Sabado

Hi everyone,

Yessica, no entiendo que cosa te confunde, las fotos de cual dia....me muestras el lunes?

This is the poster I told you about, showing that real men don’t eat turtle eggs. It’s amusing to see the image of the “manlier” man in the front pointing to the “less manly” man eating the turtles’ eggs.

Today was our last day in the field. We took part in the vegetation study that some of the scientists are doing down here. The goal is to measure the long-term health and changes of the mangrove plants in response to changing conditions due to increased human activity, climate, etc. First we had to put sticks in the ground to measure 30 meters to the E,N,W, and S around a center point. Well, these dead sticks had armies of termites on them. Even though I have taken a field entomology class and held a Madagascar hissing cockroach, I was pretty grossed out by termites crawling all over my hand. Some even bit me. There are termite mounds three times the size of my head, growing on the trees. The termites are really important to decaying dead logs to recycle the nutrients here. It is interesting to note that the only tree that they will protect and not attack is the tree that hosts their mound. You can see them crawling on the log below.




While other teams took various measurements of the trees, Ms. Krol and I were making tallies of canopy cover in several places facing in all directions. It was very tedious, but I just hope the data is useful. Others hung leaf litter boxes (see below) to catch falling leaves. If more leaves fall than usual, this may indicate an increase in soil salinity due to drought, too much pumping of fresh water, or other reasons.




I also have a picture of a hole in the mangrove mud, dug by a crab. These burrows actually provide an important service by aerating (getting oxygen into) the soil for the plants.






Next is a picture of one of the special adaptations the white mangrove plant has to living in such low-oxygen soil: they are called pneumatophores and they are little root parts that stick up from the ground into the air to capture oxygen.



This afternoon I worked more with Marco on the murals. I asked him if he went to his planet last night and he said that everyone there says hello. He named the mural “La Luna Sandía Salió Otro Día” (the watermelon moon came out another day). When we were done, I watched a bee come and try to pollinate our colorful crocodile!

I wanted to make sure I also took some pictures of a key location here. This picture below is where the mangrove ends. The man-made structure is a restaurant of a squatter who refuses to move away from this important ecological location between the mangrove (foreground) and the sea (background). Naturally the mangrove should have an outlet to the sea at least once a year when a major storm comes, to flush out fish that were born in the mangrove, flush out pollutants, and allow reef fishes to enter the mangrove to spawn. There shouldn’t be this road across the inlet (between the water and the restaurant) for people to drive on.

Facing the opposite direction from the previous picture, we are looking into the mangrove (where all those birds, etc. are) instead of into the sea. You can see the bridge that was washed out with the last hurricane. The passageway is much narrower than even when I got here a week ago, because people that are building houses on the beach (also illegal) are illegally dumping fill into the mangrove. I showed a picture of this dumping a few days ago. They are further closing off the mangrove to sea access. The crocodiles can get out and walk when they need to, but not the fishes!




In general, this town is at a crossroads, where it can decide

a) to organize the encroaching tourism and development in a way that allows them to enforce the many environmental laws that are actually pretty progressive, or
b) they can be totally reshaped and lose this mangrove.

The path that La Manzanilla takes will quickly take a turn one way or the other in the next few years. I hope to keep an eye out and stay connected.