All posts by ek26

Uncategorized

Welcome to Peelize

Leave a comment

Daily Blog Entry 6:

Today was a different day than normal because we only went on a hike once, and I don’t think I got any more bug bites today. It feels strange to not walk around drenched in sweat and fighting the urge to scratch every inch of my body.

In the morning while I was bird watching, Jessica and Scott were talking about the ants by the sugar containing by the coffee station. Jessica called it a sugar ant but Scott said they were ghost ants. The ghost ants had a light, beige colouring to it. Some were crawling around the sugar jar while the others were walking in a single line towards the sugar. I have never seen a ghost ant before, so that was a cool find. I had no idea that ants could have such light coloered abdomen.

Another cool thing that had happened was the experience of working on the urine sample project and presenting them to the Southern Mississippi University students. I didn’t know that the gloves that I used to handle the urine samples had a hole in it. While handling Jessica’s urine vile, my hand got wet and I thought it was just my sweat, but as I was washing my gloves I realised that the gloves had a hole in it. Yikes.

When I introduced the urine project to the other students who came to the research centre today, I welcomed them and started my presentation by saying “Welcome to Peelize”. Pun credits to Sami.

We also saw a scorpion under black light, and it turned to a florescent green. It was wild. Sami, our arachnid expert said that it was because of a protein in their exoskeleton.

Attached are the pee insects. photo credits to Jessica

Uncategorized

Turtles can glide

Leave a comment

Daily Blog Entry 5:

The cool interesting ant find of the day was the Cephalotes that Sam found! He said that the Cephalotes ant just glided onto him, which is what the Cephalotes are known for, giving them the common name ‘gliding ant;. Although Cephalotes are supposed to glide onto trees and not to humans, to the ant’s credit, Sam was wearing a green shirt and dark pants. He was basically dressed like a tree. Cephalotes have a very flat head, abdomen, and thorax, which gives them a second common name go ’turtle ant’, so it was pretty easy to identify the ant as a Cephalotes because it too had an incredibly flat, rectangular head. I wanted to see the ant to exhibit their turtle-like behaviour of retracting their legs when they were scared, but it didn’t seem to be scared by people’s presence. Sam wanted to see it glide, so dropped the ant to test if it would glide back onto Sam’s leg. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the ant anymore. I was so excited with finding the Cepahlotes and testing its interesting behaviour that I forgot to take a photo of it. Dang it.

In other news, I walked right into a vine that was right on my eye level, so now I have a cut above my left eyebrow. To be fair, I was on the lookout for ants for I was only looking at the forest floor. Speaking of critters, I am now very paranoid about chiggers. I’ve picked off a few tics from my body and it doesn’t bother me too much because I have the satisfaction of crushing it with my fingernails and killing it. Meanwhile, chiggers can cause so many bites on the body before its death, and you can’t even see it!

To end on a positive note, WE SAW A TOUCAN TODAY! It was smaller than I expected, but I am so happy I got to see one!

The toucans were too small to take a photo of, and I didn’t take a photo of the Cephalotes, so enjoy a photo of a cute baby leaf cutter ant’s nest that we saw:

Uncategorized

Red and Yellow Kill a Fellow

Leave a comment

Daily Blog Entry 4:

We are on a lucky streak with animal sightings. Sam spotted a coral snake, and we all watched it slither in front of us and out of a log. It was very nice to see that the most venomous snake in the Americas is actually a very gentle snake that doesn’t want to bother humans.

Today I learned that soldier ants have the behaviour of just swarming in one direction as a colony looking for food and that they don’t have a formal nest for their colony. That is pretty wild and against my understanding because I’m most familiar with leaf cutter ants who are very organised (task partitioning) and have incredibly complex nest structures.

While walking in the rainforest while securing our nitrogen urine viles, Scott pulled a large plant leaf down to show us something. I initially had no idea what it was, but I saw that it was actually a very loosely constructed ant nest, and the disturbance actually caused the ants in the nest to hurriedly rescue the larvae of their colony- there were a lot of ants carrying white specs heading to the stem of the plant.

The most interesting ant finding of the day was cave ants. I was too busy looking at the bats and admiring the geological structures in the caves for me to even be looking at the ground. I didn’t even know that ants were in caves. When we found the ants in the cave we called Scott over and he excitedly joked “oh new opportunity for a grant” with Pedro, who guided us into the caves. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of the cave ants, but I did take pictures of my art work we left in the most remote chamber of the cave.

pictured below: TFB handling important limiting nutrients

Uncategorized

Between an ant hill and a boa constrictor

Leave a comment

Daily Blog Entry 3: 



I am absolutely exhausted and it feels like I’ve been here for a week but I’ve only been here for 3 days. It’s wild that on the third day we already saw so many cool things: several scarlet macaws, dozens of fish tail palms, a boa constrictor, 7 meter long ant hill, an unknown colourful beetle, and many cool ants.

Today was a great day for TFBs! For the ant department, we saw a lot of acacia ants. The acacia trees were usually immature and had a lot of thorns for the ants, so it was alarming at first to see a lot of ants on a small plant. However, after figuring out that the young plant was actually an acacia, I was pretty excited.

We happened to see an almost 10m long leaf cutter ant nest, and it was incredible. The entire nest looked like a hill, and I would not have guessed that it was an ant nest if it weren’t for Adrienne yelling out “LOOK AT THIS NEST”. This nest was a bit overshadowed by the boa constrictor next to it, but it was still amazing.

On the way back to the research centre, we came across a hollow tree trunk with a swarm of ants. Scott described that the swarm of ants were a part of the mating swarm. I learned that winged ants are called alates and that they were being protected by the worker ants because the alates were preparing for the mating season now that the start of the rainy season is approaching.

Finally, we saw an ant with the cordyceps fungus growing out of it! Incredible! Ever since a EBIO319 alumni told me about seeing an ant with the cordyceps fungus, I was really excited to see one, so I am so glad that Kristen saw it. It was incredible that the mandibles of the ants bit onto the leaf so well that the infected ant was on a slanted plant leaf. The cordyceps fungus was growing straight from the head and it was definitely an interesting find.

Uncategorized

Leeches :(

Leave a comment

Daily blog entry 2:

I fed a lot of critters with my blood today. I had around a dozen 4 mm long leeches on me this morning, and I also just applied anti-itch lotion on 14 spots on my legs.

It was a long day today. After waking up at 5:25 from all the noises in the rainforest, we had a nice breakfast courtesy of the Crystal Paradise Ecolodge staff (thank you!) and headed to Rio on Pools. I followed Adrienne and Scott to what seemed like a cool water-slide location, but I WAS WRONG. I just ended up getting leeches on my butt from all the butt-scooting I did on the rocks. Other than that, Rio on Pools was absolutely gorgeous. I was definitely thinking about the Pools at Caracol as I was sweating and struggling to climb up the pyramid. We reached Caracol after we crossed the Macal River and moved from the Pine Ridge forest to the Rain forest. 

Caracol was such an interesting place. I have never seen Mayan ruins before, and I was glad that I was able to learn about ancient culture while also observing the nature around me. In total, we got to climb two temples, enter a tomb, look at half a dozen beds, and enjoy the great view of the Rainforest. We even saw Guatemala. Leo, our tour guide, even got Guatemalan service. In terms of flora and fauna, we really got lucky. We saw banana trees, howler monkeys, wild avocado, birds and lots of ants.

At Rio on Pools I got to see one ant on my taxonomic card. It had a shiny golden streak on its abdomen. That was the only remarkable ant that I saw. We saw some leaf-cutter ants on the way to the sites at Caracol. That’s when I learned that they have extensive trails that they clear out. Then we went to Las Cuevas, and that’s when I saw the leaf-cutter ant nests. They were everywhere. We just gathered around one giant ant hill, and I got to learn so much. It’s really nice to have Scott as the ant expert because I got to hear a lot of information, such as the fact that no one has actually seen a leaf-cutter queen ant and a male ant mate in the air before. I also learned that there’s a death chamber for dying ants and used leaf. Scott said that there’s a pheromone that ants emit when they die, and when that pheremone is put on alive ants, other worker ants still move that ant to the death chamber. Pretty Nifty stuff.

I received a suction device where I can collect ants. I hope I get some pretty interesting ants tomorrow!

Uncategorized

turns out that I don’t know anything about ants

Leave a comment

Daily Blog Entry 1:

We are finally here in Belize! I have already had three encounters with ants and I do not really know what they are. I spent quite a while working on my taxon ID card and researching ants, so it is humbling to know that in my first hour in the Belizian nature, I have had three encounters with ants and I was unable to identify all of them. But before we get to the ants, quick debrief of what we did today: We left Hobby at 1:40 and landed a few hours later at Belize City. Claire’s father was the pilot, which was very nifty. Edward, the friendly driver, drove us to a convenient store and then Crystal Paradise Ecolodge, which took around 4-5 hours. We then moved our belongings into the lodge (which is where I saw the first two ants) and had dinner at the lodge (which is where I saw the last group of ants).

All three ants that I encountered were probably of the same genus. They were all about 1-1.5 cm in length, thinner thorax than head and abdomen, no visibly large mandibles but a very noticeable elbowed antennae. I took a picture of the first ant and that had a white/shiny/yellow band around its abdomen. Scott said that those were Ponerine ants that can give very painful stings. Thankfully, I did not touch it. The second type was very large and did not have the band around its abdomen. I think Scott also said they were Ponerine ants as well. The third type was in a group were feeding on a beetle, and I think they are Ponerine ants because they look very similar to the second ones. 

I think the last two ants were of the same species. I never realised how omnipresent ants are and how little I know about them – this will be a very difficult week trying to identify them. I took pictures of the first and the third ant type I saw. Unfortunately, my MacBook does not have any portals to insert an SD card, so uploading photos will be a hassle.

I hope to be able to identify those ants later and get a better understanding of how to identify ants. (Also quick shout out to Scott for being the Ant man and for helping me to loosely identify the ants).

Uncategorized

Are we almost there yet?

Leave a comment

I’ve been telling my friends all about EBIO 319 and I can’t believe its almost here. In Belize, I’m expecting to see some cool birds in the rainforest. I went to Borneo with my father and brother two years ago. We hiked through the rainforest and climbed up an observation deck to look at birds. I was really excited to see a rhinoceros hornbill bird or any other tropical bird, but I didn’t get to see anything. We waited for half an hour for birds, but nothing happened. It was very disappointing so I hope that won’t happen this time! I’ve spent a lot of time working on the presentations and reading the chapters, so I think I’m pretty prepared on the academic side of things. In terms of mental preparation, I’ve prepared myself to smell like a middle school boy after P.E and be really sweaty, smelly, and sticky. I’ll try my best to keep the complaining at a minimum. I spent 7 years in Singapore so I should be pretty used to being gross and sweaty. I’m very excited to be able to just immerse myself in nature and being able to gain a new appreciation for the various types of insects and fish. I start an internship the morning after I come back from Belize, so I hope to be able to just enjoy this course and get the most out of the experience.