After La Fortuna, we rented a car and drove ourselves back to San Jose. But, on the way, we stopped at the Los Angeles Cloud Forest, which was AMAZING! For those of you in the know, this is a place exactly like Monteverde, except without the tourists, people trying to sell you stuff, and generally annoying atmosphere. The forest was called Los Angeles, and it had some pretty awesome stuff in it.
Here´s a quick primer on Costa Rican Cloud Forest Flora and Fauna (say that five times)
-Leaf cutter ants work 24 hours a day, until they die! There are five jobs for these ants, and all of them are female (except the males, of course): workers, soldiers, the queen, males and nurses. Workers cut leaves and carry them back to the nest, soldiers guard the nest from other ants and predators, the queen LAYS 6,000 EGGS A DAY!!! She´s a busy lady. The males, on the other hand, breed with the queen once, AND THEN DIE!!! Man, am I glad I´m not an ant. Nurses clean the leaves before they get into the nest, to make sure that no harmful organisms get in. The ants chew the leaves and then feed them to a fungus, which they eat.
-There are quite a few different types of epiphytes, including bromeliads and orchids. Some harm the tree that they attach to, others don´t. An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant, and never touches the ground. Neat, huh?
-A strangler fig will find a tree, and then slowly grow around it, taking several hundred years, finally killing the tree. But, by then, the fig has established roots and no longer needs the original tree for support.
-If you go walking in the cloud forest, bring a walking stick.
-The Costa Rican raccoon is called “zorro.” Doesn´t make the masked Mexican sound that cool now, does it?
-Costa Rican mammals smell BAD!!! Especially when they´re wet.
-There are 114 types of snakes in Costa Rica, of which 14 can kill you. The other one hundred can just bite you.
-If you´re a spider, Joyce wants to take a photo of you.
-And finally, there´s an orchid that spends its whole life growing, just to bloom for one day, and then die. I REALLY hope that the bees don´t miss it!
Hasta Luego, Jack
