Tiputini: My real-life version of Amazon Trail

So I know everyone remembers those incredibly fun computer "trail" games of the 1990s. My sisters and I practically grew up playing Yukon Trail, Oregon Trail, and Amazon Trail. I loved playing them because I felt like I was really floating down the Amazon River or panning for gold in Alaska. After going to the Amazon, I've realized that the Amazon Trail video game totally formed my entire view of Amazon. Although its been my dream to go to the Amazon since my elementary school did a presentation on it when I was like seven, I kept thinking about the scary Amazonian animals like barracudas, piranhas, boa constrictors and pumas that are in that game. Even while I was stepping onto the canoe that would take us down the Napo River, one of the largest rivers in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I couldn’t help shake the feeling that somehow a huge piranha would jump out of the water and bite me in the face, which would force me to take a chance with the jungle herbs that I happened to pick up at the last trading post.



But really, that canoe trip was one of the most unreal experiences I've had in Ecuador. It blew my mind to think of how much life was teeming in the forest beyond the bank of the river...or even within the river itself. The river itself was actually pretty murky...not from pollution but because it has a ton of inorganic material from erosion of the forest floor. The trees along the river were so dense that they often looked like they were falling in. One type of tree literally grows sideways out of a bank over the river. It developed roots on the bottom part of its trunk to take up water from the river. I loved sitting and listening to the sound of the forest as well. You could hear thousands of birds, bugs, and monkeys (especially howler monkeys) all within a mile of our camp. Ecosystems like this one are incredible not just because they have lots of cool plants and animals though. They are amazing (to me at least...) because they are made up of so many different parts that are seamlessly woven together.

The first experiment we performed while we were there was with (and I know this is disgusting) some dog poop that our professor brought with him from Quito. We were all totally grossed out by the smell at first (and for good reason), and a lot of us were confused about what he was expecting us to see when we put it down on the forest floor. The group I was with divided it up in two spots about 5 meters from each other...one in the sunlight and the other in the shade. We took observations every ten minutes for about an hour...and came up with some crazy results. Within seconds of putting this stuff on the floor, tons of insects started flocking to it. There were dung beetles with incredibly colorful metallic exoskeletons and gigantic flying ants that were fighting for a piece of the stuff. By the end of our observations, the poop was completely gone in both sections. Once we collaborated our data, we found that there were seven species of bugs at the sunlit section and seven completely different species of bugs at the other section. Within 5 meters of each other! I don't think I've seen fourteen different species of insects in all of Chicago let alone within 5 square meters. Things like that just blow my mind about the rainforest. I wish that everyone in the world could come down for just a day and physically see what it is we are destroying. The section of rainforest I was in is one of the most biodiverse in the world. Its part of a very famous national park in Ecuador called Yasuni National Park. Recently, there has been a great deal of press because Ecuador (i.e. Rafael Correa)  is trying to protect it from oil interests while continuing to sell it to oil companies. He's quite a sly politician...I should probably write an entire post about how crazy he is.

(This is a crazy bird that we saw while we were canoeing in this small lagoon in the forest. You can't see its wings right now, but they have small hooks so the birds can grab onto branches. Evolutionarily, they are closely related to a particular prehistoric reptile with a similar adaptation) 

Whenever our group went out into the forest, we were required to have one of the National Park guides with us. The guides were some of the most incredible people I have ever met. Like ever. One of the guides was an indigenous man named Meyer, and he was the guide with us during the dung experiment. His knowledge of the rainforest was astounding...it made me feel self-concious about my vision, because he (like a 65 year old man) could see a pointed arrow frog in the underbrush from like 3 meters away, while I tripped over tree roots for half the hike. Once, he looked at a grasshopper on a large leaf about a meter away and knew not only its age and sex, but also where it made its home. I was also honored when he made these beautiful bracelets for me and my friend Daniela from palm tree threads located nearby. It was amazing to even watch him work on them! His hands moved so quickly and he was done within a few minutes. Seeing how much he loved the forests and all the stories it has within it was so refreshing. He had a story or legend to go along with almost everything we passed throughout our hike. We saw community spiders (who team up to make gigantic webs), ants that tasted like lemon, and these gigantic army ants that can take down almost any predator that messes with them. All of these things were particularly startling for me, considering I've lived most of my life in a place where often my closest interaction with nature is seeing a flock of pigeons battling for a scrap of bread in a parking lot.

Another thing I noticed while walking through the forest was how lethal most things in the forest really are. There were strangling vines (that choke the trees they grow on), gigantic, poisonous spiders (just look up a picture of the Banana Spider, we ran into that one) , bullet ants (they are named that way because their bite literally feels like a bullet), and large cats (pumas and jaguars) that can tear their prey to pieces. Even the harmless looking lemon ants eliminated trees that competed with "their" trees by secreting this crazy acid into the soil. There have been millennia of natural pressures placed on these plants and animals that forced them to become excellent competitors. These conditions reinforce the idea that every decomposing leaf, every drop of water, every pile of dung is a precious resource that is worth fighting for. The plants and animals that waste these resources end up losing in the evolutionary battle. I really wonder how our society came to forget that we are also part of this interconnected cycle. Dung, which is seen as such an incredibly precious resource here, is seen as a dangerous waste that we want to keep as far away from us as possible. The resources we are abusing right now are intrinsically tied to our own survival as a species.

Anywho, back to some more specifics about the trip. There were several particularly cool things that we did during out time in Tiputini that I want to cover. The first of which is the night hike that we went on with our professors through the forest. The second is the awesome hike where I saw a tapir and had my eardrums blasted out by a howler monkey. The third is when a herd of like 23 woolly monkeys descended on this one tree by our campsite. The forth is our flotada down the Tiputini River. And finally, the caiman watching nighttime canoe trip. I'll most likely break this up into another blog as well, because I'm tired of people making fun of me for being so behind...

The night hike was so ridiculously cool. I was absolutely terrified at first because I know that there are so many scary animals that come out to play during the nighttime. Actually, just a few seconds after we started walking, my friend Julia yelled and swiped something off my back really quickly...and I'm glad she did because it was a bullet ant. These things have such a potent venom that the most effective way to save yourself from a bite is to have someone give you an electric shock. So obviously I was a bit wary of the situation from the get go. It was so amazing to walk around there at night though. The darkness is so thick that without a flashlight I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. The trees are all so close together that its impossible for much starlight or moonlight to get in. There was so much noise though! The bugs and birds were almost deafening because we were trying to be as silent as possible. We saw so many amazing bugs during that night hike though. I thought that I would be super freaked out about the spiders here because I've had some serious arachnophobia issues for most of my life...but these things were so big that I didn't even think of them as spiders anymore. Most of the ones we saw were about the size of my face, super hairy, and had really vivid warning colors (which I paid attention to...). Once we saw one literally come out of this cave it had burrowed into the ground just to check us out. We saw scorpions, lizards with incredible camouflage skills, snakes, and (my favorite) a butterfly with spots that looked like owl eyes.

Super cool hidden lizard! 

Ok, so I think I'm going to finish this blog post for now...but I will definitely continue with the rest of my stories in my next blog!