5. Copal, botanists and smelly socks, 7/20/06

Thursday, July 20, 2006

We returned to Plantation 2 to resume our survey of the copal trees. I started systematically noting incidences of wound wood we saw the first day. Yesterday we also noticed that a few resin lumps had pliable breathing spouts made of gooey resin. We even saw one larva poking its head up from time to time so that a thin layer of resin separated it from the surface. Minutes later the hole was closed. I realized I had mistakenly identified some of these small lumps as the type that contained resin fly larvae because this pliable consistency. I had noticed these spouts on some resin lumps in earlier trips to Peru, and one goal of this trip has been to try to figure out if the weevil developing in this type is a different species from others.

As we made our way to the edge of the plantation from flat upper ground to slightly lower and wetter ground near a stream, it seemed that we saw fewer lumps with spouts. We did, however, find a few small lumps that had spike like protrusions. Perhaps we've been lucky enough to find two weevils with overlapping but subtly different habitat preferences. We put wire mesh traps on several of these different types to test this nascent hypothesis and also installed a couple of the cone style weevil traps on several trees with fresh resin lumps in hope of trapping adult weevils crawling up the trees.

By the end of the day we had finished surveying the trees in Plantation 2 with data on 136 trees. Although it’s the middle of the dry season, it can still rain any day here, and that afternoon we got caught in a huge downpour. Always prepared, Nestor had brought his poncho, but being blithely optimistic, I had left my behind. Marissa captured one very nice picture of our soggy crew returning to the house. I was more embarrassed that my thermos type containing my camera, lenses and camcorder were not watertight. I carefully dried the equipment that was minimally damp, and fortunately it all worked. Unfortunately the portable hard drive left inadvertently in the bottom of my pack wasn’t so lucky. Since then I have put each camera piece in a ziplock bag with a moisture-absorbing packet and brought extra plastic bags to surround the carriers inside the pack. The tropics are inevitably hell on this sort of gear, but I want them to last as long as possible.

At dinner, we met two fellow botanists. Naillarette Davila Cordozo is a plant taxonomist in charge of the Jenaro Herrera herbarium. She has been leading the collection and identification of leaf samples collected in the 9 hectare arboretum and is doing some research on the ecology and propagation of the Heteropsis vine, locally called “tamshi.” I studied this same plant in Brazil with the Tembé (called titica in Brazil) who harvest the aerial roots for a lashing material in their houses and sell larger quantities to wicker furniture makers in the city.

It was fun to discover that Naillerette is the woman that fellow researcher Paul Fine recommended to me before this trip as someone who could greatly help identify my plants. I had met Paul in 2002 and stayed at his house in Iquitos when he was doing fieldwork for his PhD studying copal trees. He was living at a IIAP research station just outside of Iquitos. He greatly helped my work by introducing me to Victor and several other young men who had founded the group Friends of the Alpahuayo-Mishana Reserve. Naillerette had read some of my work about Heteropsis in Brazil so we happily starting sharing information and project ideas about this unusual, important and often overexploited Amazonian plant.

We also met Xanit (pronounced more like “Sunny”) who is doing a PhD at Miami University in Ohio – where I interviewed for a teaching position in 2001. We both knew Michael Gilmore who recently finished his doctorate at the same school after studying the habitat classification system of the Maihuna Indians along the Napo River. Xanit is resurveying some “permanent” forest plots established at the station twenty years ago. Each four years a new student documents the dynamic changes that occur in a specific area. This data collection may be laborious, but it must be interesting tracking the emergence of new trees in the plot, measuring the growth of others, and noting which ones have died.

After supper all of us but Marissa made a foray into town with the IIAP truck. I had hoped to call Yuri to let her know that we had finally arrived safely at our destination since in the rush to get things done in Iquitos, I had not been able to spare even a few minutes to send her an email from there. We got to the general store with the telephones at five minutes after nine. These were truly their phones since they had already been disconnected, removed from their iron bar cages and put away inside for the night. The lady manager said come back tomorrow. We are open from 7 am until 9 pm. This closing time was apparently one thing in Peru that absolutely went by the clock. Cesar did accomplish the main goal of our outing that was finding the fellow that often does services for IIAP in town. He agreed to meet the boat arriving the following morning and pick up our long-awaited bag and left-behind food.

While some nights are very cloudy, a clear sky at night here offers a spectacular view of the stars. In this part of the world, though, I could locate any of the few constellations I am familiar with in my home sky. I got to sleep easily, but I again woke up feeling very cold. I was used to sleeping without any clothes on, but I reluctantly put on the same sweaty and dirty socks, underwear, pants and short-sleeved shirt I had been wearing for five days. The outfit smelled ripe from collar to feet, but the extra warmth allowed me a few more hours of comfortable sleep.