Ocelot tracks and colored beetles

As always the jungle is fascinating, and every time you go, there are new things. Beetles as large as a thumbnail with bright yellow and black stripes were eating bright white shelf fungi that were growing on a log that had fallen over the stream. The color contrast was stark and beautiful. Nothing subtle about this bit of natural history. A river of leaf cutter ants used the same log with the beetles and fungi as a bridge to carry leaves back to their nest. Army ants swarmed across a nearby log.

At one point I thought I saw a frog jump away from my foot. When I finally located the moving animal, it turned out to be a lizard with its head shaped like a leaf. The lizard was so cryptically colored that it took me 5 minutes to point it out to Bob, even though we were a few feet away from it. We saw a number of other lizards and skinks during the day that apparently had not been killed by the disease.

That evening we were able to visit Heidi and Edgardo in their new house. The place was much better than the old lab they had been living in. They had a nice dog, and a yard now, and were within a short walk of the Rescue Center. It was fortunate they had found a good place to live, the real estate market was very tight in El Valle. The demand for second homes and tourist accommodations had led to first world prices in a developing country. Given that the rescue center paid very little, finding this house really made it possible to do the work they needed to do.

The next day we took a short trip to collect a few samples and check that the experiment was running properly, including changing the solution that we were dripping into the stream and measuring the pump rate. Everything was going smoothly. Once that was done we had some time to take a walk upstream. There were occasional tadpoles and I found the only adult frog of the day. It was no bigger than a dime that looked more like a moss than a frog. I only spotted it because it jumped when I stepped near it.
On our way back downstream we saw a track in the sand which we photographed. Electronics have made this a very small world. We sent an email of the picture to a world expert on mammal tracks, and he confirmed that it was an ocelot track. This was interesting news since we had seen no other evidence of large animals. The monkeys, peccaries, and other large animals that would have been in a pristine jungle in this area had been hunted out, but somehow this large cat was holding on.

The next day Alex found some scat, a ropelike pile of feces on a rock in the center of the stream. This is the habit that ocelots have when they excrete feces. We got back fairly early and Karen Lips and her student had arrived from other sites in Panama where they had been surveying for frogs and lizards the past few days.

This was the first time I had gotten to talk to Karen Lips. She is petite with short, dark stylish hair, a quick smile and large brown eyes. Going into the field with her, I was impressed that she was better dressed than most field ecologists and somehow managed to stay clean even though she was working her way through a muddy jungle. Her life revolves around study of frogs and she spends 3 months in the tropics most years. If you want to start Karen talking, frogs are the topic guaranteed to get her going. She doesn’t just talk about frogs, she is animated and strongly opinionated about any controversy in the world of amphibian science.