De las sombras de las mantañas

About 16 hours from boarding a flight to Cusco. Arequipa, despite an unpleasant bacterial episode, has been good to me. This is a beautiful, friendly city.

I'm always a little lost, at first, in this kind of classical Spanish downtown. Everything begins looking the same. My first morning here I got lost on my run. The narrow streets and unbroken wall of buildings (edificios seems perfect here) obscure even nearby landmarks, and despite being laid out in almost a perfect grid, I seem to have a knack for finding the discontinuities.

Still, you get used to it. And every now and then, a street is just wide enough, and oriented just so, to give you a breathtaking view of the mountains hanging over it all.

I've had great company here. My host family, Rafael and Beatrice, were just as kind and gracious as you could ever imagine.

It was tremendous fun studying spanish with some fun folks from around the world.

Here's a picture from on top of the monastery next to where I'm staying:

And here's a bunny from the market, to round things out.

Hello Peru, so long Lima

Lima in winter always feels dystopic. I think its the fog. At night, smoldering in the orange of sodium lights, it reminds me of that opening panorama in Blade Runner. I half expect flames to belch out the tops of skyscrapers. 

In the daylight, you can see the dust, too -- a dull orange dust that must blow in off the dry foothills. It tints everything that doesn't move too much, like the geometric progression of whitewashed terra cotta buildings, and the massive hulks of Soviet-built helicopters decaying on the airport tarmac. More Mad Max than Blade Runner. But a weird, urban version, the fog and haze and dust making a confusingly somber backdrop to the frenetic, honking, LED-spangled bustle of the street. 

After I made it through immigration control (pro tip: Argo, with its excruciating three-tiered passport-wrinkling climax, is not the ideal in-flight movie for international travel) I pushed the button at customs and got the green light, mercifully avoiding having to explain the cornucopia of scientific and photographic equipment to anyone in a uniform. Then I got to wander around for half an hour or so reflecting on the importance of clarity and precision in prearranged meetups in the absence of functional cell phones. 

Eventually, I made it to my eleventh-floor hotel room (suite!) and the compelling view above. A few hours sleep, a shower, breakfast, and lots of manuscript revision later and I said hello once more to Señor Alarcón (having learned my lesson about precision) and was back in the taxi al aeropuerto. 

Maybe someday I'll get to enjoy Lima. So far it's been mostly a dreary way station, some place I'm excited to get to primarily  in order to leave as soon as possible. 

But let me tell you: it's worth it. Peru is awesome. So far, Arequipa is brilliant. And we haven't even gotten to the ants. 

Army ants!

Here's Labidus, another under-appreciated army ant. These workers are
guarding a foraging trail.

Ant vs. termite

It seems like the winner of this setup is generally 'ant,' but here's
a cool shot of a termite soldier getting one in for the woodeating
cockroaches, squirting some sticky goo onto the ant. The ant, as best
I can tell, is <i>Acanthostichus</i>, a nifty subterranean army ant in
the subfamily Cerapachynae.

This one didn't end well for Team Termite -- when I came back a few
hours later, the queen was in a giant pile of dead workers at the foot
of the tree.

Post-processing

In between the endless gut dissections, one of the things I've been
learning a lot about this summer is the power of post-processing.

For example, check out this shot of a neat little mantis that my
friend Gabe found. The first image is straight from the camera; the
second, after about 5 minutes of tweaking. To get the second image, I
retouched to get rid of sensor dust spots, tweaked the color
saturation and white balance, and bumped contrast and exposure just a
bit. The difference is startling!

As something of a bonus, I'm finding that this has really focused my
attention on the things you _can't_ change in the 'darkroom;' namely,
focus and composition. Aperture (Apple's photo program) makes it easy
to get rid of sensor dust, but can't recover the end of the mantis's
left antenna, or bring the focal plane forward a mm to where it really
should be. Those imperfections will stay in this image, and
recognizing that is making me a (marginally!) better photographer.

Jungle lesson #1032

Don't leave chocolate half eaten while you get distracted looking for
ants. When you think about it again, a cursory inspection in the
failing evening light may not reveal the hundreds of tiny red ants
enjoying your dessert, which will sting your unsuspecting tongue
enthusiastically on their way down.

Surface tension, part 2

And now for something a bit more abstract. This little Cephalotes
spinosus worker landed feet up in the dissection dish, holding a globe
of water in her legs. This doesn't happen often -- I've dissected more
than a thousand ants so far this summer, and never seen it!

Capturing with the camera what I saw with my eyes was pretty
challenging -- any flash at all washed out the beautiful reflective
colors on the water's surface. For photo geeks, this was taken
handheld with natural light at about 2X on a Canon 20D with 65mm MP-E
macro, at 1/60 sec, f6.3, and ISO 1600.

Yet another spider

And here's another one!

Another spider

Despite my visceral fear of spiders, they make great subjects.
Especially cute little jumping spiders, wrapped up in silk blankets,
waiting for their next houseguest...

Bailing out

We had a huge thunderstorm the other day. The lab flooded, but just a
bit! But we weren't the only ones affected -- these wasps appear to
have gotten some water in the nest. Lacking buckets, they bail it out
with their crops. I just love the refracted image in this droplet!

Lunch

Busy time in the jungle. Here's a neat spider!

This is not an ant

It's actually an ant-mimicking staphylinid beetle! But it sure had me
fooled -- it took an email to a friend of mine to track it down. It
must take some kind of selection pressure to make a beetle look enough
like an ant to fool a wannabe entomologist with a stereoscope! This
little critter turned up in my aspirator after catching some army
ants, along with an also-but-not-quite-as-impressive ant-mimicking
spider.

The jungle is crazy: it's crazier the longer you look, crazier the
smaller you go, crazy all the way down...

Fungus

One thing about the jungle: everything grows fungus.

Sometimes, it's fluffy white stuff growing on your glasses case.

Sometimes, it's zombie fungus that grows into your head, takes over
your brain, and forces your undead body to grab onto a leaf while it
grows a giant mushroom out of your back to infect your nestmates.

For whatever reason, this particular section of the trail had a
preponderance of the latter, including a bunch of unfortunate
Camponotus workers decorating the undersides of leaves, and one
exceedingly encrusted moth.

Fortunately, the fungi in my cabin only seem to be interested in my
inanimate belongings. At least so far...

Wasps with wax

Here's a fun little bit of natural history: these wasps have built
their paper nest underneath a big leaf, and are now building a sort of
wax floor underneath the nest. I have no idea why -- neither does the
wasp guy who's sharing our lab space! -- but it's pretty cool.

This particular plant seems to be perfect for little paper wasps, as
there are no fewer than four nests hanging under various leaves. This
can also make photographing them a challenge -- not only do I have to
worry about the wasp nest three inches from the front of my lens, I
have to worry about the nest in the leaf right next to my head!

More orthopterans

They're just so cute!

Surface tension

The world behaves a little differently at the scale of ants. For
instance: never having to look around for a bucket! This Ectatomma
worker is bringing some delicious ant bait back to the nest to share
with her sisters.

Los tres amigos

We've been hard at work catching ants! In the jungle, this can be both
trivial and an enormous challenge: ants are absolutely everywhere, so
if you're not picky, you hardly have to do more than open your
collection tube; on the other hand, if you want several colonies of
the same species, you may find yourself spending a lot of time chasing
ants through the foliage.

Here's a fun shot of some turtle ants, <i>Cephalotes atratus</i>,
tending membracid leafhoppers. <i>Cephalotes</i>, the genus on which
my research is focused, are a bit of a mystery -- most of the time,
they don't really seem to be doing anything more than walking around
and maybe licking a leaf every now and then. Consequently, they're
something of a challenge for the behavioral ecologist! <i>C. atratus</
i> is a rare and delightful exception. These fabulously spiky ants are
not only conspicuous (almost an inch long!) and abundant, they can
often be found 'farming' other insects for their sugary secretions.
These membracids may even be mimicking their spiky black farmers!

Macchu Picchu

A brief episode of internet connectivity -- the satellites must be
behaving today!

Here are a few shots from our hike to/in Macchu Picchu -- the city at
sunrise, a view of the main courtyard bathed in fog, and a shot of
Lina gazing out across the valley from inside the ruins.

Despite being absolutely overrun by tourists, this city is one of the
most incredible things I've ever seen in my life. The Incas were
incredible -- their stonework, in hard granite on the bleeding edge of
the void, is absolutely mind-boggling. Staggering. What would this
civilization have looked like had it not been cut off in its infancy
by invaders from Europe?

We had the good fortune to get to Macchu Picchu by way of a short
2-day hike through the high mountains (a sort of unofficial Inca
Trail), and were lucky enough to be accompanied by the lovely Jai and
Kansa, as well as our incredible guide, Ruben. SAS Travel in Cusco
puts together a really fantastic trip if you're in the market. J & K,
if you're reading this, I got some great photos, and will share them
all when I have a decent connection again. Hope you're enjoying Rio!

The jungle

The beer is warm, the bugs are good, and the internet is bad.

Why leave?

The air

is much thinner at 3000 meters. Miraculously, flights happened, rides caught, customs cleared, and now Lina and I are spending a few hours acclimating to the altitude before starting a 3 day hike to Macchu Picchu EARLY tomorrow morning.

 

Flying into Cusco can be an adventure -- the city is built in a relatively small valley amongst some relatively steep mountains, and the pilot has to do some real maneuvring to get the plane down and lined up. On the way out, the descent was brilliant -- we weaved in and out of enormous, fluffy clouds that hovered just over the valley, making tight banking turns to quickly drop altitude. Pretty fun stuff.