A fun thing to do over winter break: BioNews: Spring 2019: Newsletters: News & Events: Department of Biology: Indiana University Bloomington

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BioNews: Spring 2019
A fun thing to do over winter break

“. . . a fun thing to do over winter break”

Monday, April 15, 2019

After teaching the BIOL-L 433 Tropical Biology in Costa Rica course for six years, Roger Hangarter, distinguished professor of biology, finds that “it is still a fun thing to do over the winter break.”

Maggie Vincent echoes Hangarter’s sentiments about the course, “L433 was an incredibly fun experience for a lot of reasons. The instructors, Bill Ruf and Roger Hangarter, created a learning environment where we got to ask the questions ourselves and follow our own curiosity. As a result, we were all eager to dive into the course. We were excited to hear what they knew on our hikes and in their lectures. It’s not often in undergraduate courses that you get to break out of the classroom the way we did.” Vincent is an undergraduate biology major who participated in the two-week course over the 2017-18 break.

L433 students and instructors stay at established biological research stations and visit world-renowned preserves. They explore tropical rain forests, cloud forests, seasonally dry forest, mangrove forests, and other habitats. They learn about biodiversity, plant-animal interactions, plant structure, physiology, and evolution. The course is an opportunity to experience a country that embraces ecological sustainability.

(1) The red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) is the poster child of Central American rain forests. La Selva, Costa Rica. (2) Glass-winged butterflies drink nectar but are also known to obtain additional nutrients from the droppings of insectivorous birds, like antbirds. (3) Around sunrise at the La Selva Biological Research Station, the booming calls of howler monkeys resonate through the canopy. No alarm clocks are needed. Photos by Roger Hangarter

The students are required to keep field journals, including a summary of what they did and saw each day. Vincent fondly recalls, “We hung out in our shared rooms at the end of the day and tried to collectively remember everything. Our days would start at 7 a.m. and often go until 10 p.m. or later. They were so jam-packed it was difficult to remember everything. As we wrote in our journals, someone would call out, ‘Did we see that three-toed sloth this morning?’ or ‘What was the name of that bird we saw?’”

“It was fifteen people having a great time in some of the coolest places I’ve ever seen,” says Vincent.

Maggie Vincent will graduate from the IU Department of Biology in May with a B.S. in biology. She plans to pursue a master’s degree in ecology and evolution.

Roger Hangarter (distinguished professor and chancellor’s professor of biology) researches plant physiology—specifically, environmental sensory-response systems and plant development. He is known for his nature photography and videos as well as his efforts to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining biodiversity where one lives.

Bill Ruf (senior lecturer) is director of the Tropical Biology Program. He began teaching L433 in 1990—picking up where faculty member David Dilcher, who conceived the course, left off.

“. . . a fun thing to do over winter break”

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