Invasive species are never to be taken lightly. While some are accidentally released, others may be introduced as floral design or food stock- even as pets. If you really wanted to get technical about it, humans could also be classified as an invasive species.

The entire world, since exploration started, has entered a sort of pandemic around the influence of invasive species. While this isn’t really a headline for most people, since global warming and deforestation like to take the center stage, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. Entire communities are rearranged as a new species enters, and sometimes this can lead to the extirpation, or local extinction, of a species. Even others in the ecosystem can be indirectly affected by this change.

In the San Juan River, tilapia and peacock bass are the two species who really impacted this river. While they’re still a good source of food for animals and people alike, the biodiversity of other fish species which would historically fill that niche have been extirpated. Small minnows and larger prey fish have been replaced with the African tilapia and South American peacock bass- which is a common story across Central America.

The Embera people still use these fish for their survival, as do the fishing birds and mammals around the San Juan River, so at least this story doesn’t have to end in complete tragedy. That being said, a lot of fruit in their diet is also non-native. Mangos from Southern Asia, as well as watermelon and cantaloupe from Central Africa, are all fruits grown by the Embera people along the Panamanian river. Of course, they aren’t the only humans to introduce non-native species and use them as a source of food or profit. This behavior seems innate in humans themselves, bringing what species they know to a new place, regardless of what could be found their already. This only hurts the native fauna, however, as they have to compete with new species who may not have any predators or pathogens to keep them in check. Native pollinators may not be able to get the right fuel from the new flowers, or don’t have the hardware to do so. New fruits could be toxic to the native animals, or not nearly as nutritious as the ones which they have been evolving alongside of for millions of years.

Really, this is a problem which cannot be fixed entirely. Some species are here to stay, no matter how damaging and invasive. The priority now is to understand how we can try to keep these in check, and to make sure that no new species can begin to pervade the wilderness. This is a hard law to keep, but knowing that a culture removed from the modern era such as the Embera have accepted non-native species into their way of life just serves as a reminder that nowhere is really safe from the invaders.

When most people think of research, it typically conjures up images of men and women dressed in stark white lab coats, swirling bottles of strange chemicals and staring at computer results before suddenly finding the cure to an ailment. Of course, this really isn’t how most research is done- not the part about being in a lab, but usually the work is much more rigorous, with rewards we may or may not have anticipated. Ecological studies really aren’t much different from that. A null hypothesis is formed, the methods aligned and soon the researcher is on their way to finding out if their thinking is supported in the data. But how does one figure out which methods to use?

In our group project, my teammates and I were faced with such a dilemma. We are interested in the species richness across the town of Gamboa, especially when concerned with small lizards and salamanders. Although two very different animals, they both fill an ecological niche as small predators and prey for larger carnivores. How to catch these guys, however, was a problem. How to catch a lizard which lives to climb? The typical pitfall trap seemed to be our answer but supplies weren’t as handy as we would have liked. Usually, large buckets aroun six to eight inches deep, with steep, slippery walls are used. Flush with the ground, any animal small enough to fit into the mouth typically falls in without even knowing what happened. In our case, we have plastic cereal bowls.

Yup, that is are what we’re going to have to use to catch our quick-footed reptilian friends. Even slower moving salamanders could eventually climb out of this two inch deep dish. So, of course, we had to improvise.

Rather than getting to work right away on our actual research project, our group had to do a little research on the methods we were going to use. How could we make these bowls more effective in catching our target species?

The first suggestion was to actually use plastic bottles, rather than bowls. Dug straight down into the ground, the bottles are small and slender, working as a nice funnel straight to the ground. This is basically how regular pitfall traps work as well, just on a smaller scale.

The second suggestion was just digging straight into the ground and setting the bowl into the large hole. This would also mimic the larger bucket method, as the bowl has more surface area, but our main concern here was dirt. These lizards and salamanders live with dirt their whole lives, so why would a little hole be that big of a deal? Bring in- the garbage bag! Dug out in the same way as the regular bucket, but with a garbage bag taped to the sides, this method was made to hopefully keep the slope more slippery. With less to grab hold of, lizards and salamanders wouldn’t be able to escape our pitfall trap, and we can continue with our projects.

Even though this isn’t as rigorous as an actual researched setting, we still kept out methods as close to similar as possible. All methods were tested on the same stretch of the same building, so our species count shouldn’t vary too much. While we couldn’t control every variable, such as the weather or time of day, we still wanted each container to be in the same sort of location. This way, we can tell which seems to work the best out of all of them.

“Studies” like this help to improve on already known methods of collecting samples and data, and while our endeavor isn’t really to further the scientific community as a whole, it’s still beneficial to realize that you really can do research on anything, even methods of research!