El Valle de Anton

Our weekend destination.

Such a fun weekend! It's insanely easy and inexpensive to leave Panama City, and as it turns out, there are plenty of places only a few hours away that are well worth the trip. Early Saturday morning I caught a bus bound for El Valle de Anton with Sam and Nicole, a 125 km trip for the cool price of $4.25. El Valle (The Valley) is a caldera, basically a bowl formed by a volcanic collapse, and is known for its beautiful scenery, extensive hiking trails, and hot springs. This was our first time making a trip out of the city, and you can get by in El Valle without being terribly travel-savvy, so it seemed like a good choice.

The back building, where our room was.

First thing when we arrived we checked in to a hostel so we could ditch the majority of our stuff before checking out the area. We went to the far extreme of thrift for our lodgings, choosing La Casa de Juan that only charged $10 a night, so we were pleasently surprised by how nice it turned out to be. It was basically someone's home with a separate guest house that had been converted into several rooms and dormitories. In the courtyard between the buildings there was a garden with all kinds of interesting plants and flowers, as well as chickens, rabbits, turtles, dogs, iguannas, and countless other animals. Except for the rooms, the vast majority of the space was open-air or awning-covered, including the dining room, living room, and part of the kitchen. There were only a handful of other guests when we got there, so we were able to get a private, secured room (there was a big music festival in the city, so it wasn't as big a travel weekend as usual). The room itself was a bit dingy, but considering we would only be there for one night and would be out in the town 90% of the time, we didn't worry about it too much. And the owner Juan was remarkably helpful and kind to us, giving us a map and showing us photos of what to expect from the various trails and attractions. We rented some bikes from the guy for $5 a piece and headed off into town.

The bikes turned out to be a TERRIBLE investment. All three had seats that couldn't be tightened enough, so as soon as you put your weight on them they would sink down and tilt back. I spent the vast majority of the time riding as if I were on a chopper or just standing on the pedals. And Nicole had the additional issue of a leak in both tires so that within an hour of leaving the hostel she was basically riding directly on the rims. The worst part was that she hadn't ridden a bike in years and was in the rear, constantly falling behind. She assumed she was just out of biking shape and never said anything to us or checked her bike. A good chunk of the day had passed and we had zipped all over town by the time I fell in behind her and realized what was going on. Our hostel was on the far end of town, so we just dealt with the bike issues and took regular walking brakes to make it work. Next time I wont hesitate to shell out the extra money for a decent bike - those three were all such pains!

One of the petroglyphs.

Our first stop of the day was the botanical garden and zoo in the north side of the caldera. There were some pretty cool animals, including a jaguarundi, a mongoose, and some golden frogs, but for the most part it was like any other zoo I've been to. The trail between exhibits and the picnicking/resting areas were really well done though, making it a very pleasant loop to walk. After a quick lunch we went to the west side of the crater to do a hike that led up to some petroglyphs that supposedly depicted a map of the valley and its major features. For me, it felt a lot like looking at the constellations - I can see how others are able to pick them out and make the shapes, but I'm utterly hopeless when it comes to doing it myself. Despite the explanations given by some of the local kids (they gave a hell of a presentation for only a couple quarters), all I could really see were some animals, a human, and a raincloud, maybe. Nonetheless, they were still very cool to see and the hike took us up along a stream with falls and pools to a cool vantage point looking down into the valley. Also, the kid-historians had me in on some kind of joke that went way over my head and repeatedly cried out "india dormida" (sleeping indian) to me while laughing hysterically, both on my way up and down. As much as I've thought about it since then, I'm still clueless as to what the funny part was.

The roaches particularly liked to dart out
from behind the tapestry.

By the time we got back into town, it was getting dark and we decided to stop for dinner before returning to the hostel. Thus, by the time we arrived at the hostel, it was totally dark, which magnified the horror of what I'm about to describe. There's almost no outdoor lighting at La Casa de Juan, so when we opened up the door to our room, we couldn't see much at all until we flipped the light switch. And the second we did, I could see movement from every side of the room. The table next to our door was the easiest to focus in on, and that's where I saw at least three or four insects scamper for the shadows. I had gone most of the day ignoring my fears and pretending it wouldn't be an issue, but now there was no denying that we'd be sharing our room for the night, with earwigs and cockroaches from the looks of it. We spent the next few hours trying to distract ourselves by playing cards and planning out the next day, but it was hard to avoid seeing the little shapes darting from one shadow to the next. A unanimous decision was made to keep our light on all night to keep our friends as inactive as possible and I slept in a button up and full-length pants, tucked into my socks (which should not be too surprising for most of you!). Surprisingly, I slept pretty well, waking up in a panic only once or twice, thinking one of the little guys had found skin. Sam and Nicole fared much worse, tossing and turning all night.

Our guide through the trails.

But lo and behold, we survived the night! Fortunately, I had convinced everyone to get up early anyway so that we could go on a hike up the mountains behind our hostel (basically on the east side) and get to the top while we still had early morning low light. When I woke to the sound of my alarm at 6:00 AM, Sam and Nicole were both already sitting up in their beds, looking miserable. As we were leaving the hostel, one of the dogs came running after us through a hole in the gate, looking downright offended that we would even consider going without her. She ended up leading the way to exactly where we needed to go for the hike and would always stop about 50 yards ahead of us to look back and wait for us to catch up. There were even a few unlabeled forks that we would not have known what to do with, but our guide led us right to the ridge where we wanted to be. The view from up there was amazing, far surpassing what we had done the day before on the petroglyph hike. The trail took us to one of the highest points on that side of the caldera, from which we could look west and see the entire valley or look east and see an endless expanse of Panama down below. There were small clouds rolling out of the valley and dumping a fine mist on us as we sat and enjoyed the views, which made for a very satisfying end to the hike and also gave us some great pictures. Far and above everything else, this morning excursion is what I enjoyed most about the weekend. Dead tired though we were by the time we got back down into the valley, we were all in great spirits, not least the little dog, who refused to leave our side after our adventure together.

Some of us enjoyed the experience more than
others...

As a lovely follow up to so much work so early in the day, we decided to treat ourselves with a visit to the hot springs. It's much cooler up in El Valle than it is down in the city, so the idea of hanging out in some hot pools as the afternoon approached was not as insane as you may be thinking. When we got there, a few tourist buses were parked near the entrance, but once we paid, got the tour and explanation, changed, and stored our bags, it was starting to clear out and actually ended up being pretty mellow. In addition to a couple of lounging pools, the place also offered muds with supposed healing properties, which I naturally applied all over my face. It was pretty funny to see everyone walking around looking like zombies or members of the Insane Clown Posse. Mud truly is the great equalizer - everyone looks equally ridiculous when they paint their bodies with it! It was great to spend some time just relaxing and zoning out; between the awful bikes and all the hiking I was feeling just as tired as if we'd been working in the field. There were a few too many old men in tiny Speedos for my taste, but other than that the hot springs definitely earned a thumbs-up in my book!

I'm writting this after just getting back into Panama City, surprising myself that I have enough energy to even do so. But even with the scary room and the terrible bicycles, I had an amazing time and wanted to get the details right before they start to fade and mix. I took over 150 pictures these past two days, so even just deciding which to include here is quite the task.

Canal Day 2

A return to the canal! Today was much like yesterday, but this time we were prepared for our crumbly rock adversary and were able to pull out some pretty impressive leaf fossils without shattering them in the process. We mostly achieved this by removing 10-30 lbs blocks just for a single fossil. Once in the lab, we have precision tools that can cut out only the necessary sections without much risk to the fossils themselves.

I was also put in charge of photographing rock contacts, small-scale bedding features, and micro faults within our site, which was a nice change from excavating under the hot sun. It was fun to be able to use my geologist's eye to pick out important features, take notes, and record GPS coordinates to go along with the photos. At one point, our "safety officer" from the Canal Authority came by with the expansion's official photographer and took pictures of us at work to document this history in the making. Of couse, I was working on photographs myself at the time, so he got some really nice pictures of me taking pictures. Who doesn't love those?

It was SO much bigger when we started!

Our crowning achievement of the day was successfully removing a ~300 lbs boulder full of incredibly preserved plants from one of the walls of our site. We had to slide it down inch by inch to get it onto level ground, then used some plywood and two wooden beams to get it to the truck. By placing the boulder on the plywood, then using the beams as a track along which to slide the it, continually moving the rear beam to the front to keep the track going, we were able to just barely get it there. Apparently this is what the Egyptians did when moving materials for the pyramids, claims Aaron. To actually lift the rock up to the level of the truck bed, we were forced to chisel away some of the material from its underside, which was a very slow and careful process since the fossils of this site are so fragile. Once we had whittled it down to maybe 200 lbs, two of us were able to lift it, with another spotting us, and hoist it onto the bed. It was a lot like lifting one of those awful TV sets from the late 90s/early 00s, with absolutely nothing to hold on to and too bulky to really be able to get your arms around it. That, as much as the weight, is what made it such a difficult and time consuming project. But damn did it feel good when we were all done!

Fun extra: 1) we were working below the canal level, and
2) this box on water transports cars.

THE CANAL

While on canal land we have to wear safety gear :(

We finally got access to go to the canal! It's not the all-encompassing, long-term permit we've been working on since day one, but for the next week we'll be allowed to prospect and excavate along one particular tract of canal expansion land. We've had this short-term permit in hand since the fourth of this month, but were told we needed an escort to the work site to cover safety regulations and let us know where we can and can't work. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the one man who had authority to do this was on vacation and we hadn't been able to get in contact with him. Only just this morning he finally returned Aaron's calls, so we switched gears immediately from a lab day into a field day and were down to the canal by 10:00 AM. We met up with our "chaperone" near the entrance and followed his truck down to the exposure where Aaron and the other interns had gone a few weeks ago, when I had stayed behind to work on the plaster project. When we got there, he rolled down his window, signaled to Aaron to park anywhere off the main road, and sped off back to his office. The frustration on Aaron's face was plain to see - we had been waiting over two weeks just to have someone take us down to a location we had already been to before. But that's the way it is with the Canal Authority, nothing we can do about it. At least we're on the canal now and (fingers crossed) by the time this permit expires, we should have the long-term permits in hand.

Our work site. Right underneath the hill is the current canal
and the tops of a few ships.

A pretty representative sample of what we're working with.

The site we worked at for the rest of the day was the wall of an immense ditch that had been dug out as part of the future canal passage. The rock was supposedly shallow marine (though we have reason to doubt this) and had been metamorphosed to a moderate degree (schist-grade?) so that all the clay minerals formed smooth sheets within the greater rock body. There were visible fractures within the wall at various scales, large to small, and looking into the ditch you could see the faults that had caused them. All of these features culminated in making it very difficult to remove any material without it crumbling or exploding under the force of the chisel. The beds we worked in contained planes of dense leaf impression fossils, some with truly extraordinary preservation, and it was inevitable that some were going to get destroyed in the process of excavation. Our strategy was to quarry out boulders much larger than would normally be necessary, using the existing fractures in the rock to decide which fossils we would sacrifice in the name of cutting things down in to smaller pieces. Even with the care that we put into it, old fractures would rupture or new fractures would form, destroying the leaves we had hoped to take back with us. So it was a slightly frustrating day, but also a lot of fun from a problem-solving perspective. Especially when compared to hours of lab work!

The workers had kindly marked off a fossil branch for us
and stopped excavating, so we packed it up!

We got back to the labs right at 4:00 PM, just in time for the day's seminar. It was given by a student from the University of Panama and was about a new species of fresh water dolphin that had been found along the Caribbean coast (very close to Pina!). What I did not know going in was that the talk would be given in Spanish! I was able to follow about 60% of the presentation, which I'd say is a decent amount. I was dead tired from being out under the sun (plus I'd been expecting a lab day, so I hadn't slept much) so I was very proud of myself for not dozing off, or even coming close, during the seminar.

More Caribbean side and an amazing Friday night

This one's long, and more experience-heavy than paleontology-heavy. It also lacks photos. You've been warned!

It's been another lab-intensive week, especially so because Aaron left Monday for an outreach event in Colombia, but towards the end of it I got a bit of a reprieve from the usual sample preparation and micro fossil picking. Thursday morning was spent at a STRI storage facility that's leased out from the Canal Authority. I was surprised to find, upon arriving there, that our building was just an old house, stripped of all furnishings, sinks, cabinets, etc. and filled with stacks and stacks of fossil-filled bins. As it turns out, the entire Canal-owned compound used to be a Panamanian military housing community. When the Panamanian army was disbanded, the housing development was given over to the Canal Authority and is now mostly used for storage or leased out to other government affiliates.

Anyway, our reason for being there was to size-sort sandbags full of sediment from the Cucaracha Formation (about 20 million years old and known, in places, to be exceedingly rich in microfossils) that will later be picked for microfossils. The process began with pouring the contents of the sandbags out into five-gallon buckets. The material was golfball- to softball-sized pieces of sandstone that, to my inexperienced touch, felt far too well cemented for us to possibly break down and separate the grains. But sure enough, after filling the buckets with water up to the level of the rocks and adding a small scoop of everyday detergent, they rocks immediately began to crumble. Working the slurry around in my hands for the next ten or fifteen minutes took care of the rest. It felt very little like paleontology and very much like making mudpies! One thing I really love about this field of work is all of the unexpectedly fun odd jobs that line the path to the end scientific goal. After my bucket of rocks and been fulling converted to a bucket of mud, the wet sieving began. We had three wood and wire-mesh sieves (not much different from what one might use out in the backyard) that ranged from maybe half an inch square down to a millimeter square in grid size, stacked one on top of the other from smallest to largest. The rest was just a matter of dumping the bucket's contents into the sieves and using a hose and my hands to work out any clogs and help the grains through the wire. By the end of it all, I had to have lost close to 90% of the initial mass (all silts and clays that are too small to contain any fossils of value to us) and dumped each sieve out onto a separate tarp to dry. Once they've dried, it will surely be up to Sam and I to pick through the material on our microscopes. We did this for close to four hours, all the while out in sun in the backyard of our storage house, so it was really a pretty great way to pass the morning.

Once again, Friday was spent at Playa Pina, pulling bones out of the beach rock. We've been going there so frequently that there wasn't really a whole lot to do. Two of us worked on removing a couple ribs out of the tidal flat while the other two made what progress we could on pulling a dolphin or whale skull out of a cliff face. The skull was A LOT more work, so we switched back and forth between the two tasks. The sandstone that supports the skull becomes fairly easy to chip off when saturated with water (thankfully at high tide the wave action takes care of that) but after you get through the first few inches on the surface, it's unrelenting. Our general strategy was to make indentations with our pickaxe then go in with chisel and hammer to remove as large of pieces as we could. The pickaxe was nothing short of infuriating to use - it's head has started to become loose such that the weight (and my balance) shift mid-swing and the rock would only chip off into hundreds of small fragments rather than large, satisfying chunks. And these fragments would invariably fly straight towards my face, entering eyes, mouth and nose, in complete disregard of safety glasses and improvised facemask. When the tide started really coming in and we could feel the water lapping at our feet, we decided to finish working on the skull the next week rather than attempt to haul out a 150+ pound slab of rock through ankle-deep water. We didn't go home empty-handed though; we had at least three or four ribs in the back of the truck by the time we hit the road.

Oh! And we saw Amado again, though his siblings and cousins stayed mostly out of sight. He came down to help us for the last hour or so that we were there. We noticed that he was visibly cringing as he was crouching over the ribs with hammer and chisel (he swings far too wildly for us to even consider handing him the pickaxe) and then saw that he had a huge gash on the back of one of his legs. I asked him about it and he told me it was the reason why he wasn't there to work with us when we first arrived - he had been attacked by a dog and had traveled into Colon to see a doctor. When he was telling me all about it (in Spanish) he kept referring to the dog as "un diablo" and I could see why. The monster had left one hell of a mark on the poor kid's leg. We all insisted that he shouldn't help us this week and should take it easy instead, but he refused. Before we drove off, we pulled a cellphone out of the truck's glove box and handed it over to him. More than well-earned, I'd say. Amado was much more talkative with us this time than when we first met him, and he really seems like a good kid.

Due to the rising tide, we were on our way home an hour or so earlier than we normally would have been, which boded well for actually making it to volleyball on time! Every week I miss the first game because I'm still en route from Pina, but not this time - or so I thought. We ended up having to make a stop at a Claro store (a cellular provider) to handle some phone and internet stuff, and by the time we got out and I made it to Tupper for the games, my team was just leaving the court and celebrating a win. I wish I could have been there for it, but at least we won. I decided to hang around anyway and chat with my coworkers and all the other STRI people that I'm slowly getting to know. Glad I did, because after the last official game had ended, I got to play three in a row with all the people who were still hanging around. I never thought I had even the slightest interest in the sport, but volleyball is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. And, after the games, I did a ton of conversing in Spanish with my coworkers. Many of them were just as eager to practice their English, so the conversations were bilingual, which was pretty fun, despite how challenging and slow it was. I stayed at volleyball really late, until they began taking the nets down, then went with a few people to one of my coworkers' apartment in the area to hang out. At this point, I was the only native English speaker left, so I was in full-out Spanish speaking mode. It was easy enough to follow the conversations, but participating  was a struggle! One-on-one I can do just fine, but with so many people you really have to be quick on your feet. It was great practice and a really good time, without a doubt one of my favorite things that I've done since I got here. The next morning I was supposed to go on a canopy tour with Nicole and Sam, but I slept through it entirely. As cool as their experience sounded, I don't regret missing it at all. What I did instead was an incredible experience and will probably stand out against everything else long after I've gotten back to the States.

Carnival!

Note the gorgeous $6.99 jersey

Saturday through Tuesday was all about Carnival here in Panama. I had no clue it was such a big deal in this country - second only to Brazil! A ton of people left the city to go to Las Tablas (about 100 miles out), where the biggest party is supposed to be, and nearly every business here was closed for the entirety of the celebration. It felt like a ghost town, especially in my neighborhood, which is mostly government offices and literally everything was closed. Despite the mass exodus to the countryside, Panama City's event "Carnival de la City" was still very impressive. A half-mile stretch of the neighborhood Cinta Costera (a seaside road, boardwalk, and park system) was gated off, three main stages were set up, and the streets were lined with tents and booths for vendors. Live performances would start in the afternoon each day, ranging from local acts to famous Central American pop artists, and continue late into the night. And it was totally free! There were only two entrances and you had to show documentation and get a pat down from the National Police, so I guess the entrance fee was paid in the ridiculous amount of time spent waiting to get in. Each day was more intense and more crowded than the last, culminating in Tuesday's party which had a parade and a performance by some (allegedly) famous reggaeton guys. That night was basically shoulder to shoulder; I swear the entire population of Panama showed up.

Intern Sam with a dancer/drummer from the parade

My initial impression on Saturday night can only be described as overwhelmed. The space was enormous, yet somehow still insufficient for the amount of music being played, so in any given spot you would have two or three different speakers blasting different songs at you. Every fourth or fifth food/beverage stand would be set up with a DJ, lights, smoke machines, and a towering stack of speakers, repeating from one end of the grounds to another on both sides of the street. Folks would hang out, eating, drinking, and dancing at whichever was playing the music they were most into. And everywhere you looked someone was selling something. Kids and adults alike maneuvered through the crowds with trays of sunglasses, masks, silly string, and light up swords. People standing near huge bins filled with ice would call out advertising their beer and soda, and if you felt too lazy to walk the 10 yards to he nearest one (they were seriously everywhere) you could just wait for someone to walk by with a smaller cooler or better yet, buy a beer off a 5-year-old holding a six pack up in the air. For food, there were hamburger/hotdog/soda combos and barbecue plates at any of the hundred food stalls for the cool price of $1.50 or kebabs for 50c from any of the portable grills that lined the inner lanes of the streets. You'd be hard pressed to avoid seeing these barbecues - they were set up on top of wooden milk crates at chest level and had flaming beer cans (filled with grease?) on either side. I've never seen anything so precarious and dangerous looking. Wish I had taken a photo! Even a vegetarian had options here, and I could pick from yucca and plantains and beans to candied apples. To top it all off, if you wandered anywhere near one of the stages, you were at risk for being sprayed with water, confetti, and glitter. Even if you tried your best to avoid it, some kid with squirtgun and silly string in hand was sure to find you. I'm glad Carnival is a drawn out affair because the first night I managed to do little other than walk around like a zombie taking it all in.


Here are some of the highlights of my first Carnival experience:
- Got grabbed by a middle-aged woman as I was trying to leave one night and she wouldn't let me go until I danced salsa with her. I can't dance.
- Fell a good 2.5 feet into a manhole as I was watching the parade go by, and I consider myself lucky. In Panama City, the covers to sewers, electric/gas access, etc. are almost always missing and I should have known better when I stopped watching the ground to look at a float. My little hole was trash and water filled, but I came out without a scratch (how my injury-prone ankles survived I'll never know). I've seen others at least 5 feet deep with crumbling cement and exposed rebar.
- Saw the water/confetti spraying people picking up crates upon crates of eggs and got the hell out of there.
- Made "friends" with some people my age after buying beer from their cooler and they proceeded to take pictures with me at one of the reggaeton shows. I was aware of about half of the photos, the others I realized only after seeing the flash.

This is where I made some amigos

- Was warned by some Panamanian guy (also my age) to be careful of the people mentioned above because they might try something. He then proceeded to tail one of the other interns as we were leaving for another stage.
- FINALLY had a couple of late nights out!

Castaway-style Dining

Broken bridge

Yesterday was perhaps even better than the day before! We left early in the morning to go work near Pina (that small town on the Caribbean side), this time going further west once we got to the coast and checking out a few roadside cuts and quarries that were potentially of interest. The drive itself was surprisingly eventful, in that we encountered a fallen bridge with buses and delivery trucks backed up for about a quarter mile. Passenger cars were still allowed to cross though, so long as everyone but the driver got out and crossed on foot. I don't know what caused the collapse, or how long it had been that way, but the bridge was intact enough for a crossing, it just had a bizarre-looking kink in the middle of it. I was a little bit nervous that the concrete was going to fall out from under my feet as I walked across, but we made it over just fine. The drivers of the larger vehicles were finding ways to move their products and finish their routes despite the holdup. Buses on either side of the bridge basically traded passengers and turned around and delivery trucks were selling off some of their snacks and drinks to all the stranded people. After getting past the bridge, we were basically the only car on the road, and I was given my first lesson driving a stick. It did not go smoothly at all! I'm kind of got the hang of it after 15 or 20 minutes, but I'm going to need WAY more practice!

As the old saying goes: A banana in the hand is worth two in
the bunch

A few of the sites that we had hoped to visit had been overrun with elephant grass and shrubs or were closed off, and those that we were able to get to had exceptionally low productivity. At one quarry, I thought for half a second that I had found some large pieces of petrified wood, but upon closer inspection they turned out to just be sandstone-filed casts (the bark texture was all that had been preserved). I think someone found a claw at one site, and Aaron found a broken shark vertebra at another, but that was it. As we were about to leave the last site, though, we spotted a bunch of ripe bananas on a nearby tree and couldn't resist the urge to go chop them down! I've always been unimpressed by the fruit, eating it mostly because they're so convenient and easy to get, but those little guys were incredible! They were short and fat, brilliantly yellow, and the peels came right off. And the flavor was unlike any banana I've ever had before - they tasted somehow more banana-like and were remarkably sweet. The only let-down was that they were FULL of seeds! So many that you couldn't avoid them no matter how hard you tried or how small your bites were. Commercial bananas are clones that have had the seeds bred out of them, and now I understand why. The seeds have an acrid taste and are unpleasantly crunchy, so to eat the bananas we would kind of just roll around each bite in our mouths and spit out dozens of seeds. Totally worth the effort though!

Since there were no other sites to visit and we had nothing to do back in Panama City, we decided to take an extended lunch out on one of the cleaner looking beaches under the shade of a grove of palm trees. Sam and I took it upon ourselves to bring down a coconut or two, a task which, as it turned out, I'm pretty good at! Of course I had a number of failures before my first nut (throwing rocks, attempting to climb), but in the end I was able to use one of the palm fronds to continually knock the coconuts into one another, eventually getting two to fall down (one of which came dangerously close to smacking me in the face). We used our machete to hack away the fibrous pod and expose the nut and then carefully sliced off the top so we wouldn't lose the water (I'm also quite good at this!). By the end of the coconut feast, it was apparent to me that the meat and water were mediocre at best, but I swear the first few bites/sips were beyond delicious! I think the water was slightly fermented, since it tasted a bit like kombucha and was almost carbonated, but I took my chances and drank a ton. I also ate about half a coconut's worth of the meat. Upon finishing, I was extremely satisfied but also felt like I had a rock in my stomach. Overdoing it hardly describes the amount of coconut and banana I ate that afternoon.

Drinking coconut water, sloth-style

On our drive back in to the city, one of the weirdest, hardest to describe things happened to us - twice. Once as we were approaching a narrow bridge (not the broken one) and once as we were making the turn away from Pina and back to the highway. In both cases, some kids (maybe 12-20) formed a sad-looking roadblock out of string, buckets, and an occasional cone, and then would jump out of the bushes as our car approached. They covered their skin with charcoal, wore palm fronds as clothes, pinned random trash and knickknacks on themselves, and wore hats made of buckets, cones, and boxes. As they approached the car they screamed wildly and danced/hopped around and looked overjoyed. One kid would approach the driver's window and say "dame algo" (give me something), among a million other incomprehensible things, while the others would continue chanting and hopping or would approach the other windows and introduce themselves. We offered each group roughly a dollar in change, which judging from their expressions was more than they had hoped to get, then they cleared the roadblock and let us pass. It was so much more surreal than I'm capable of putting into words, and for the rest of the ride home all of repeatedly broke out in laughter just at the thought of it.

Boating the Canal

Today was such an incredible day! We started off by going to a field site we had visited last week, near the neighborhood of San Judas. The rock there is part of the Gatun Formation, which dates to the early-late Miocene, maybe around 9-8 million years ago. It's another one of those sites that is just overflowing with mollusk and gastropod fossils, but there are vertebrate remains to be found too if you're eyes can pick them out amongst the endless shells. I had a terribly hard time finding anything interesting, whether by lack of skill or lack of luck, and by the end of the afternoon my collection bag was looking depressingly empty (see photos). I thought I was on to something big when I found a sizable piece of wood (maybe five inches across in the longest direction) within a cliff face, but after pulling it out I realized that it was entirely carbonized (basically turned to charcoal) so none of the original textures and features remained. I did make it out with a few fish teeth and ray plates, but nothing compared to the two-dozen or so shark teeth that everyone else collectively found. You win some, you lose some. And it was a beautiful sunny day with a steady breeze, so I was far from being down in the dumps.

Nicole's shark teeth

My meager findings

Carbonized wood (it was big!)

Our vessel

We got back to CTPA (my department) just before 3:00 PM, giving us just enough time to grab a snack and clean up before heading to a Smithsonian-sponsored seminar on Barro Colorado Island in Gatun Lake (park of the canal route). Barro Colorado became an island when the area was flooded during the creation of the canal and is where the Smithsonian set up its first station in Panama. The high biodiversity and isolation of the island make it the perfect place for ecology research, and a lot of famous work has come out of the area. To get there, we drove out to a town called Gamboa that sits on the canal a few miles southeast of the lake and caught a STRI boat that then ferried us to the island. A water delivery had to be made, so they put us, along with the other eight or so passengers, on a larger boat than is usually used and we were able to sit outside on the deck. By about half an hour before dusk, we were out on the canal watching the sun set. It was unbelievably beautiful! Before even getting to the island I knew I wanted to go to every single one of these talks just for the journey there!

The other interns, from left to right: Pedro, Sam, Nicole

First thing as we were stepping off the boat, we saw a caimin (a type of small crocodile) hanging out on the shore and a couple of bats flying around between the buildings. We were served dinner in the cafeteria there, given some relaxing/socializing time with $1 beers, then led to one of the center's conference rooms for the lecture. The talk was about gene flow and adaptation (mostly to climate) in crustacean species along California's coast. The general idea was that animals that fix themselves to a substrate (i.e. barnacles) can only live on rocky beaches/jetties where they have something to cement onto, but these areas are frequently isolated from one another by large stretches of uninhabitable sandy beaches. Nonetheless, the same species are seen throughout the coast, so obviously are able to distribute during their larval, free-floating/swimming stages. The question then, was to what extent genes are exchanged and how much homogenization occurs within these kinds of animals. The speaker went on to show that it was actually fairly limited and further showed that different populations expressed different genes to deal with the same environmental changes like temperature and salinity. The point of all this is that these animals seem to have a large pool of strategies to draw from when dealing with shifts in climatic conditions and therefore are likely much more tolerant to change than previously thought (bodes well for future climate change). There was much more to the talk, but the speaker kept referencing a talk he had given earlier in the week (which I had not attended) and saying things like "you all know this by now..." (when I didn't) so a lot of it went over my head. Confusion aside, the overall trip was incredible and I will doubtless be returning at the next chance I get.

Oh, and interesting fact I learned yesterday: whales have asymmetrical skulls so that the sound impedance is different on either side, allowing them to hear directionally under water!

More Lab, New Work

So far things are shaping up to be another lab-heavy week. We thought we had made a breakthrough over the weekend when Aaron received word that we'd been granted a temporary access permit to a dam site within the canal expansion area. But, of course, things could never be so easy and straightforward. One of the conditions of the permit is that we need to be escorted (at least for the first few visits) by a government health and safety officer. However, the contact information for said officer leads to no one - both calls and emails go unanswered and unreturned. Aaron's trying to figure out our other options, but for now it's a dead end.

The bright side is that I was given a new project to work on! Since my microfossil picking setup is still out of commission  I was given a new piece of sandstone, this time containing a large fish vertebra. The sandstone is fairly soft, especially when wet, so the contrast between it and the fossil is stark (great for someone like me who lives in constant fear of breaking the specimens). Two days' work has yielded a good amount of exposure on the bone, and I think that by the end of tomorrow it'll be all but extracted. I can't really say why, but for some reason working on bone has been much more engrossing and entertaining than working on shells. The time passes pretty quickly and I don't feel like a zombie by the end of the day. Hopefully there will be plenty more material like this for me to work on.

River dolphin. Weird, right?

My progress pales in comparison to what Nicole (another intern) has accomplished in the past few weeks. Because of her prep experience, she's been working on the enormous "dugong" ribs we have down in the basement and has freed a ton of bone material. Enough so, in fact, for Aaron to discover that the bones don't belong to a dugong at all - they're from a river dolphin! And so began my instruction in fossil identification. The evidence lies in the vertebrae in the neck. Most marine mammals have simplified necks with only two main vertebrae (others very reduced) that are basically only used as attachment points for neck tensing muscles (for bracing when diving into water, etc.) and allow up-and-down movement. River dolphins, on the other hand, can turn their necks both side-to-side and in a rotational sense and this shows up in the nature of the joints between neck vertebrae. It actually looks almost unnatural when you see of a picture of one turning to look at a camera. So now I know my first fact about river dolphins! Hope I kept all of that straight...

The final bit of exciting news is that the wooded area behind our labs has been a regular animal preserve lately. I've had numerous sightings of iguanas, dart frogs, countless bird varieties, and monkeys! I looked up a Panama monkey guide and discovered that what I've been seeing so far are Panamanian night monkeys and Geoffroy's tamarins. Both unbelievably cute. I'm going to start making an attempt at bird identification, but there are so many different varieties that I think I'll get overwhelmed pretty quickly. We'll see!

Return to the Caribbean Side

Much to my delight, we returned to the beautiful town of Pina today, as per Carlos' request, to excavate some of the fossil material left behind last week. There are SO MANY exposed fossils out on the beach there that even this second trip was not enough to recover everything. Our main goal was initially to go after a dolphin skull lodged into a cliff face, but the nature of the rock and the amount of overburden made the task impossible in a single trip and it was high enough above the average sea level that it won't be going anywhere anytime soon. So instead, we spent the majority of our time out on a natural jetty going after a few ribs and vertebrae.

While working, we attracted the attention of a teenage kid, Amado, who lived in his grandmother's house along the waterfront. He offered to help us out and even brought his own hammer, so we put him to work. Before too long he was followed by his siblings and cousins, Jenny, Marieli, Jose,  and Helen. They were all much younger than he, and so just watched, asked questions, touched the fossils, and pulled us away at the slightest chance to show us things on the beach and point out potential fossils they had found. These kids spoke Spanish with an incredibly thick accent and would give the funniest looks of bewilderment, irritance, and exasperation when I asked them to repeat themselves or told them that I didn't understand. When they would repeat themselves, it would just be a louder rendition of the slurred-together phrase given with a huge roll of the eyes. Because of this, the names given are just my best guesses at what they said. Amado was an impressive worker and was very careful not to damage anything that could be a bone. However, he swung his hammer like a madman, bringing it alarmingly close to our faces/hands/feet and spraying rock-shrapnel everywhere. His cohorts were incredibly cute, if also distracting, and I know that I appreciated their presence.

Amado in full battle armor

As we were leaving, Aaron started to pay Amado for his help and the kid told us that if we were going to come back, he'd rather be payed with a cell phone. Almost everyone here does pay-as-you-go phones, so getting one for him won't be hard at all for us. But since Pina is so isolated, it would take Amado a full day, and a fair amount of money, to go get one himself. We'll more than likely be returning next week to continue working on the dolphin skull, so we gave him a few dollars for now and promised the cell phone for later.

For the last hour of our visit to Pina, we explored some new stretches of beach just to see what might be out there, and when we discovered only true sand beaches with no fossils to be seen, we were forced to lounge, eat lunch in the sun, and I even went for a little swim. The horror of it all! The surf was pretty strong, so I didn't chance going out very far, but I floated around and let myself get carried by the waves for a while. It felt so refreshing after digging for hours and getting sprayed with muck. It's such a bummer that the Panama City beaches are covered in trash and the waters are filled with sewage!

We had such a long day in Pina that we all but entirely missed our volleyball game at 6:00 pm at STRI. Our team had two matches that day, though, due to last week's bye, so we were still able to play in the second game and I got to start! There was an hour and a half or so between the two games, which gave us plenty of time to warm up and, perhaps more importantly, relax with a few beers. We may have taken the relaxing a little too far, as evidenced by our utter destruction in the second game. We all played reasonably well, but our teamwork left something to be desired and we were ultimately brought down by being out of position and not communicating with one another. Far too many times the ball touched down on our side due to everyone assuming someone else would get it. Regardless, I really enjoyed myself. Volleyball Fridays are turning out to be one of my favorite things here. I hardly had the energy to make dinner by the time I got home and passed out the second my head hit my pillow.