So in June, I got to spend 10 days in the beautiful country of Panama to collect fish for work!  We (meaning me, Ph.D. student Spencer Ingley, and M.S. student Preston Johnson) went down there to collect these little guys:

Brachyrhaphis episcopi

Brachyrhaphis roseni

Brachyrhaphis terrabensis

Now I realize you might not really care, but I'm going to tell you why anyway.  These fish live in the small streams of Panama and Costa Rica with some populations up high in the mountain streams away from predators and others down near the larger rivers that are full of predators like this:

Cichlid

As a result, the two populations have evolved quite differently.  It is suspected that B. terrabensis (low predation) and B. roseni (high predation) were once the same species, but separated due to the different evolutionary pressures they faced.  It also seems that B. episcopi is going through the same thing right now as the montane and lowland populations are going through similar changes.  So we went down to collect several killed populations for genetic and life history analysis and a few live populations for behavioral studies.

So in my head, I pictured us going through lots of beautiful jungle, but totally expected the place to be all gross and dingy, so you can imagine my surprise when this was the city I landed in.

Panama City

Every morning we got up, and drove into the jungle to look for small streams.  Our first day we found this beautiful resort with some amazing waterfalls, great hikings areas, and even a rope swing.  We had a great time, but unfortunately the awesomeness of the waterfalls made it impossible for the little fishies to swim up the streams.  So after some great pics, fun on the rope swing, and a few videos we had to move on.



Later that night, we found a site with tons of B. episcopi in the mountains and the roads were crazy but it was super pretty.

The next day we met up with Dr. Johnson and one of his former students and checked out the western part of Panama (B. terrabensis & B. roseni territory).  We found some pretty mountain streams and found lots of terrabensis.



That evening we stayed in this little town in the very tops of the mountains near the Costa Rican border.  Dr. Johnson had been commenting on the quality of the roads in Panama when all the sudden we turned onto this super rough, bumpy road he said, "Now this is like the roads in Costa Rica".  We found this little shop and it turned out we were in Costa Rica!  No passport stamp though...


The next morning we went down this super steep hill.  We thought we might tumble down the mountain but we made it.  It's crazy to think that there were motorbikes going up this thing!


At the bottom we crossed the first of many iffy-looking bridges, and found this beautiful stream with a decent amount of B. roseni.  It was definitely one of the most beautiful places we found roseni.  A lot of the other places were streams running through neighborhoods that were either super muddy or super trashy.


After this we split, cause Jerry and his friend had to catch their plane back.  At this point we had both finding the proper stream sites and the seining down so we were pretty much pros.  We spent the remainder of the day catching roseni and experienced our first Panama rain.  We were SOAKED.  And we were tired.  Our past nights of sleeping consisted of poor air conditioning, hard beds, and rooms like this:


So that night, we went for this.  It was much nicer :)

Gran Hotel Nacional

We spent the next several days getting a whole ton of fish.  And getting wet.  And the wetter we got, the more stinky our car got.  It was bad.  Rrrrrreal bad.  And the more streams we waded through, the more destroyed my shoes got.  But eventually we had enough dead fish and we started on our live fish collection.  The roseni site had tons of them, but we had to spend a long time finding a good stream that fed the same river up in the mountains to find a matching terrabensis site.  Finally we found one.  We got a lot of fish, and most importantly, we found Big Bertha.  This picture has two Brachyrhaphis terrabensis, one of them is normal size and the other one is Bertha.  She's great.

Big Bertha and Friend

By this time we were tired, wet, smelly, and now we had an eight hour drive ahead of us back to Panama City with 200 live fish in the back to worry about.  Needless to say it wasn't our happiest moment.  That drive lasted FOREVER.  But as we neared our destination, our handy GPS told us we were near the Ocean.  So we took what would be the BEST DETOUR EVER because we found this beautiful beach.  Feel jealous. Cause no one else was there.  We had the whole beach just to ourselves!






We got back to Panama City and headed to STRI (the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute - yes, we really are that cool) where we got our fishies comfortably situated.  We checked out the research areas too, and I have to say, this would not be a bad office view!




We met up with one of the scientists there and headed out to a national park to collect some episcopi. It was really pretty.  This was just the road to get to the collection sites!


But it wasn't all work.  We did get to see some pretty cool things.  And I would hate it if Aunt Diane didn't get to see some pictures of the Panama Canal.  We drove over it a couple times and there were some sweet bridges.  We were on the Pacific side of the canal, so we didn't see the locks but I found a picture of them anyway!

Gatun Locks

Our last day in Panama we spent getting stuff ready to leave, and then we went to the Temple.  It was beautiful.  The session was in Spanish so I had to wear one of the headsets, but it was great.  It was packed and I was happy to see so many in attendance on a Wednesday evening.  We had met the Temple President and some other people at church earlier and it was fun to see some of them again.





We stayed at the Temple Hotel.  It was super nice and only $5 a night.  The only requirement was to attend the temple each day.  Sounds like a great deal to me. 






The next morning we took care of all our stuff, got it ready to ship home, and got someone at STRI to take care of our fish until we get the permits to export everything.  It was a really fun trip.  But ten days hiking through streams really killed my shoes...


Spencer had a couple problems speeding...

Talked his way out...

...bribed his way out with this one.

And by the end we were all looking like mountain men.

Preston

(Me)

Spencer

But these two guys are great.  We had a lot of fun together.  And we got to see some great things.  Like this.  Why don't we have signs like this?!





Or Jesus Buses?




Or fearsome dragon horses?





We may never have the answers to those questions, but Panama is a great place.  It was fun to see the beautiful places the fish in my lab come from, and to learn a ton.  And hopefully soon, I'll get to go another great collecting trip!