Carleton Students Head to the Rainforest for Serious Science

Four times in the last eight years, a team of talented students from Carleton College has traveled to the Costa Rican rainforest for an intense two weeks of “kamikaze science.”

They’ve studied the behavior of coral snakes, hummingbird flower mites and leaf-cutting ants. The papers they’ve authored have been published in leading scientific journals, like Evolution and Tropical Ecology–quite an accomplishment for undergraduate scientists.

From Nov. 30 to Dec. 14, 15 Carleton students will again travel to the Organization for Tropical Studies’ La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, and one of the three topics they’re studying this year is how the ravages of deforestation spill over into a protected rainforest.

“The deforestation of Costa Rica was happening when I first started going to La Selva,” said Mark McKone, associate professor of biology at Carleton and leader of the student group. “If it’s not in a protected park, it’s gone, and it’s happened over the past 10 to 15 years. Where we’re going is a very important place to look at the rainforest and the decisions made by the Costa Rican government, and to ask questions about what’s going on in the Amazon.”

Each year, scores of student groups flock to La Selva to study the Costa Rican rainforest, but few do so with the scientific seriousness of the groups McKone has taken over the last eight years as part of his course “Tropical Rainforest Ecology.”

The class is a two-term sequence, taught during the fall and winter. During an intense period of study and preparation, the students split up into three small groups to write project proposals, following a process similar to applying for a National Science Foundation grant. Their proposals are critiqued by Carleton alumni of the course who are currently in prestigious Ph.D. programs across the country.

The students travel to Costa Rica to conduct research during their winter break from Carleton. “We’re only there two weeks but they are so ready,” McKone said. “I call it kamikaze science. They hit the ground running, conduct their experiments, and when they come back they write their papers [during the winter term portion of the class].”

This year’s projects deal with poison-dart frogs, leaf-cutting ants and forest edge effects. Most of the students have a strong interest in the environment, but McKone stressed that his course is not about environmentalism first and foremost.

“We don’t set out to save the rainforest, and we don’t spend a lot of time in class talking about the deforestation rate,” he said. “We talk about how the rainforest works, though, and I’m absolutely convinced that the things we find out about the rainforest at a basic level will help inform conservation efforts in the future.”

Why not study other ecosystems, like the Florida Everglades or coniferous forests in the Northwest? Simple, McKone said. “I tell them we could be studying those places, but this is the place on the planet where massive land use change is occurring, and it’s happening in our lifetime.”