BioMuseo and Bats (and uber)

 This past weekend was another one of those in which I got a break from having nothing much scheduled --- my weekdays are still pretty much filled up with "math whenever I want", punctuated by only an occasional zoom call.  But on the weekends, when other people are released from their offices, I get to head out and see the Panama sights with them.

BioMuseo Birthday

On Saturday, the BioMuseo celebrated being ten years old; my friend Yesenia whatsapped me to say that she'd found discounted tickets for an evening event they were having there.  She'd been there during the day, but never in the evening: did I want to join her?  Did I? But of course!  I snapped up a pair of tickets right away.  First, it's the BioMuseo, a spot many people have told me about; second, it's a chance to see Yesenia again.  (She's the buddy who likes hiking with me, so this was a rare indoor event for us).

The building for the BioMuseo was designed by the famous architect Frank Gehry; the roof has many lofty parts of many different colors.  It's located on the Amador Causeway, a scenic (and touristy) stretch of land built out from Panama City from the dirt dug out of the canal to connect a variety of local islands to the mainland. 

The inside of the BioMuseo itself is impressive; it has several parts, one of which describes the geographical formation of Panama:  70 million years ago, North and South America weren't connected. (We got to touch a 50-million-year-old rock.) Slowly, land between the two continents built up, and South America hustled north a bit, and then there was a land bridge between the two continents, which allowed animals to travel in both directions.  Some of the animals that traveled from one continent to the other caused extinctions.  We no longer have giant sloths (3 meters high) or mastodons or giant carnivorous flightless birds.  

Behind us: a migration of animals between the continents.
The statues were really cool.

There's also an amazing all-around-you video of the diversity of animals in the country: under the floor beneath you, rivers with frogs and fish; in the sky above you the forest canopy; on three walls around you, jaguars and sloths and monkeys and frogs and birds . . . I was glad the room had railings.  Other people just sat cross-legged on the floor.  

There's also a cool aquarium: one one side of the room, with Pacific Ocean fish; on the other side, the Carribbean sea fish.  For this special event, the museum had scuba divers submerged in the tank waving at people, which attracted huge crowds.  (I liked the fish, too, though)!

Yesenia taking pictures of us, 
while people behind us take pictures of scuba divers.

There was also a room with sculptures of giant plants and insects, so we could be the size of ants.  Very cool.  What there was NOT, to Yesenia's disappointment, was any vegetarian food.  (She'd remembered an un-burger place rather fondly).  I had raisins and peanuts with me, which saved us from eating the animals that the museum was encouraging us to protect.  

All in all, a fabulous experience. I highly recommend.

Bat Night

The next night, I met my host Jeanette at a Smithsonian research center in Gamboa for their once-a-month public Bat Night. That was super-cool, in a very different way.  The BioMuseo is clearly a museum, and has a lot of images of animal (videos, sculptures, photos); the Bat Night was run by the scientists working at this place.  The presentations were much more geeky, personal, and passionate.

One postdoc there waxed rhapsodic about pseudo-scorpions.  They're like scorpions in that they have poisonous pincers they use to catch, maim, and consume their prey, but with these important differences:

• They don't have the sting-y tail; in fact, they have no tail at all.
• They are tiny tiny tiny (a millimeter long, or less: we looked at them through microscopes).
• They are so tiny they can't bother humans or our pets; they only sting other insects, like termites or ants.  

In other words, pseudo-scorpions are our friends.  

Another young scientist showed videos of spiders drumming their legs, and let us put headphones on to hear the sound. (Many of the people there agreed that Ed Yong's book An Immense World is an instant classic. The subtitle of that book is "How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us", and at Bat Night I got to see in person some of the things that book described, including drumming spiders and a moth that can jam bat's sonar signals).  

And, of course, we got to see bats.  The researchers catch bats using nets that they put up in the nearby forest and monitor very closely.  They love the bats, and are very gentle, wearing gloves and using small bags made of baby blanket material to enclose the bats in a soft, dark space so they don't get hurt.

bat face, fuzzy, looking at me.

They'd encouraged us to be forest-ready: boots, long pants, long sleeves, and insect repellent.  I didn't have a headlamp, but someone loaned me one, and we got to troop through the woods.  There, I saw my first Túngara frogs.  These are the ones that make the incredibly loud video arcade sounds . . . and they are tiny.  They're the size of the last joint on our thumb.

In fact, we saw another larger frog (much bigger than my fist) make a dash and gobble up a Túngara.  That was exciting!  

There were two rounds of talks --- the first talk in Spanish, and the second in English --- about bats, given by a postdoc who is just in love with these animals, and you can see why.  Some fun facts:

• Bat species make up 20% of all mammal species, and they make huge ecological contributions to our planet.
• When bat populations declined in the U.S. due to the nose fungus, farmers had to spray more pesticides (costing $$), which in turn caused a 10% rise in human infant mortality.  The health of our babies is linked to bats.
• One nectar-drinking bat has a long tongue that acts like a sponge.  It doesn't suck the nectar up through some kind of straw or lap it up; it sponges the nectar out of the flower. 
• Vampire bat teeth aren't fangs like our canines.  Rather, the two front teeth (like buck teeth) are sharp as scalpels.  Sometimes researchers doing postmortem investigations on vampire bats cut themselves accidentally, because those teeth are so sharp. 

Mae Dixon, the postdoc who gave the Bat Talk.

This was yet another fab event.  When my husband returns to Panama, we're going to go to this again (we'd met another woman there for her third time; she brings new friends every month).

Bonus weekend adventure: Uber.

Somehow, I've made it this far in my life without ever using Uber myself -- and that includes my cross-country train adventures last January, stopping over in 5 different cities.  This weekend, because both of my outings ended long after the sun set, the bus-and-then-shortcut-hike-through-the-woods wasn't a safe option. 

In fact, I had initially planned to take the bus to Gamboa, only to discover after I walked the 2km to get to the stop, that this particular bus stopped running on Sunday afternoons, and if I wanted to take it to Gamboa I'd have to wait until Monday morning.

At any rate, I had long ago installed the Uber app on my phone, and twice in one weekend I actually made good use of that app.  I even figured out how to deal with the fact (I discovered once I was in the vehicle) that there are three different Smithsonian research centers near Panama City and I'd inadvertently entered the wrong one.  We fixed it; I arrived at the Bat Night (as you can see above), and all went well.  So that's a whole new avenue of transportation opened up for me!