Monkeys Before Breakfast

Ok, so I’d been hoping to make a big deal out of the Camino Real trail and craft vignettes of life-and-death struggle along the way, but I’ve got new pictures that don’t need much creative backup to make them count.  I’m going to rush though the rest of the Camino Real stuff, and skip ahead to the events of yesterday and today.  I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Camino Real II: Let’s Get This Over With, Already

Okay, I left you all with a picture of a huge leafcutter soldier utterly dwarfing a couple of worker ants.  It is indeed a rare ant that dwarfs anything, but size isn’t everything:

Dunking your boss at the company picnic will never be as cathartic as gangster-stomping the life out of him with your frenzied work buddies and then dismembering his carcass with your own two mandibles. For most of the ants in this picture, life couldn't get any better.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that individual ants are totally expendable; the survival of queen and thus, colony is all that matters.  Ants dies in the line of duty all the time.  But I was intrigued to learn that when there is a surplus of soldiers (who presumably consume a massively disproportionate share of the food) a pheromonal signal is dispersed (presumably by the queen) that tells the workers to gang up and murder every soldier they see.  Terrifying.  I thought about this for a while and brewed all sorts of brilliant but nebulous insights from which I’ll spare you; not everything has to be a goddamn metaphor and besides, I’ve got better material piled high.

The last thing I really want to share is the Strangler Fig, which I will not henceforth capitalize.  The strangler fig is a hemi-epiphytic tree.  Allow me to break that down.  An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant.  Its roots, if it has any, aren’t in the ground.  A few epiphytes are parasites, but the majority just use other trees to get a leg up in a tough environment and do no harm.  The fig is hemi-epiphytic because it eventually puts down roots.

The strangler fig isn’t a true parasite, although it is known to the Costa Ricans as matapalos: “tree-killer.”  Unlike a parasite, it doesn’t directly rob the “host” tree of resources–it’s more like a nightmare competitor.  Strangler fig seeds are dispersed by mammals that eat the fruit and deposit them, with fertilizer, in the treetops. The poo-born(e) epiphyte sprouts in the canopy, slithers down the trunk of the helpless tree, and swallows it like an anaconda.

This horrifying spectacle of creeping claustrophobic doom has traumatized me more than any plant should, but once the victim finally croaks and rots away, the remaining structure is a marvel:

Look up:

Way up:

Beauty.

The first photo appears in the brochure I’m making.  You’ll recognize the tree when I eventually post the finished brochure, but you’ll also likely notice that it’s been relocated.  Anyway, that’s the fig I’ve been raving about.  You may now rave amongst yourselves about its photographer and his stupendous blog.

Okay, enough trees.  I’ve got a digital menagerie of exotic mammals, plus a spider, just for you–all wild, and all nude!

This morning I didn’t even make it to breakfast before I saw a couple of white-faced (cariblanco) capuchin monkeys horsing around in the forest surrounding the campus.

This is the only shot I got off before they swung out of sight, but it wasn’t the last time I saw monkeys today.  But we’re in chronological order here, and I before I saw more monkeys I visited La Casa de los Murciélagos (“the bat house”–it’s not formally capitalized), which is an abandoned house full of bats. Check out bats, Michael!

According to Chino (one of the naturalists) there are two different types of bat in this picture.  Moving on (I’m at the center of a blackfly and mosquito feeding frenzy out here on the balcony, where the wireless signal is strongest), here are more bat pics.

Snuggle Bats -- the newest merchandising offshoot of the William Bearcloblaw Law Blog

Good stuff, huh?  After this we stopped by the pigs, which were kinda cute, but not worth any real fuss.  However, I have a standing invitation to the next slaughter.  I’ll post “before” and “after” pics then.  Oh, and “during.”

Before I move on to the main attraction of adorable tree-dwelling mammals, I’d like to share with you a spooky invertebrate I saw last night.  Walking from my bungalow to the main building, I noticed a bright, blue-green glint ahead on the gravel path.  Something was definitely reflecting my headlamp.  Anywhere else I would have written it off as broken glass.  But I live in paradise, so I knew I was looking at something beautiful and precious and SWEET BABY JESUS, IT’S A PREGNANT SPIDER:

"I am the Night Spider. We'll be seeing a lot of each other in your dreams."

You just want her to crawl across your tongue, dragging that sticky egg sac.

Back to today: after our escape from Bat House (As marketing intern I’m making an executive branding decision to capitalize this attraction) I observed that the San Luis river looked particularly appealing on what was a very warm and sunny day.  Chino said he knew of a good spot downriver for swimming.  I and several other interns resolved to go swim after lunch.  It was an interesting trip (Chino had to carve a fresh path with a machete) and a good time, but the pictures are on other people’s cameras.  I’ll post those when I get them.

The day was already a glittering victory by the time we started hiking back to campus around 2:45. By 2:48 we were surrounded by capuchin.  There seemed to be one in every tree, and they were all watching us closely as they swung and leaped through the canopy.  They were hard to snap because they wouldn’t hold still, but I managed to get a few good shots.

Unfortunately this next pic is slightly out of focus, but you can tell that the monkey is at least as concerned with me as I am with it.

There was also a mother monkey with a baby clinging underneath, but I just watched.

Then, just as the last monkey loped out of frame, someone noticed that the monkeys passing through one of the trees had roused a couple of kinkajou that apparently had been holed up in the trunk. They were painfully cute:

One skeptical kinkajou

"Epiphyte With Yawning Kinkajou #6"

I’m not even going to bother writing about the capuchin or kinkajou right now (because I don’t really know anything) or the experience, because it was one of those “you just had to be there” instances.  I didn’t fall to my knees and weep at the majesty of Creation, but it’s tough to articulate just what was so neat about having this wholly new experience fall from the sky (one of the monkeys peed).  These are creatures we read about or see on TV, but I, at least, had never really believed that they were real in the sense that I might just happen upon a horde of monkeys on my way back from a swim.  If the kinkajou had also served me free drinks, this joint would have Southern Hills Country Club whooped hands-down.  But SHCC is still my Happiest Place On Earth for now.  One more kinkajou pic:

Thanks for reading, everyone.  I love having an audience and your positive feedback is a drug. Mallory likened me to Mrs. Frizzle, which, alarmingly, did not ruin my day.  In fact, I may start calling this (only half-ironically) The Magic SchoolBlog.  But let’s see if we can’t top that.  Keep reading, subscribe, set up Skype times if you want–some things don’t get blogged.  My Skype handle is WilliamBearclaw.

I think next time I’ll give a bit of a campus tour, introduce the staff and other volunteers, and do a “Day In the Life of William Shipley” bit.  Buenas noches.