In the volcano

We pulled off the road at an overlook to take in the city of El Valle. The view was breathtaking. The town is nestled at the bottom of a huge volcanic crater with the rims of the old volcano rising circling above it. The rim of the volcano is so steep it forms almost vertical walls around ¾ of the city.

About a million years ago, the mountain that was El Valle volcano experienced a massive and cataclysmic explosion. The explosion left a 3½ mile wide crater and walls over 600 feet high. After the explosion the crater filled with water and contained a lake. The sediments and dead animals and plants in the lake waters settled over many years creating a flat bottom. Eventually a side of the crater washed out leaving the flat bottom of the lake that became a rich soil. This verdant land became the site of the town of El Valle and the cropland that surrounds the town. The steep walls of the crater are now draped with jungle so the area has the feel of a hidden tropical paradise, a Central American Shangri-La.

The high altitude leads to perpetual spring time. In the tropics, flowers are always blooming. It is a beautiful area and there is no doubt why people want to own houses on the slopes of the volcano and why many Panamanian tourists and international visitors vacation in El Valle.
Small houses and fields cling to the slopes of the steep walls of the volcano about 1/3 of the way up the sides. Eventually, the pitch gets so steep that the land cannot be lived on or worked and it gives way to jungle. When the slope is steep enough there are sheer rock faces that even the jungle cannot cling to.

The steepness is why there is still any wildness left in the area. Crops are scratched out of hillsides that would be considered un-farmable in the US because mechanized agriculture cannot be used, but the hills eventually are too steep for manual agriculture. The farms clinging to the hillsides reminded me of Switzerland where crops or grazing pastures are on slopes so steep a loss of footing could lead to a fatal tumble. It was obvious that the dirt itself was just clinging to the volcano sides from the numerous scars of landslides on the slopes around the valley.
The town looked very inviting because of the green productive fields and then the steep walls surrounding El Valle; we looked forward to getting down to our home base. Edgardo pointed out a large white hotel across the valley that was to be our headquarters for the next 9 days. We got back into the trucks and wound our way down the steep mountain road toward it.

When we drove up to the Hotel Campestre, it was clear that it had once been an opulent inn. The expansive grounds appeared well designed, with a circular fountain in front of a large central building. The hotel had a backdrop of a nearly vertical vine-draped wall of the volcano. Spreading to the side of a large main lobby and restaurant area, there were a couple of white two-story wings of the building housing 20 rooms each. In front of the hotel and a bit off to the side, we saw what was once a large swimming pool. Along one end of the pool there were smaller stepping-stone pools with fountains and waterfalls connecting each pool eventually cascading into the main swimming pool. Just past the pool was what appeared to be a caretakers quarters.

Upon closer inspection, the pool was filled with sediment, vegetation and insects. For biologists, the decay of the pool offered an opportunity, and while Matt and Edgardo checked us in, the rest of us tried to identify its inhabitants.

The most impressive animal in the pool was the large dragon fly larvae. These larvae are fearsome predators with a flip-spring jaw with a small hook on the end that extends in a millisecond to grab unsuspecting small aquatic insects and even fish. We also saw our first tadpoles here. There were, unfortunately, also many mosquito larvae, so the dragon fly larvae were not keeping up with their job, and I was wishing my DEET was not in my lost luggage.

The main entrance of the hotel had large wood timbers for support and overhead. We walked through the lobby to get our keys, and there was an aquarium with a bright yellow and dark brown splotched frog. This was the famous Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki), about 2-3 inches long. This poor fellow did not look well and Matt remarked that they probably purchased a new frog caught by locals from the plentiful supply in the nearby jungle every few weeks and didn’t worrying about feeding it.

The Panamanian golden frog is considered lucky. Legend has it that indigenous people in the region traveled to El Valle to catch the frogs. Some considered it a symbol of virility and prosperity. The frog adorns lottery tickets in Panama and the species is an icon in a land with many, many attractive species. This was one of the species that would disappear from the wild when the disease swept through the region.
We got our keys and I helped the others carry their gear to the rooms, and our equipment to the lab. Edgardo, his girlfriend Heidi Ross, Piet Verburg, and Scott Connelly, were living in the lab-house combination off the edge of the hotel that initially appeared to be caretakers housing. This house had been a duplex and each side had a large kitchen in front and several back bedrooms. One side had been left for housing and the other converted to use as a lab and storage area. The large front room on one side that had been converted into a laboratory was stacked with equipment and the small amount of table space was given over to sample processing and analysis.

As we approached the lab/ house, a small whitish dog came out to greet us. As with most Central American dogs, she was not well kept. She was also pregnant. Since she got food, she kept returning to visit us and bark at any strangers who happened by. She was a nice affectionate dog, but I was not sure that petting her was worth the risk of fleas. The dog, however, eventually won me over.

This is where I had the pleasure to first meet Heidi Ross, who was hired to work on the project as a technician. She initially came to Panama with the Peace Corps to El Cope. This was an earlier site for the frog project as well. El Cope is now little use for frog work because the disease already swept through there. She was interested in the frog work that was occurring before the disease came and volunteered to work on the project. Eventually, after her stint in the Peace Corps was done, she was hired and ended up getting together with Edgardo. Heidi wears her long curly hair in a ponytail and has nice green eyes. She was always around Edgardo, who is outgoing and gets most of the attention. Heidi is quiet but occasionally throws shocking off-color jokes into conversation. She is an excellent worker, never complains in harsh field conditions, and loves working with the frogs.

Piet Verburg was in the lab building and helped us get settled. Piet was the hired gun (we referred to him as Pistol Pete) on the project and had been living in the lab/bunkhouse building and starting to work on the research sites. Pete was on a postdoctoral appointment and did not have the numerous responsibilities that academic faculty members at universities have. Postdoctoral appointments are the positions many academic researchers must take before they get a permanent faculty position. These positions pay marginally better than graduate positions, but have no permanence. Often the postdocs do all the actual work on a project because they are trained and research is their only goal. It generally is a chance of a lifetime to totally immerse oneself into research.

Piet was born and raised in the Netherlands. He was hired for his top-notch research skills and expertise, and willingness to travel the world to do aquatic research. Piet did his doctoral research on Lake Tanganyika in Africa, a lake with hundreds of species of tropical fishes. He is a wiry athletic individual, with tight-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He moves perpetually and very extroverted. He will get up early and run 6 miles, do physical work all day, and then smoke and drink all night long. He persistently asks questions and loves to challenge the status quo and established scientific knowledge.

Scott Connelley was the third new person I met then. He is a graduate student who was studying the frogs for his dissertation. He is a short, dark-haired individual with a well trimmed beard and dark, quick bright eyes. He is energetic, quick witted and full of stories and dirty jokes to pass the time. Scott is also an excellent photographer who has been documenting the frogs in the wild before they go extinct. He regularly gives talks on loss of tropical diversity and is dedicated to conservation.

We set up our gear in the lab, and started to discuss our research plans. Piet asked questions and questions about our answers. We knew time was limited and needed to get to the stream, so we tried to be as direct in our answers as possible. We needed to get a fast start on the study the next morning to start our preliminary measurements. The experiments were going to be detailed and required substantial advance preperation. Some of the analyses we could do back in the US, but others required knowledge of the actual stream. So this time was also taken to get information from Scott, Piet, Heidi and Edgardo.

Understanding the effects of the frog losses required making sophisticated measurements of how the stream ecosystems work in the most fundamental sense. How nitrogen and carbon (fundamental chemicals found in all living organisms) flow through the plants and animals found in the streams is a essential characteristic of how these systems function. Our stable isotope method used forms of nitrogen and carbon that differ slightly from most of those elements found in our natural environment. We were going to take advantage of that fact to trace the fate of these compounds that are central to all biology as we know it, and specifically to the biology of the stream we were planning to characterize.

This type of research is an example of new, high-tech approaches that are available to environmental scientists. The nitrogen is a special form that has one more neutron in the nucleus, so it is a slight bit heavier than the more abundant form that has 7 neutrons and 7 protons (just 1/14th heavier). As far as the plants and animals are concerned, the tracer form of nitrogen with 8 neutrons is identical to the more abundant form with 7 neutrons, but science can tell the difference.

The samples that could have our tracer in them can be taken in the field and dried and ground up in the lab. A tiny bit, about the size of a head of a pin, is put into the mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer burns up the sample and converts the nitrogen to single charged atoms. Inside the machine there is a series of magnets that accelerates the charged atoms into a stream of particles that are shot in a line through a tiny hole in another magnetic field. The field bends the charged atoms. Heavier atoms bend less than lighter ones, just like it is more difficult to make a tight turn with a large truck speeding around a corner than it is a sports car. The machine has a detector that can sense the two particle streams and indicate how much of the heavier atom there is. The numbers from the machine can be used to tell the relative amount of the tracer nitrogen there was in the sample.

We planned to add a pulse of these non-toxic tracer compounds and collect numerous samples during and after the pulse to characterize how the nitrogen was used in the environment. Samples were to be returned to the US where mass spectrometry could be used to analyze the samples and the results would eventually be used to calculate how quickly the materials moved into the plants, animals, microbes, and various chemical pools in the water.

The isotope and our time were both quite costly, so organization was absolutely necessary, and made more challenging by the makeshift conditions at the lab and even more demanding conditions in the field. We hoped it would not rain, and given it was the dry season, we probably had a 50% chance of dry weather. A flood could spell disaster for our project. The high walls of the volcano often caused the clouds to drop their moisture even in the “dry season”. Here, dry was relative. In addition, the steep walls lead to very rapid run off when it does rain, increasing the probability of flooding. The experiment was a one shot deal. We would not have time to redo the experiment if it was halted by a flood and it was unlikely that we would be able to get all the researchers back down to try do the experiment again. Plus, we did not know exactly when the frogs would start dying, and we needed measurements from before the die off.