 
|
|
|
| Hunting for Caterpillars in La Selva |
| Explore the fascinating world of caterpillars: Diner or dinner? |
     
|
|
On The Expedition Assisting members of Dr. Lee Dyer's research team, you'll switch between collecting caterpillar species and their host plants; labeling and observing them back at the lab; and chemically analyzing plant and caterpillar toxins. Dyer and his staff will teach you all these tasks, giving you the opportunity to learn about ecological dynamics at their most intimate level. In your free time, you might play your Costa Rican hosts in a lively game of soccer or volleyball, or take a walk and see some of the area's other inhabitants - such as monkeys, sloths, parrots, and peccaries. Meals and Accommodations You'll split your time between the comfortable and contemporary La Selva Biological Station and the more rustic Tirimbina Rainforest Center. At La Selva, you'll enjoy typical Latin American meals, bunk beds, electricity, and hot showers at a modern research facility, complete with free internet access and washers and dryers. You may have the opportunity to meet other researchers based at the station and to learn about a variety of exciting projects. Tirimbina is a smaller and more private research center, with solar powered cabins deep within the forest. Here the team will bond over shared cooking duties and dips in a nearby swimming hole during free time. More Information Just can't get enough of those caterpillars? Hundreds of different species await you at Dr. Dyer's Ecuador, Arizona, and New Orleans research sites, where data will be compared with that from Costa Rica to determine the effects of climate change on species in different areas of the world. You can also join Dyer's Behind the Scenes project in his lab at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where you can help study the effects of severe weather events like 2005's Hurricane Katrina on caterpillars and their parasites. 
|
Details
|
Booking Terms & Conditions |
|
Research Summary La Selva Biological Station and Tirimbina Rainforest Center, Costa Rica — Caterpillars have developed a bizarre armory of defenses to protect themselves from both predators and parasites. Some eat and then use plant toxins to keep parasites off; others bungee-jump out of harm's way. Understanding why one caterpillar is a diner and the other is dinner is an important part of conserving forests and other habitats. Working in one of the world's richest tropical rainforests, you can help sort out the tangle of defense and offense in Costa Rica. Meet the Scientists  Dr. Lee Dyer Tulane University On this project, we spend most of our time collecting and rearing caterpillars. This means that we will spend a lot of time in the forest, hiking the trail system, searching off trail, and enjoying the views. The best part about working in our forests is, of course, that we are working in super diverse habitat and will see a lot more than caterpillars and plants. I look forward to seeing you down in the tropics. Lee Dyer, Ph.D., is an ecologist who has worked with a variety of organisms in the tropics for the past 10 years and in temperate areas for the past 14 years. He received a B.S. in Biochemistry and English from the University of California at Santa Barbara. After four years of research on the effects of water diversions on the Mono Lake ecosystem, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he received a Ph.D. in ecology. His thesis work examined interactions between plants, herbivores, and their natural enemies and included work in Costa Rica, Colorado, and California. Dyer was a professor for 5 years at Mesa State College in Colorado where he established the Western Colorado Center for Tropical Research and received the distinguished faculty scholar award. As of January 2001, Dyer is a faculty member in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Tulane University. Dyer will be in charge of all aspects of the project, and his specialties relevant to the project are statistical modeling, community ecology, caterpillar natural history, and basic natural products chemistry. |
Details
|
|
About the Research Area Costa Rica is a peaceful democratic republic in Central America, directly north of Panama and south of Nicaragua. The country is split by a ridge of mountains, with four distinct cordilleras or mountain ranges and several dozen volcanoes, seven of which are still active. Biodiversity is very high in Costa Rica and habitat types are also quite varied, including tropical dry forests, lowland wet forests, montane rainforests, and alpine vegetation. La Selva and Tirimbina are located in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica near the town of Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui in Heredia province. The area is at the confluence of two rivers, Rio Sarapiqui and Rio Puerto Viejo. La Selva is composed of primary forest, secondary forest, and abandoned plantations. Tirimbina is just 840 acres in area but has been declared a Costa Rican National Wildlife Refuge and has primary and secondary forest as well as abandoned pasture and cacao plantations. Like the rest of Costa Rica, biological diversity is very high at the reserves. This diversity includes thousands of species of insects, over 2,000 species of plants, and hundreds of species of birds and mammals. During a typical walk in the area, a visitor will see peccaries, coatis, sloths, monkeys, toucans, parrots, and at least a dozen species of butterflies. The lucky visitor may see an ocelot, jaguar, or other cat species in the forest. The 300 species of caterpillars with which the project will work are only a fraction of the estimated 5,000 species that occur at La Selva (about 4,500 moth species and 500 butterfly species). Find out more |
Fact Sheet
|
|
Locations shown are approximate.
|