It is my first day on the job – my first field day in Costa Rica – and I am stealing cow poop. I shoot frantic glances toward the gravel road as I hurriedly scoop grassy globs of dung into a plastic bag. There’s no way I’m going to be able to explain in English, let alone Spanish, what I’m doing to whoever owns these cows if they suddenly decide to make an appearance. I mentally calculate my escape options, estimating how long it will take me climb over the fence blocking my path to the car. I weigh the benefits of having Hansel stationed in the getaway vehicle, or between myself and the large brown dog that is currently voicing deep-throated opposition to our being on his land. A change in texture toward the runny side of the spectrum, and an increase in the intensity of the odor of mostly digested organic matter passed through multiple stomachs brings me back to the matter at hand. Just how much of this stuff do I actually need? This is not something I included in my grant proposal, which threw around elegant references about using “bait” to lure my dung beetle targets. What I have will have to be enough; I tie the bag shut and launch myself into the car. Day 1, and it is already abundantly clear that I have no idea what I am getting myself into.
Last summer, I conducted my first field season of international ecological research in the cantons of Osa and Golfito, in southern Costa Rica. I trapped hundreds of dung beetles on oil palm plantation fields nestled within a fragmented landscape of tropical rainforest, pasture and people’s homes. My goal: look for ways to begin to mitigate the devastating loss of plant and animal species associated with oil palm plantation expansion in the tropics. Dung beetles are fascinating creatures – heavyweight power-lifters who can roll up to 1,141 times their bodyweight while upside down and backwards, and are capable of carrying away even the largest mammal’s pile of droppings in less than 10 minutes when working in tandem. Dung beetles also provide a host of valuable services to the ecosystems to which they belong; aerating and mixing the soil as they scramble to bury their dung food caches, dispersing the plant seeds embedded within clods of poop, and playing an important role in nutrient cycling by moving balls of animal waste into the earth, where their nutrients can be released to plants’ roots. Plus, trust me when I say that we humans with our sensitive noses would rather have their “bait” buried in soil than on the surface where it was deposited. While dung beetles are really cool, we had more lofty ambitions for this study than just characterizing dung beetle communities. The dung beetles were an access point; what ecologists call a bio-indicator: a sort of canary in the coal mine that could be measured to give insight as to the health of entire ecosystems.
Diversification in the context of my project means planting a mixture of oil palms and other crop plants including banana, cacao, cassava, and laurel (a timber tree species), instead of vast stands composed solely of oil palm. The more Google Scholar searches I racked up in preparation for my project, the more mythic silver-bullet qualities diversification took on in my mind. The team that set up the project – comprised of my advisor, Professor Rodolfo Dirzo, and a rotating cast of graduate students and post-docs – formulated a set of complicated hypotheses: 1) That diversification would mitigate the risk of large-scale outbreaks of disease by breaking up the tantalizing buffet monoculture fields spread before the insects and fungal pathogens that specialize in preying on and infecting oil palm trees. 2) That growing a variety of crops with high market value would protect farmers from the boom and bust price cycles that have characterized many of the commodity crops grown in Latin America. 3) That growing more food crops within oil palm fields would increase food security, helping to make up for the food crops and products that oil palm plantation expansion displaced. And 4), the hypothesis most relevant to my study, that increasing crop plant diversity would increase animal diversity by providing them a wider range of food resources and habitat types. These were the team’s predictions; now I wanted to measure how dung beetle communities were actually responding to diversification efforts on the field plots. And so, my weeks were divided between two sets of sampling sites – Osa Peninsula and Golfito – and my days were broken into sampling periods – morning and evening.
Golfito
Morning: Sunday
I don’t know if Chacaritas is big enough to count as a town. It’s more of a fork in the road, the place where the bus from San José turns off the smoother, straighter Pan-American Highway to the road to Puerto Jimenez. At the crossroads, there are three restaurants, and a gas station with attached convenience store and Bank of Costa Rica ATM. If you drive a few minutes by car down the road toward Puerto Jimenez, you’ll find a school, a small church, an automobile and motorcycle workshop, and another convenience store. The cabinas I stay in, a set of small rooms to rent to the truck drivers and other travelers that directly adjoins the owners’ house, are located past the school and three doors down from the church. Through my bathroom walls, I can hear the splash of water into the sink, and the faint sounds of television or the radio. Sitting on the front porch, sifting through plates of dirt and dung beetles, I observe the minute details of their daily lives: the wife doing the laundry and letting a small fluffy dog out to go urinate on the white gravel, the husband driving away in his orange pick up truck to go check up on his properties located in some other part of Golfito. I have never been so aware of my neighbors: growing up in the suburbs, I spent most of my time away from home, and besides, everyone had fences.
It is Sunday morning, and Christian Rock blares from the Church. As I sit on the front porch, whole families squeezed onto a single motorcycle and dressed in their Sunday best crunch slowly toward the sound of hymns set to amplified electric guitar. I marvel at the number of people they can fit onto their motorcycles. They stare at the foreign girl dressed in muddy hiking pants and sorting through plates of dirt. I can feel the intensity of their observation as they drive past, their heads slowly rotating so that they can keep an eye on me even as their motorcycles scoot forward.
Osa Peninsula
Evening: Ylang-Ylang Tree
On the drive back, Hansel and I are often too tired to talk, or sometimes, we don’t have anything else to say to each other. Over tens of bumpy hours in the car, we’ve sketched the major details of our lives: Hansel is from Puntarenas province in northern Costa Rica, near the Arenal Volcano. He attended Berry College in Georgia for his undergraduate degree, which has possibly the only campus in the world larger than Stanford’s. He did his master’s degree at the University of Costa Rica, lugging around turtle carcasses at the research station in Corcovado National Park to lure jaguars into appearing before his camera traps. He’s told me about his older siblings, all of his ex-girlfriends, and his views on the current Costa Rican election. At this point, I know that he can’t drink coffee after noon without risking insomnia, and that he isn’t a good cook. New topics of conversation are as few and far between as un-potholed stretches of gravel road.
The sun sets, her descent marked by pink and orange streaks on the soft underbellies of clouds. Night blankets the rainforest canopy; bringing cool breezes that caress the carpets of purple-flowered vine that envelop entire trees and reach toward the road in wispy trails; the dense green foliage that blurs into an undifferentiated mass under the cover of darkness; the cows dozing in their pastures; Hansel and I in his old car. The silence, the still countryside, and the cool air sweep over my skin and begin to slowly carry away the smells of dung, dried sweat, and perpetually moist clothing.
By the time we arrive at my hotel, it is fully dark, and the air is sweet with the promise of a cool shower and bed. It’s sweet with a real smell as well: the scent of what Hansel calls “the perfume tree.” The smell permeates the entire grassy parking area and front garden, so evenly distributed that it seems to have no source, though honestly, I never tried to find the perfume tree. Even a disturbed forest, a forest that’s had its understory yanked out from under it and replaced by a network of boardwalks and detached hotel room cabins, is pitch black at night; and wandering through such an occupied darkness feels unwise and disruptive.
I didn’t think to look up the perfume tree until after I got back from Costa Rica. “Ylang ylang” tree, my Google search results said. “Native to the Indo-Malayan region, including…the Philippines...” At first, the connection to the Philippines feels like an anchor, some sort of link connecting me to the foreign and distant place I went to by myself. Then it felt like a reproach, another Filipino-ness test that I had failed. Like when I have to admit that I only know the names of a few Filipino dishes and rarely eat Filipino food, or when I have to confess to people that I don’t speak any Tagalog and neither does my mother.
When my mom talks about Filipinos, she always attributes a clairvoyant quality to them – according to her, any Filipina worth her salt would take one look at me, and instantly recognize my Filipino-ness while also knowing that I was only half. Her belief in the power of people of certain ethnicities to easily recognize others from their group extends to Latin America as well. She’s always surprised to hear about all of my experiences when this hasn’t been the case.
“¿De dónde eres? - Where are you from?” It’s a natural question to ask a foreigner, a friendly one. My first answer, that I’m from California, from the United States, doesn’t often satisfy the askers. Their brows furrow; they shake their heads. “No, where are you from? Where are your parents from?”
My parents? My mom’s from southern California, she grew up in LA. My dad is harder to pinpoint; he’s from a Navy family, so he grew up all over: Guam, the East Coast, and finally Camarillo, also in southern California. I usually just say that they are also from California. This is still not what they wanted; I sense mild frustration. They take another approach – the guiding question. I’ve heard a lot of variations. In Panama, “Are you Latina?”, once followed by “Are you sure?” when I answered in the negative. In Mexico, “What state of Mexico are your parents from?”
Whenever this happens to me, I feel like I’ve been caught in a lie. My ethnic ambiguity has deceived. I stumble over myself to explain where my brownness comes from: “My mom’s family is from the Philippine Islands.”
Reflecting on why I feel so guilty during these interactions, I have pinpointed two sources from whence my discomfort oozes. One: my first trip to Latin America. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I traveled to the province of Coclé, Panamá with a youth leadership/community-based development/cultural exchange program. I was assigned to live in a small rural town called Cabuya Centro with two other American girls, one of who told me halfway through the program that community members only liked me because I was brown. Her plainly spoken implication was that I hadn't really earned their affection and that I didn't deserve it. Two: deep-seated guilt about not being Filipino enough.
Golfito
Morning: Picudo
The beetle in my hand is a rich purplish brown, about the size of a quarter, and possesses an unnerving, scrabbling determination to burrow through my hand to freedom. I bring him closer to my face to take in his serrated legs, the tufts of lighter brown hairs peeking out from beneath his wing covers and the places where his legs join to his body, and the little horned bumps protruding from the dome of his pronotum and proclaiming his sex. There’s an acrid note to his scent. I expected him to smell like dung, but this is closer to the pungent odor of a skunk.
I look up at Diego, the local farmer assisting me with my sampling – did he know what this was? He studies it for a while, brow furrowed. Then, “A picudo!” He’s triumphant. I know this triumph, the satisfaction of identifying something, of assigning a name. Now, he’s launching into an explanation in his rapid Spanish: picudos are pests that dig among the roots of oil palm trees and make them susceptible to disease. He looks around for more things to tell me. We’re on his brother’s property, the one surrounded by rain-forested hillsides that attract low-hanging, silvery, cotton ball fluff morning mist. He finds his culprit – the old oil palm trunks littering the field, some still mostly in the positions in which they grew, some leaning precariously, some on their sides on the ground. It’s expensive and labor-intensive to remove tree trunks, so his brother left them where they were and Diego planted around them. “The picudos live there, in the old trunks!” I’m skeptical.
It took me a while to figure out why I was so reluctant to believe Diego. I came to Costa Rica with a rigid idea of how dung beetles fit into oil palm ecosystems. Every peer-reviewed scientific article I had ever read, every experimental design discussion I had ever had with Professor Dirzo; they had all only ever talked about dung beetles providing desirable ecosystem services. If dung beetles only provided desirable services, having more and a greater diversity of them could only be good. A dung beetle pest? It was inconceivable to me, and it didn’t fit within the tidy framework I had laid out for my study.
Golfito
Evening: Banana Plantations
Half of the cacao plant is on the ground, cut off at its trunk and carelessly tossed aside, a mass of moist brown leaves. The leaves are still attached to their branches, though they are now severed from stem and roots that bound them to the soil. The pile isn’t limp yet. It’s still sitting proud and upright, only upside down. The untethered cacao leaves are holding strong for now, but they won’t be able to resist the relentless pace of decomposition in the humid tropics for long. They will melt into the ground and re-enter the frantic cycling of nutrients. Rainforest soils are not as fertile as early European colonists thought. The forest floor is blanketed in only the thinnest and most ephemeral layer of leaf litter because warm humid conditions are ideal not only for plant growth, but also for decomposition. A dead leaf’s residence time in the litter is only a week or two, and even massive downed tree trunks can disappear in a few years; carried away by the activity of a teeming mass of pale, matted fungal hairs and the scrabbling, slithering insects that feast on dead plant and animal tissue. When tracts of the Neotropical rainforest were slashed and then burned by European colonists, the nutrients that fell in a haze of ash lasted for a few years of agricultural production, and then the land was abandoned, and they were on to the next patch of forest.
The cacao leaves are steadfastly resisting decomposition, but the banana leaves hanging have already surrendered; slowly decaying and drooping while still remaining in contact with the rest of the plant. Mottled brown and yellow spots expand from the margin of each broad fan toward the huge stalk connecting leaf to underground stem, and the damp smell of decomposition adds itself to the fresher smell of wet grass. Plants have to evolve special ways to stay ahead in this environment. The banana plant is clonal: it sends up new shoots from an underground stem before the mother plant has even flowered and fruited. Madre, hijo y bebé; that’s how Diego described it to me. While I set up my dung beetle traps, he lops off unwanted hijo and bebé shoots with practiced swipes of his machete. Commodity agriculture is a tightly choreographed, brutal dance.
This field site is a former banana plantation, and the whole county of Golfito is former United Fruit Co. territory. The United Fruit Co. brought a new kind of slash and burn agriculture to Central America. In the early 20th century, as waves of Panama Disease and Yellow Sigatoka advanced from one banana republic to the next, the United Fruit Co. chewed through new acreage, ripping up railway tracks, livelihoods, and whole communities as it tried to stay ahead of the rising tide. Then, it found a “solution”: the application of a concoction of copper sulphate, water, and lime that they called Bordeaux Mixture, which poisoned the soils so that oil palms are one of the only crops that can grow well in this decimated soil today.
Sometimes I can hear the sonorous, slow voice of Pablo Neruda reciting “United Fruit Co.” at dusk as we blunder through thickets of waist-high grass in search of my traps: “Among the bloodthirsty flies/ the Fruit Co. disembarks,/ ravaging coffee and fruits/ for its ships that spirit away/ our submerged lands’ treasures/ like serving trays”. The United Fruit Co. banana plantations shut down a long time ago, but the infrastructure is all still here, rusted metal shells bisecting the fields; a rusty metal cage that encloses part of the path we follow to get to the far field.
Banana plantation cultivation decimated the soil and brought disease to these fields, but it also brought some of the best electricity infrastructure they’ve ever had here, Diego says. I pull my own submerged treasure out of the ground, a quart-sized plastic deli container filled with dirt and my dung beetle catch for the day, and empty it into a bag so I can spirit it away to the front porch of my hotel room. The mosquitos are relentless at dusk; my arms are dotted with hundreds of bites. Maybe I thought I’d find myself in Costa Rica, or at least something more than a gushing fountain of new questions that burbled out of my brain at an increasingly rapid pace as I spent more time there. The scientific pioneers that came to the tropics before me always seemed to discover something: new medicines; new species; even a whole new theory, On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The world asked me questions, and I had – have – no answers.
What was I doing, what was I really doing, in the middle of tiny Chacaritas?
How could I know so much more about Latin America than about the Philippines, and was I okay with that?
What would Miss Muller, the high school world history teacher who assigned chapters of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and introduced me to United Fruit Co. think about my forays into Latin America?
Is science much more than thinly veiled neocolonialism?
Is science for me?