like Christmas!" which bewilders us Gringos who confusedly glance around, searching for a nowhere-to-be-seen hint of snow or cold front).

A tree frog chilling on my rain jacket! 

The frogs that we see are my favorites! You can just scoop them right up, as long as you do it quickly before they squirm away! And they're happy to hang around on your hands, as long as they're DEET-free, since DEET will diffuse through their skin and kill them. But otherwise, you're free to look and touch!

Mid-jump! 

An arachnid amigo!