6/6/2012———

Caught another early ride out with Ummat to Pipeline. Victoria, a noctural bat person, surprisingly shows up to join along at this early hour. She’s leaving soon and is trying to get as much different Panama experience in before her time is up. After years here, this is apparently her first time down pipeline road (the main jungle research access point) during the day.

Whatever it is that makes me like all the other animals is missing from birds for me. Just don’t care about em that much.

Monkey Stole My Lens Cap

Hiked back down the Frijole to recheck Ummat’s new sites. Found a tiny group of wasps building a nest under a broad herbal leaf. The nest is quite tiny and unfortunately 3D.  Filming scenes like these are difficult. The jungle is much darker than one ever realizes. At least the lighting is controlled. Realized the leaf was swaying slightly, and my plamp came in handy to anchor it in place. Will have to remember this trick for filming the ants on the Cecropia trees.

3pm

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Went to the Summit Zoo to meet with the frog biologists. Got a terrific tour from Angie.

All their various housings for the adults, polywogs and eggs were beautifully handmade.  I was most impressed by the amount of work they put in raising food for the frogs. They keep incredibly rare (one frog was the only known specimen of its species), and sometimes sick frogs. Thus, they strive to keep a broad variety of mealworms, springtails, crickets and other insects to keep the frogs in the best health. The variety is also useful when they find a new species and aren’t even sure what they eat.

Saw anteaters and jaguars, but Peter refused to come along so as to not  “ruin his eyes” with captive versions of the creatures he hopes to spot in the wild. Of course, next to the Jaguar cage a 6 foot viper came out that Ummat and I chased around  a bit trying to collect pictures. After that sprung the largest Iguana I had seen.

Each tank had a little card deck giving mugshots of the inhabitants

One point in the day I accidentally reached back to scratch my back and realized that it’s all just falling off. Put sunscreen on back before snorkeling next time.

8pm

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Ate second dinner with Susie, Emilie and Ummat after fixing up broken equipment and building a cast for Ummat’s potentially broken foot.

6/5/2012
Cecropia Rotation Tests
Late night early morn. Race the sun, setup at 9.
Used chair trick learned from last night’s flower-carrying Leafcutter recording to make my tripods taller. Ran across Ummat and his bugs this morning. A group of adorable panamanian 8 year-old girls were interested in what he was doing with bugs, and helped him take down data. Adorable.

This picture should probably be on the cover of every recruitment brochure to go to Ummat’s college.

Setup was tricky as anticipated. Paint pen works well on leaves, but only if they are dry. A single drop takes a paint pen out of commission for 2-5 mins. Compass shows the sun rising in the west. Confusing.

Realized after starting that I setup the shots in the shade and need to drop the exposure for when the sun comes out.
Just now realized that I set my sitting/equipment tarp over a leafcutter nest. They are nicer than they look. I’m worried about the stability of the tripods. Shouldn’t worry about anything, this is paradise…though the stakes are so high to do something REALLY COOL and I have SO LITTLE TIME.

Need to do at least one fun thing with a microcontroller. Talked with Marc Seid, he pointed out that a golden experiment to hit on in science would be getting an insect to self-administer. This means, you can get ants addicted to morphine, but getting them to perform a task where they learn that morphine is the reward is something that has not yet been done.

10:55 Am
Been nearly 2 hours. Am starting to think that Cecropia trees do not move their leaves. Found lots of weird hemipterans with Ummat.

Had to pack my stuff up last night and surrender the key to my room. I’m now officially homeless in Panama. Supposedly I will get to move in with Stephen Pratt et al when they arrive in 5-6 days.
Found a strange insect yesterday. Was too attracted to my camera to snap a photo. Her legs are held top and bottom like a Tie-Fighter. Bright blue. Tiny Wings, Hovers. Moves like a quadcopter.

6/4/12
Ummat gave us a ride as far as we could go on pipeline. The goal for the day is to walk back in order to make it to the talk at 4pm. 11-12km down the road, trees had fallen across the road from the storms last night. Saw Howlers, Filmed. One had hideous growths coming out of its neck. Ummat says that it’s bot flies.

Saw first (and ultimately only) Coati walking down the road. These creatures must not have good vision, or their cognitive processing is far more overloaded by smell. It walked up directly to us sniffing around, and it seems that it only turned to run, once it actually caught our scent. Same reports were heard from ummat the day before about his coati experience.

Hiking with Peter and his dad. Those two seem to have the sweetest relationship. Adventuring around together and having a blast. Testing filming ants crawling on cecropias. Trees seem to be the cleanest spots to film in the forest, but pose other interesting geometrica challenges.

That smell coming from the Azteca ants has been disturbing us with its familiarity. We nail it down to the smell of nail polish remover, or acetone. I wanted to film the Azteca’s defense response, but they had already been provoked. Their response seems fatigued. Perhaps it needs to recharge?

So many blue morphos flying about, forcing realizations that yes, one is in a wonderful jungle paradise. One actually lands on me and hangs out for a while.

Someone says that cecropia trees actually move throughout the day. We discuss tracking their movements via time-lapse.

I kept petting what I thought was a nice fuzzy leaf stuck to my kneepad. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Made a jungle message to send to Kitty

6/3/2012
Got an early morning ride with Ummat and Yann. Went to Rio Frijole on pipeline road. Peter had explored this area earlier and tipped Ummat off to groves of helaconia trees. Takes 20 mins of river walking to get into the growth. Ummat finds his hemipterans on these plants. Males and epsecially mating couples are the prized catches. He forgot his net and so uses his fast, determined hands to snatch bugs off the strange fruit.

He goes on my shoulders to catch the high- ups. I begin to think about capturing basilisks on video and walk into knee-deep mud pit. There’s something special about practiced bug hands; this is a skill I want to master.

I find a sandy bank colony of Atta (leaf cutter ants); perform some scent testing experiments. See if squashed abdomen juice will draw ants near. Results seem unclear. Stephen Pratt later tells me that smashing up ant abdomens isn’t quite the same as them delicatley mixing the right cocktail of foraging pheromones.

I hear a manakin bird cracking and try to chase the sound into the jungle, but it gets unmovabley thick.

Peter’s Tent-Making bats chew a leave and make a little tent for themselves.

6/2/2012
First day “off.” Bringing my equipment with me anyway. Victoria (who seemingly serves as gamboa’s social liason) set up an incredible trip. Bus to coast to boat to island (the island is maybe not an island, just a hard to get to penninsula). Entire day of fun!

  
Day kicks off with spotting a sloth handing on electrical wire. Snorkeling shows tube worms and barracuda. Drunk scientists get nuts. There is a deep fog of sexual tension pervading the social environment of these expatriated researchers. The quick blossoming relationships that develop between them make it feel like Junior High. They all cook fantastic food! Yann whips up crepes on the beach, fresh coconut drinks abound, and hot new cookies pop out.

There were very sad looking parrots on the way back, and one really drunk guy on our group who kept hanging halfway out the boat.

I did a lot of people launching

6/1/2012
Peter picked me up with the truck and drove us to the Pipeline road for my very first time. He showed me an Army ant bivouac inside a tree that he tracked down the day before. Tracking video would be hard to get of the inside of the tree, so I wedged the GoPro 3D and started poking the bivouac to see its movements. I then came up with the idea to take a fistfull of ants and toss them onto a white reflector. Started off simple enough.

Close-up of bivouac inside hollow tree. It smells like funky meat.

LIKE ALWAYS, did not realize the implications of tossing fat piles of angry ants around myself.
These ants are big.
The biggest can bite through my beekeeping gloves (of which I am only wearing one).
The ants are in no formation, have no purpose, are not contianed within the tree. Instead they are infecting the ground everywhere, crawling all over the ground, spreading and climbing up everything coming out of the ground.
My feet are COVERED in them.
Surprisingly I have yet to be bitten by them down there. (UPDATE: starts happening A LOT in the afternoon)

Spending lunch writing and tossing ants off the bridge to the fish below.  A perfectly black moth lands on my boot. Everything in the —(Crazy birds start shouting and screaming down at me, minor bird attack)— jungle must be terrified all the time. The two emotions of the jungle seem to be absolute fear and absolute boredom.

It is getting more and more difficult to keep track of things, and this just my first few days here. Keeping stuff organized is fat and time consuming, and the time keeps slipping away from me. I feel the sun move across the sky as I work nonstop.

Army Ant Soldier Head lodged in my leather beekeeper’s glove

Saw my first Basilisks. They are everywhere. How nice! They are hard to spot unless they move. Also, it seems they won’t run across the river unless they feel forced, and must. Otherwise they will run along the land. They remind me to test out how the army ants’ bivouacs function in the nearby stream.

6PM
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Back after my first truly amazing ant experience. Remember How I was waxing poetic about how research is embettered by situation in the feild? Well it’s not all roses. And I am not just talking about pain, or hard work. The flipside to situated design is that it turns you into a machine. An Animal. Feeling Weird.

Later
——————–
Peter tells me that army ants also sting. This makes more sense as to my symptoms later in the evening. My hand is fully swollen, and I really should have taken my wedding ring off because now it is stuck onto my chubby hands. When I got home, my blood pressure seemed greatly elevated, and I could feel the poison coursing through my body. Everything throbs.

—————————–

Video of water bivouacs:

5/31/12| ——– 11:30 AM Testing capturing footage of leafcutter ants outside the schoolhouse. Filming under a short tree is not a good idea. This tree is full of thousands of small biting ants, and everytime I am filled with the desire to change focus, exposure values, I accidentally stand up fully and the shirt refills itself with ants.

My stated goal for coming here is to capture difficult footage of uncommon species on natural locations for testing computer vision tracking. I have to pick and move branches and leaves away from the ant trail. In a way, it makes me think about my job as cheating for computer vision. Shooting more GoPro footage. I hope it turns out. Hang GoPro upside-down from ant tree. Camera sets are covered in ants. Plastic is a fantastic substance! Animals can’t figure it out. They don’t know what to do with it. About to do some Dual DSLR testing. Realized that I could photograph my Journal entries to preserve them in case of destruction or loss.

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More Pics from the day before

Day before went with Peter to Barro Colorado Island.

Hiked across the island through the rain. Peter shows me walking trees.

Lunch with Apes.

Shiny Bugs.

Poison Frogs.

Crocodile in the distance.

Susi did not like how we smelled on the boat ride back.

5/29 |
——
Start day with peter looking under microscope to identify ants. There are apparently 20+ varieties of Azteca ants around, but there are only identification keys for 4 species. These ants I hear are also notoriously hard to tell apart, especially between workers. Queens are apparently the key to identifying species, but they are, of course, harder to sample.

Need to keep reminding self not to be bogged downby money or equipment failures,- place strict focus on the possibilities of experimenting, exploring and learning here.

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Projects thought up the night before with Biologists
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Despite that this may sound like wishful thinking on my part, considering much of what I study and will hopefully bundle into my thesis is about the values of situated design, but I am amazed by how much more rapid and powerful ideation and design can come forth when actually being in the field around excited, interested groups.

Leafcutter stop signs:
auto-redirect paths of leafcutters. See what sorts of gate timings going up and down provoke new paths or let them keep the same path.

Bee Guillotine:
Apparently scientists want to examine bee brains all the time. This means they have to cut the bees heads off. Bees like to walk in rows, why not hook servos with razor blades up to computer vision/arduino stuff.

Antotator:Adapt a temporal annoation system based on a smartphone (sort of like Documatic), to let field biologists quickly tag and collect data on their surveys. They could choose common attributes/tags, such as species, witnessed behaviors, or area descriptions, and input custom metrics like body lengths, and other environmental information like GPS coordinates, air sensors, timestamps would be included automatically!

Artifical Cecropia tree (for labs):
It would be useful to have a tree that is transparent to monitor the full colonies without having to invasively cut the trees open.

Side Writings
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Items to purchase: Haircut, boots, fruit, machete (for peter), plastic melting soldering iron

In a way, this journal is a bit like Memento, and it’s interesting to know that odd specifics I include and exclude, will form my later comprehsions of what I actually witnessed. These slight changes to how I write things down, whether this is due to misperceptions, limitations of what I could actually write down at the time, compressed details from tiredness, or just plain lies…my future self’s knowledge of these encounters are at the whims of circumstances of writing.

Eyes feel funny last night. Have been pained since the end of florida. I’m not sure, however, if I am too aware that there may be something wrong with my eyes and psychosomatically these problems come about, or if I am just tired.