Back at Las Cruces!

We are back in Las Cruces! (well, we were in late January, when I should have written this post )

Since I already have a post about Las Cruces, I have a few more things to add….

The ride from San Jose to Las Cruces is about 6 hours.  We stop on the way in the mountains for breakfast.  It’s always a shock to get off the bus: after being in fairly warm San Jose, then in the temperature-control of the bus, to step into the fresh (and by fresh, I mean contrastingly cold) air of the mountains.

Time for food!

This is the place where we stop.  It’s one of few rest stops on the way, and they carry a variety of things.  There are tropical fruits for sale, all sorts of sweets, and there is a restaurant .  The restaurant is buffet-style, and seems to focus on serving mainly fried foods:  Lots of types of eggs/omeletes, tortillas/fried doughs, sausages, and of course, gallo pinto.  It’s good to be conservative when choosing which foods are going to be in your stomach when the next fews hours ahead are winding through the mountains!

When we arrived at Las Cruces, the staff showed us a snake they had recently captured in the garden (Reason number one why to always wear close-toed shoes!).  I can’t remember now what type it was, though there’s a good chance that it was a terciopelo (aka fer-de-lance).

Snake in a jar

This time on the walk through the garden, I caught a shot of the prayer plants.  You can see the difference in the positions of the leaves.  The ones on the left are all folded up (looking like hands in prayer, hence the name), while the ones on the right have their leaves in the position to catch as much sunlight as possible.

Prayer plants

This time while we were in Las Cruces, there was group of biologists from throughout Central and South America there to take a graduate course.  It was interesting to meet even more people from many different countries and to practice my Spanish.   There are many different dialects of Spanish, and despite having become pretty good at understanding ticos speak, it was difficult to understand through the accents of some of the students from other countries.  They were all working on independent projects, and on my free day, I spent time with a group looking for leaf-miners….

Leaf miners are the larvae of insects that eat the tissue inside of a leaf (called the parenchyma, thank you Dr. Klemow and Bio 122 ).  Since the miners are damaging the tissue that they are eating, you can distinctly see the patterns that the miners leave behind them as they munch.  The path starts out small (because the larvae was small) and becomes wider and wider until the insect is large enough to move on to the next stage of its life and leaves the leaf.  The group was studying the patterns the larvae make: do the larvae munch haphazardly through parenchyma or do they navigate around the veins in the leaves?  It turns out that the paths tend to go around the veins, and that when the larvae do cross a vein, they more frequently do so through the thinner parts of the veins, towards the edges of the leaves.

Leaf-miners! (minadores in Spanish)

Also in Las Cruces, there is a HUGE strangler fig that is composed of many trunks with a space in the middle (where the tree that they strangled used to be, before it died).  Because there are some many gaps and holes, it’s easy to climb inside, and you can easily climb up about 20-30 feet (then there is a bee hive in the tree, I wasn’t going to mess with that!).

inside the strangler fig

Again, we’ve had some awesome panoramic views from Las Cruces.

view from the mirador

Las Cruces

OTS has three biological stations in Costa Rica: La Selva (where I completed my frog research), Las Cruces (where I currently am), and Palo Verde (where I will be in a few weeks).  Currently, we are at Las Cruces, which contains the Wilson Botanical Garden.  Since the Garden is the center of the station, I’ve decided to dedicate a post to all the sites that may be seen in this small area.

One of the many parts of the Wilson Garden

The story behind the Garden: Robert and Catherine Wilson were involved in gardening in the US, but moved to Costa Rica to begin the Botanical Garden in 1962.  They began a collection of plants from around the world, focusing particularly on palms and bromeliads.  In 1973, OTS purchased the property and continued maintaining the Garden.  Today, the Garden covers 30 acres and over 30,000 species of plants, 60% of which are not native to Costa Rica.  The Garden also contains the world’s second largest collection of palms (though I’m not entirely sure who has the largest….if you find out, please let me know).

We are staying in the Wilson house, where the Wilson’s actually lived while they were here.  The ‘front door’ looks like this:

Entrance to the Wilson house

This picture reminds me of home, although this is a much “neater” version of both the usual ‘at home’ situation and the ‘here’ situation.  After the first week, this organized version of footwear becomes a mess that requires careful navigation to safely cross.  You find yourself actually contemplating whether or not you really, really need to go through the process of parting the sea of flip-flops, sneakers, cleats, and muddy boots that await your exit or entrance to the house.  It really does make me feel at home. (though my mother is probably cringing at the thought that now the whole world can potentially know that we do not have a nice neat entrance to our house! oh well…)

One of our first days here, we went on a tour of the the grounds, and now it’s time for your tour!….

Wilson Botanical Garden

We started through a portion of the Garden that contained a large tree with fruits on it.  Anyone hungry for a fig? (I have to interrupt here to say that anytime I hear the word “fig”, I’m immediately taken to the portion of the story of Beezus and Ramona Quimby, by Beverly Cleary, in which Ramona is ‘having a party’ and trying to force the unfortunate attendees to eat Fig Newtons after telling her guests that the Newtons were filled with chopped up worms, not figs.  If you haven’t read it yet, you should.  You’ll find it in the children’s section of the nearest library.)

Figs!

Our guide proceeded to explain how the fig flowers are pollinated: Figs are pollinated by wasps–sometimes the wasps are generalists, and may pollinate many types of figs, while others are specialists, and one type of wasp can pollinate only one type of fig.  The flowers of the fig are actually inside of what we would typically consider the ‘fruit’.  The female wasps exit a fig carrying the pollen from the flowers of that fig, and flies in search of another fig in which to enter and lay her eggs (I’m not exactly sure where in this process she is mated and becomes fertile, whether it’s while in her ‘home’ fig or on the fly…again, if you find out, please let me know).  When she reaches what she deems a suitable fig, she crawls inside, lays her eggs, and dies.  Therefore, many figs actually contain: pollinated flowers, wasp eggs, and wasps.  Perhaps Ramona wasn’t so far from the truth!  (Note: not all figs require this specialized pollination process, so there is a chance that the figs in Fig Newtons do not contain wasps, depending on the type of fig they use.  Please continue to eat Fig Newtons if you already do so, because I would not enjoy being accused by Nabisco if they suffer from a fall in the number of sales of Fig Newtons after this post!)

After making us seriously consider every fig we had ever eaten in the past, our guide moved us into the bromeliad section of the Garden.  Whether you know it or not, I can almost guarantee that at some point in your life, you have eaten part of a bromeliad.  While some bromeliads are epiphytic (they grow on other plants, and don’t need soil on the ground to survive), some bromeliads grow on the ground, like the common pineapple.  While the pineapples that we eat are typically grown on large plantations, we had the opportunity to see an undomesticated pineapple growing:

a tiny pineapple!

It was tiny!!  The tiny pineapple was about as big as a lemon.  The guide said that it could be eaten, but that it contains a much higher concentration of the meat-digesting enzyme than a pineapple as we know it.  Therefore, you wouldn’t be able to eat much of it before feeling like your tongue is being digested–something he had personally experience and would not recommend.

There were other bromeliads, too.  This one had a central rosette of leaves that were pink…

a bromeliad

As we went through the Garden,  I was continually being left behind because I was stopping to take lots of pictures.  Therefore, I have a picture of a very pretty purple flower, but I think I missed any explanation of what it was because I was taking pictures of bromeliads while he was ahead explaining the flower.  Here it is, for your viewing pleasure, though I’m sad to say that it’s lacking a story:

unidentified flower

We moved to the area where more large plants were growing, including the banana plants.  These are uncultivated bananas, and like the uncultivated pineapple above, they are much smaller than what we think of when we think of a banana.

Banana plant

(Incidentally, here they are “bananos”, not “bananas”)  These bananas also happened to be pink, not yellow.

a tiny banana

The tiny bananas contain seeds that are about the size of pepper corns that are dispersed by birds.  The bananas contain compounds that cause slight diarrhea, so that after the birds eat the banana and seeds, they are inclined to deposit a small heap of fertilizer containing the seeds.  In this way, bananas are quite efficient at spreading their young (even going so far as to cause the birds to include the environment suitable for the sprouting!).

tiny banana seeds

We moved to a large stand of bamboo, where the guide told us that the bamboo can grow as fast as one foot per day!  I don’t feel that I can make an even somewhat accurate guess as to how tall this stand was–just that it was HUGE!!

bamboo

We ended our tour at the ‘mirador’.  With this view…..

Mirador

Until next time!