A Trip Down Memory Lane: It's Raining Sloths in Panama

Streamlined to reduce drag encountered whilst divebombing

Right after graduating from high school, I spent six months in Panama interning with the environmental organization Earth Train (website here). The time that I spent in Panama was incredibly formative for me and helped crystalize my aspirations to become a biologist while at the same time sparking off a fascination with the rainforest that has stuck with me ever since. Having grown up in a small town in rural Colorado, the rainforests of Panama were wildly fantastic and alien to me--and I loved every second of my experiences in them.

Below is a piece that I wrote sometime in the middle of my six-month internship--the initial novelty of the rainforest had worn off and my life was beginning to settle into a predictable rhythm. True to form though, the rainforest still had a few tricks up its sleeve, as the following piece elucidates:

It’s raining sloths in the jungle. I was walking down the path to the eating area early in the morning on Saturday, which runs parallel to a small stream, when suddenly I heard a commotion above me. It isn’t entirely uncommon for branches of trees that penetrate the uppermost sections of the canopy to suddenly fall with a startling crack and snap of breaking branches. So imagine my surprise when, with my eyes still full of sleep, I looked up to see a blob of brown attached to a branch plunge unceremoniously 40 feet into the stream, roughly ten feet to my right. Not quite trusting my sleepy eyes, I hesitantly went to go investigate what being had disturbed my morning walk. Slowly, being wary of snakes and other poison denizens of dead leaves, I approached the stream expecting at any moment a terrified and badly hurt monkey to jump out at me. Fortunately, my wildest dreams were proven to be unfounded and I was instead greeted with the sight of an immensely bewildered looking three-toed sloth. He was looking at the branch he was still grasping with a hint of betrayal in his sleepy eyes. He seemed to pay me no heed as he tried to wrap his mind around why exactly his back was so sore and he suddenly heard water. Given enough time he would have almost certainly been ruefully contemplating the loss of one of his most potent defenses: the symbiotic cynobacteria that lives in his fur that helps camouflage the sloth against predators such as eagles and jaguars. It’s too bad that the bacteria can do nothing for treacherous branches, however.

Fortunately, (unfortunately?) it is very rare for it to rain sloths in the jungle and the rest of the week was spent doing something much more down to earth, gardening. Nathan taught us how to transplant ferns and we spent much of Sunday tending to the garden that Earth Train has lovingly helped create. It’s dirty, but very rewarding work.

In many ways, those two experiences really define a prolonged stay in the tropical rainforest. Long hours of gratifying observation and work punctuated by fantastic experiences that couldn’t happen anywhere else. It is a slow, building process. One that often leaves you wondering what the hell you’re exactly doing, but then never fails to disappoint with either dive-bombing sloths or the simple satisfaction gained from noticing some new thread of the tapestry that helps further your understanding of the amazing ecosystem that surrounds you.

What a Course on the Biology of Fungi Has Taught Me

There is one simple truth that I will always remember about fungi as a result of having taken a course on the biology of fungi: fungi are literally everywhere and do everything. Unfortunately, we, as a society, aren't so keen on fungi for whatever reason and so we often forget that fungi even exist. Our dispositions toward this entire kingdom of life fluctuate wildly from indifference to revulsion with the mood of the moment usually depending on how recently we have come in contact with a particularly "disgusting" mold or mildew. As many mycological advocates explain, we, as a society have a deep seated “fungiphobia” that prevents us from truly understanding the incredibly diverse and beautiful Kingdom Fungi. The fact that fungi have their very own kingdom that includes such disparate life-forms such as endomycorrhizal glomeromyctes and beetle-obligate ascomycetes is something that is lost on most people—myself included until I took this course. To put it in more familiar terms, the Kingdom Animalia includes organisms from sponges to elephants. The genetic and evolutionary distance between these two types of organisms is enormous, and it is possible to see the same kind of diversity and depth within the Kingdom Fungi to an even greater extent. The sheer diversity of even such fundamental aspects of biology such as life-cycles and mating systems in Kingdom Fungi is without rival—fungi do things with sexual reproduction that even the most jaded Japanese porn fetishist has never dreamt of. This incredible diversity is a driving force behind fungi's phenomenal ability to colonize literally any part of the planet. I will remember all of these things, and more, as my hair turns grey and my ever weakening immune system slowly gives way to a fungal infection that rapidly spreads throughout my body before establishing itself in my brain. As I slowly descend into madness and eventual death, I will remember that I lived in a world run by fungi. It was their ubiquity that allowed for me to breathe in the fatal spore—after all, there were millions of spores in the air that day—on that typical day when I was close to 50. And so then at the end of it all, I would close my eyes and realize my true purpose in life: food for the almighty fungi.