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Costa Ballena |
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Osa Conservation |
In March and April 2004, the third and last field trip in the Ticolichen project was carried out in Costa Rica. The participants Robert L?cking (The Field Museum), Harrie Sipman (Botanical Museum Berlin), André Aptroot (Centralbureau for Schimmelcultures, The Netherlands), Susan Will-Wolf, Marie Trest, and Matthew Nelsen (University of Wisconsin-Madison), together with their Costa Rican counterparts Loengrin Umaña, José Luis Chaves, Enia Navarro, Issac Lopez, Ronald Rodriguez, Eduardo Alvarado (INBio), and Daniela Lizano (University of Costa Rica), spent three weeks collecting lichens all over the country, in Hitoy Cerere Biological Reserve (La Amistad - Caribe Conservation Area), Volc?n Tenorio National Park, Monte Alto Forest Reserve (Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area), TapantíNational Park (La Amistad - Pacífico Conservation Area), Los Santos Forest Reserve, Dominical (Pacífico Central Conservation Area), Santo Domingo, and La Selva Biological Station (Cordillera Volc?nica Central Conservation Area).
The focus of this year’s trip was on lowland to mid-elevation habitats, as upland habitats had been relatively well sampled earlier. Still, the places visited varied vastly, from coastal maritime rocks and trees on both the Pacific and the Caribbean to rock outcrops at 3,500 m, boggy Puya p?ramo at 2,700 m, hot and dry lowland calcereous rock, windy ridges with roadside trees, lowland rain forest, lower volcano slopes with incessant rain from its private cloud, cloud forest, and even concrete side-walks in the capital. In all, more than 8,000 specimens (including duplicates) were collected, prepared, and databased. Although already over 1,500 species are known from the country, many new genus reports were among the material, e.g. Absconditella, Ainoa, Calvitimela, Euopsis, Immersaria, and Rimularia. Of special interest was the abundance of usually foliicolous genera like Calopadia, Echinoplaca, Gyalectidium, Gyalideopsis, Lasioloma, Musaespora, Sporopodium, Tapellaria and Tapellariopsis on trees, fence posts, and even on rock. A very particular site was found at Pilón Biological Station within Volc?n Tenorio National Park, where cut logs had been exposed to almost constant rain in a pasture for some time. The still attached bark of these rotten logs was colonized by about 15 different species of Gyalideopsis, all with different hyphophore types, including the enigmatic G. gigantea with its enormous, tomentose hyphophores. In the process we also saw lots of characteristic plants and animals, varying from a sloth in INBioparque and armadillos and howler monkeys around the huts in Monte Alto to a 'freshwater squid' (otherwise only known from Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies) on our plates one evening and 2-3 cm large bull ants on the trees about to be sampled, and even larger flagel-scorpions in our bedrooms.
Article courtesy of André Aptroot |
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