A day in the life of a field biologist is not centered around the typical 9-5 work day of an office professional. Indeed, our workflow typically involves long days in the field starting, in some cases, before the sun rises and ends after it has set in the evening. As student biologists, many of us have experienced the atypical work day in the field where time spent working is strongly linked to your organism of interest. Therefore, one important aspects of research is choosing a topic that brings enough motivation to get you out of bed at 5:00 AM consecutively. For me, this topic has always been birds.

Much of my prior research has involved getting up at early pre-dawn hours in order to catch the hub of bird activity just as the sun begins to rise. This field course was no exception. At times I awoke early to start data collection for our projects and other times, it was completely voluntarily in the hopes of spotting some amazing neotropical birds just for fun. Panama presents an excellent opportunity for ornithologists and bird enthusiasts alike, and being stationed in Gamboa for a few weeks truly presented us with numerous excellent opportunities to spot some birds. On our first full morning before class started, Isle and I decided to get up at 5:00 AM to hike as far into Pipeline trail as possible before breakfast started at 7. We met in the darkened hallway with binoculars ready and set off for a long walk to the trail entrance. It was still dark for most of the hike, but we were able to hear tinamous, toucans, and some motmots concealed from sight within the dense foliage. Unfortunately, we had to turn around to get back in time for breakfast, but this was far from our last chance at spotting some amazing avifauna in Panama. In fact, later that afternoon we heard the chirping call of a yellow-throated toucan which was perched directly outside the window of our classroom at Gamboa! Ilse made a few jokes about not having to wake up at the crack of dawn to see such cool wildlife anymore.

BCI was another amazing birding opportunity. Our group for the forestry project decided to focus on callback and response of three species of antbirds and antshrikes present on the island, led by the expertise of Janene. Again, our days started early in order to catch the birds at their peak activity. Throughout the project and data collection we were able to see some amazing birds that have always been on my bucket list including a red-capped manakin and a spectacled owl! Throughout our weeks in the canal zone we saw collared aracaris, more toucans, hundreds of tanagers, and pauraques (a personal favorite). On Coiba Ilse and I spotted the endemic Coiba spinetail (a type of ovenbird) during our trip to the mangroves! Later that night we fell asleep to the harsh chuuuuurip calls of the nightjars in the fields surrounding our tents.

Feb 1, 2020

Coiba is one of those rare places on this earth where you can truly imagine you have stepped back into a time before humans existed. A seemingly unspoiled natural wonder where the silk-like surface of the tide conceals a vibrant underwater world teaming with life: Moray eels, reef sharks, corals, sea turtles, and, if you are super lucky, whale sharks. We just so happened to be one of the lucky few people to swim close enough to a whale shark that we could have reached out and touched it.

After spending 5 days in complete isolation from the rest of the world, it was easy to let our minds drift away from the constant emails, advisory meetings, and deadlines that we had left far behind on the mainland just a few days prior. It all came crashing back onto us once we got back on those wooden boats, sailed back to mainland Panama, and hit the first sign of cell reception after almost 6 full days on the island. Thus, this blog post will detail some of the many amazing experiences we got to share as a group on Coiba as well as some of the challenges we faced upon hitting reality again yesterday afternoon.

Unaware of what to fully expect as we piled on to the bus before the sunrise on Monday morning, we hoped what was packed in our backpacks would be enough. The main concern (at least for me) was keeping things waterproof. This is a main reason why over 3/4^ths of the group decided to ditch their laptops, leaving us with just 3 laptops to complete our projects. It also added to the feeling of complete and total isolation from the mainland and from technology during our time on the island! Although this seemed like a risky move, in hindsight I am happy I left my laptop behind, especially after a sudden and unexpected downpour flooded our tents and left everything slightly damp and smelly for days!

Without the burden of worrying about our water-sensitive devices, we boarded the motorized wooden boats and sailed across the Gulfo de Chiriqui for one very bumpy ride that lasted almost 2 hours. It began to rain once we were out at sea and concealed the epic scenery of forested hills and picturesque islands we were passing. However, the island welcomed us with sunshine breaking through the dense rain clouds and bathing everything in a soft golden light. We had finally reached our home for the next few days!

There are exactly 123 steps up from the beach to the field station at Coibita. The stairs themselves can become very slippery with moss and the dirt surrounding them creates the perfect home for tarantulas and maybe even the occasional curious crocodile. We quickly set up our tents and explored as much as possible before our first evening lecture and subsequent dinner on the island. One of the first challenges we faced was sharing one bathroom among 30+ people. One shower, one toilet. Things quickly got… messy… but there were so many interesting things to discover that no one truly cared. We were told to always have a buddy when venturing around the island at night and to never be on the beach past 6:00PM due to presence of crocs. One way to deal with this slightly uncomfortable situation was to watch cheesy and biologically-inaccurate crocodile movies we had previously downloaded on a laptop one of the more daring students had decided to bring.

The next day we had our first group snorkel around Granito de Oro as some group members had little to no prior snorkeling experience. The groups were able to see reef sharks, sea turtles, all sorts of colorful fish and sea stars, and of course a thriving coral community. We used this time to think of ideas for our group projects which we were told would not be as harshly graded as the previous projects and that the true goal was to experience marine field work. It was easy to let our minds flood with ideas for the projects being surrounded by all sorts of alien-like underwater reef dwellers. Our group in particular decided to look at starfish predation on different coral species. We quickly learned, however, that Coiba’s reefs are dominated by Pocillopora and our methodology evolved into something we would later come to affectionately call “starfish flinging”. The realization that we could no longer look at predation among different coral species forced us to shift our focus to estimating percent damage on Pocillopora caused by crown-of-thorns (Acanthaster planci).

Crown-of-thorns (COT) starfish can exhibit dramatic ‘population explosions’ in many areas around the globe including the Red Sea, Great Barrier Reef, and South Pacific Asia (Babcock et al. 2016). Such population explosions are sentinels of an imbalance within the ecosystem and cause wide-spread coral damage, as the starfish feeds on the live parts of the coral and leaves behind a trail of dead, bleached coral pieces (De Bruin 1972).  Populations seemed to be stable in Coiba, possibly due to presence of plankton-feeding fish which generate a top-down control on the COT. In fact, we ended up having a little trouble finding a sufficient amount of these seemingly illusive starfish in our field sites to make any substantial statistical analysis. Anyway, here is how the ‘starfish flinging’ became a crucial step in our methodology. Accompanied by some STRI’s leading reef scientists and specialists, we divided our teams into 3 groups based on water column depth and swimming abilities and set off for our field stations. Armed with meter sticks, our task was to locate COT, measure its size in centimeters, fling it off of the coral from which it was feeding, and estimate percent damage. Sounds easy, huh? We were warned ahead of time that contact with the COT would cause “pain for years” and were, admittedly, a little intimidated at first to dive down so close to those spiny, coral-destroying invertebrates. The flinging part was fun though, and our group soon found its groove. We were able to find a grand total of 11 COT throughout 3 field sites and determined that the COT prefers coral communities rather than coral reefs possibly due to availability of dynamic niche space.

In between our data collection and analysis, the group experienced many amazing things during our stay in Coiba. Most notably, the aforementioned snorkeling with a whale shark. We were given the opportunity to deep-water snorkel one afternoon in a known whale shark area off the coast of a rocky island. I was slightly optimistic that we would see a whale shark, but a larger part of me knows how rare and illusive these massive creatures can be and I neglected to get my hopes up too high. We plunged into the current once the boats came to a halt and immediately swam with the strong current in search of the gentile giant. All though we saw sea turtles, a sea snake, and many amazing fish, the whale shark was the ultimate prize. Fast forward one hour and half the group had split up to go searching in another part of the current and others had fallen victim to the tiresome current and had long ago retired to the boats. I was actually next in line to flop myself back on a boat when I heard “LOOK UNDER YOU!!” (shout out to Lesty Boi). There, in the murky depths below my flippers was the unmistakable face of a whale shark swimming right towards me. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life! The shark circled our group like a showoff. It allowed us to get so close we could have touched it and it stuck around for a good 3 minutes, allowing for amazing photo and video opportunities from our group. It slipped back down into the depths, concealed by the murky waters, and the last glimpse I saw was of it’s tail. When I popped back into the surface of the water, everyone was uncontrollably smiling and asking if that experience had just actually happened In real life! I could not believe we saw a whale shark and it was certainly one of the highlights of my experience in Coiba.  

Additionally, our group had planned a night snorkel to see some of the bioluminescence. It just so happened to be planned on the one night where a sudden and completely unexpected torrential downpour dumped a biblical amount of rain on our little field site in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Some of the scientists had gone down to the beach just moments prior to scan the inlet and make sure it was free of hungry corcs. It immediately turned from a light drizzle to a flood-like rain and slowly, our hopes of swimming among the bioluminescent organisms during the night snorkel were washed away too. The scientists came back around 20 minutes later using the rain as an excuse to cancel the snorkel event, but I overheard them talking about how they scanned the surface of the water only to have the flashlight beams reflected back in the eyes of a hungry crocodile family lurking just beyond the shallows where we would have been snorkeling. It did give the groups an excuse to start working on our data and presentations which were due the following day. Surely not as fun as a night snorkel, but quite necessary.

Being on Coiba with no connection to the outside world and having only a satellite phone (which “sometimes doesn’t work”) really brought everyone closer together as a group. We developed many inside jokes, stayed up late watching cheesy crocodile attack movies, stargazing, or working on our projects. We shared meals, bathrooms, tents, computers, and (in my case) flippers for snorkeling. We saw a whale shark! It was a week of complete disconnect from the trials of everyday life as a graduate student and a well-needed retreat. I know that visiting Coiba is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us non-marine focused students and a memory I will always treasure.  

Literature Cited

Babcock, R.C., Dambacher, J.M., Morello, E.B., Plagenyi, E.E., et al. 2016. Assessing Different Causes of Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Outbreaks and Appropriate Responses for Management on the Great Barrier Reef. Plos One: 1-20.

De Bruin, G.H.P. 1972. The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Acanthaster planci (Linne’) in Ceylon. Bull. Fish. Rest. Stn 23: 37-41.