June 22- Storm

Sunday was certainly an adventure this week!  It started out as a normal morning- I had gone out by myself to a nearby trail to perform an experiment with some Atta leafcutter ants.  I'm trying to determine whether they react to various Azteca chemical signals, since leafcutter ants tend to avoid trees with Azteca nests in them.  I'm testing how they respond to Azteca refuse or nest material with dead Azteca as opposed to plain dirt, which means I find ants, set up the experiment, and film for an hour to analyze later.  My current setup utilizes a gopro, some PVC pipe, and plastic dog food bins, which I think finally qualifies me as a real field scientist.
I spent the morning happily finding an experimental setup that worked (I've been trying different things without success for a week) and filming ants.  Around 10:30, I noticed that it was starting to get cloudy.  I ignored it- we get storms basically every day, and most aren't too severe.  It can be an hour from the first thunder to the start of the rain, and almost every storm that I've experienced here starts extremely lightly.  There hadn't been anything too major on the radar.  Since I was finally getting good data, I figured that I would head back towards the lab once it started sprinkling, and be back by the time the real rain started.  As you can probably guess by the fact that this incident is getting its own blog post, things didn't work out that way.  Around 11, the forest suddenly got nighttime-dark.  The rain started suddenly, along with a howling wind.
Word of advice: if conditions ever reach a point where you start to feel chilly in the jungle, leave the jungle immediately.
In the time that it took me to turn of the camera and put my stuff into my bag, it was pouring rain.  When I detoured back a minute later to grab something I had forgotten, so many branches were falling that I had my hands up over my head.  The noise was unbelievable- pouring rain, branches and trees cracking, howler monkeys freaking out, booming thunder.  There was a ridiculous wind in the understory of the forest (something that really isn't supposed to happen in jungles).  I wish I could have gotten a video of the awe-inspriring scene, but I was a little too busy trying to avoid getting hit by any falling trees.  I learned exactly how fast I could run back to the dining hall (the closest building to the start of the trail).  It was faster than I thought.  The long staircase at the end of the trail that normally gives me such issues goes much faster when you take the steps at a sprint, two at a time.
Luckily, I had been working close by, so I was indoors by the time most of the trees started falling.  Groups that had been working further out had much closer calls- several people were very close to falling trees.  Several PhD students say it was the worst storm they've ever seen here, and one of the most frightening ones they;d ever experienced.  It only lasted about 10 minutes, but there are huge trees down all over the island.  The following pictures are all from a walk that afternoon when we tried to determine how many of my study sites had been destroyed (answer: four, potentially five).  The tree that I had been watching sway in the wind was on the ground inches from where I had been standing.  Getting places on the trails has certainly been an adventure this week (some of them are basically unusable- it took us 45 minutes to go 700 meters meters at one point)