Barro Colorado Island, Panama Canal, Panama
Our transit through the Panama Canal, one of the wonders of the modern world, began last night, directly after we arrived to the ship. Waiting for our pilot to arrive, we began our tropical adventure on the Caribbean coast of Panama. We crossed the Gatun locks during the earlier part of the evening, and headed to our anchoring spot.
This morning found us outside of Barro Colorado Island, literally the island of red clay. For the first time in many years, the Smithsonian Institute opened its doors to non-scientific purposes, and Lindblad Expeditions is today the only company visiting their biological station on the Panama Canal. The island of Barro Colorado was declared a reserve in 1923, became a research site in 1965, and was established as a Natural Monument in 1979. This island has been attracting biologists from all over the world since 1916, and is now-a-days one of the best-studied tracts of tropical forests on earth. We were ready to go ashore at 8:00 a.m., some of us on hikes and others on Zodiac cruises; later this morning we swapped places and the walkers cruised and the cruisers walked. We were rewarded with howling monkeys howling, white-throated capuchins, white-nosed coatis, red tailed squirrels, and a good array of birds and plants. The best sighting of the morning though was a female Nephila spider or the yellow-orbed spider. The female of this species can be up to 2 inches long, while the males are about one eighth of that size. For this reason, sometimes the females confuse them with prey; well, not the first case of someone becoming a spouse’s meal…
