In
1995 and 1996 I took advantage of living in Costa Rica and made several
trips
to neighboring countries. In April 1995
I visited western Panama, and collected spiders near Caldera, a small
village
near Boquete. Then I flew over the mountains to the Caribbean side and
visited
Bocas del Toro Island.
Three
months later, in July 1995 I made a trip into Nicaragua, visited Rivas,
Lago
Nicaragua, Matagalpa and the beautiful Selva Negra forest.
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In
September and October 1996 I made a longer trip to Guatemala, Honduras,
and
again Nicaragua. Like on the previous trips, I mostly used local
busses, and
thus spent more than 80 hours in these unforgettable vehicles, usually
overloaded with people and goods destined for the market or brought
from
there, street-vendors selling drinks, sweets, and bakeries at the
numerous
stops, men of god trying to preach louder than the music and the
traffic’s
noise and fitting their sermon exactly between two stops, aching backs
and
bottoms, sweat and bumpy streets, good talks with people I never met
before
and will never meet again.
.
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My first
collecting site was famous Panajachel at Lake Atitlan; next I moved on
to the gorgeous
hot springs at Fuentes Georginas near Zunil, and flew over to Peten and
visited the
impressive pyramids at Tikal. On the way back to the capital I stopped
at Finca
Ixobel near Poptun, a place so close to Eden I would have wished to
just stay
there.
I
crossed the border to Honduras near Copan,
another place with beautifully preserved Maya sculptures, went on to
the
Caribbean coast at Tela, where I collected at Lancetilla, flew over to
Roatan
Island, where I briefly exchanged the alcohol vials with snorkeling
gear. Maybe
the biologically most amazing place I saw in Honduras was La Tigre
National
Park, a beautiful and enchanting forest at about 2000 m above sea level.
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In
Nicaragua I took a boat to Bluefields, in the hope that farther away
from
Manaus I would more easily find remnants of forests, but Hurricane Joan
had
indeed
left very little forest in Zelaya Sur. In Bluefields it was Carnival
time, with
strong black men disguised as white women with beautifully crafted
masks,
children completely in red as little devils, a fierce looking wolf and
a monkey,
and all the people drinking beer in the unbearable heat of around noon.
The
spiders collected during these trips have
been the basis for several publications, two dealing with the taxonomic
status of Hedypsilus and Micromerys respectively,
one on the genus Modisimus in Costa Rica
and neighboring countries, another one specifically on pholcids from
Guatemala
and Honduras, and one paper on genital mechanics of some
species I had
taken with
me alive. The taxonomic papers were the beginning of all the studies on
pholcid
systematics I have done ever since.
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