810-Laucastar Fanning, Saturday, September 6,1986
Costa Rica Expedition Faces Frogs, Fog And Knee-Deep Mud
WASHINGTON - An in
ternational scientific team has just
reported on a waterlogged month
of slogging along a machete-cut
trail in a Costa Rican jungle, often
knee-deep in mud, searching for
new facts about rare plants and
animals.
The 45 American, British, and
Costa Rican scientists were ex
ploring the only swath of protected
tropical forest in Central America
that stretches from near sea level
to 9,500 feet from steamy rain
forest to cool, mossy cloud forest
on the upper slopes of a dormant
volcano.
From bottom to top, they con
ducted the first full-scale scientific
exploration of the narrow, 21-mile
long stretch of land, called an
“altitudinal transect,” last spring.
Within it live at least 30 previously
unknown species of plants and
animals, and more varieties of
trees than grow in the United
States and Canada combined.
“I saw things I’d never seen
before. I climbed every tree I
could,” says David Good, assistant
curator of the Museum of Ver
tebrate Zoology at the University
of California, Berkeley.
Numerous Frogs, Snakes
Good and his fellow her
petologists found 93 species of
reptiles and amphibians, including
42 kinds of frogs and 27 kinds of
frog-eating snakes.
At 5,940 feet, Good saw a rare
giant flying frog, with big webs
between its fingers and toes that
enable it to glide like a parachute.
Only a couple had ever been found
before. “We saw two more, about
doubling the number of
specimens,” he says.
Good also found six tiny
salamanders with the Latin name
of Nototriton richardi. Only 15 or 20
of them had been seen previously.
“It’s not much to look at,” he says,
%w
&UACIC
&EP
iBUOW
BLUE
LT 6RE Y
AQCNBRY: THfSTS ft SPORT
OFSHOOTTH6 W/TH ft BOW
fiHP ftRROW, ms ORB OP
MftN'S OLPBSTWBftftORS.
PREHISTORIC MBHMHTBO
with Bows pro arrows
MORB THRN QOOOVBORS
AGO. TODAY 7HB BOW
SCRUBS CH/BFLYftS P
SPORTTHO OJBftpOHPOR
THROB T SHOOT/R6 RHP
HUHT/HG,
“but it’s extremely interesting in
evolutionary terms.”
The scientists had set out to
document the natural progression
of wildlife from lower to higher
elevations, noting particularly at
what altitude some species
disappear and others arise, how
they divide up resources, and how
they survive
Biologist David P. Janos of the
University of Miami collected
fungi at seven different elevations.
“No one has ever catalogued
species of fungi over an elevational
transect in the tropics,” he
reports. He came back with 300
vials of spores. “It was more ex
tensive collecting than I dreamed
possible,” he says.
The expedition, supported by the
National Geographic Society, was
sponsored by the Organization for
Tropical Studies, a consortium of
39 universities and research in
stitutions based at Duke Univer
sity.
Permanent Protection
While the scientists were in the
field, the president of Costa Rica
signed a decree permanently
protecting the last piece of this
tropical-forest swath. It extends
mountaintop Braulio Carrillo
National Park down to the con
sortium’s La Selva Biological
Station.
Costa Rica has both one of the
world’s worst records for tropical
forest destruction about 75
percent is gone and one of the
best records for forest protection,
exceeding the international
standard of 10 percent of a nation’s
territory.
“This exploratory mission was
extremely successful in in
troducing scientists to this whole
new altitudinal transect,” says
expedition leader Gary Hartshorn
of the Tropical Science Center in
Costa Rica. The major disap-
PEACH
GREEK!
LTBROWM
LT.BLUE
LT. GREENi
6 .
7.
6.
9.
10.
pointment, he says, was not
sighting any large mammals such
as jaguars or pumas.
The scientists identified a “life
zone” between about 3,900 and
4,900 feet as the richest in numbers
and mixtures of species, says the
consortium’s executive director, _
Donald E. Stone, a botanist at
Duke. Future field research will
concentrate on this transition zone,
where the most striking changes
occur among plants and animals.
The expedition into the spec
tacular forest of waterfalls and
gorges was as strenuous as it was
scientifically successful.
Torrential downpours nearly every
day brought twice as much rain as
was normal for April. The freshly
cut trail was so steep and slippery
in places that the scientists had to
crawl up it. In spots, they had to
crawl on their bellies in the mud
under large trees fallen across the
path.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been
dirtier,’’ says Gary Braasch, who
photographed the newly preserved
section for the Nature Con
servancy, one of several in
ternational organizations that
helped finance the purchase of the
land.
At one point, Hartshorn reports,
his assistant got both feet stuck in
the deep mud and had to be pulled
out. At the 6,600-foot camp, the fog
was so thick that one scientist
couldn’t find his tent one night.
David Good says he started out
having to cross a river by balan
cing on a narrow board, carrying a
heavy backpack. At the 4,950-foot
camp, he slept on a platform
suspended from poles, pulling
moss several inches thick off the
trees to make a soft bed. Before
retiring, he picked salamanders
out of the moss.
Despite mud and rain, “there
was a tremendous sense of ex-
bS
Bund col
0
citement and discovery,” says grasshoppers, including an
ecologist Beth Braker of Colorado irisdescent green and yellow one
College. She found 28 species of that may represent a new genus.
All eyes, this tree frog lives at an elevation of 2,300 feet in a
newly-protected tropical forest in Costa Rica. It is among 42
species of frogs found during a scientific expedition into the
region, the only permanently preserved forest in Central
America that stretches from near sea level to 9,500 feet.
4F 'n?"'*
\
r *
'< s&mil % ~
/e*h,
' •> f
■ 3