This course is intended for students who have had a course introductory biology, but who have not had much exposure to the rainforest. The course objectives are to become familiar with the diversity of life in the rainforest and with methods of finding, capturing, and studying rainforest organisms. The approach is hands-on, and will be a good lead-in for other more specialized courses on primates, botany, herpetology, etc. Students taking this course will come away with a broad grasp of different taxonomic groups including amphibians, reptiles, insects, birds, mammals, and plants. This class is not at the same level as in a specialized course on one of these groups. We will focus on behavior, ecology and natural history of the more commonly encountered organisms. |
Red Eyed Tree Frog. |
|
|
For the first two weeks, we shall conduct two nature walks per day with lectures in the evenings, to include a combination of slide shows, videos, lectures, and group discussions. After students are familiar with trails, and most of the common organisms. The Second half of the course each student will focus on his or her own research project focusing on an area of particular interest.
Typical Day:
A typical day's schedule is Breakfast at 7:00, with show and -tell for any organisms found the previous night, meet dressed for the field at 8:00, hike until 10:30, free time until noon lunch. Meet again at 1:00 and go into the field, return 3:00, catch up on field notes, dinner at 6:00 meet for lecture at 7:00 to 8:30. About one day per week will be free time for social activities, outing to the village, etc.
Scheduled topics:
Day 1: Transport to station, get moved in, safety lecture.
Day 2: Maps of forest around station, get acquainted hike, forest plants, and special adaptations in plants. What is a rainforest? Lecture on different types of forest in Costa Rica-cloud forest, rain forest, tropical dry forest, premontane forest.
Day 3: 2 nature walks, topic for the day: Cryptic critters: why most visitors to the rainforest don't see much beyond a tangled mess of green. Lecture/slide show on: color patterns, mimicry, warning colors.
Day 4: 2 nature walks, topic for the day birds, walk to wetlands, secondary
succession. Lecture: slide show reptiles and amphibians.
Day 5: 2 nature walks; capture and handling of reptiles. Lecture: mammals diversity, and behavior.
Day 6: Nature walks with focus on mammals. Lecture: insects: the most diverse and least known group.
Day 7: Field sampling of insects, estimating biodiveristy. Slide show on insects. Blacklight diversity at night.
Day 8: Free day (turn in field notebooks to instructor for evaluation)
Day 9: Nature walk: plant herbivore interactions. night walk.
Day 10: River ecosystem, sampling river organisms. lecture: behavioral sampling: focal animal, scan, sample size. transects, point sampling.
Day 11: Collecting behavioral data: lecture: importance of recognizing individuals, low impact marking methods.
Day 12: Practice marking and following individuals/ lizard, leafcutter ant, poison arrow frog. lecture: Braulio Carillo National park, select individual project subjects
Day 13: Field trip to Braule Carillo National Park - cloud forest
Day 14: free day (turn in field notebooks to instructor for comments)
|
