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Day 3: I Really Like Hemipterans?

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We started the day early with birding and we saw so many birds. There were plumbeous kites, social flycatchers, Montezuma oropendolas, melodious blackbirds, and Red-lored parrots. This is a picture of the tree most of the birds chill in, or at least the one closest to the station.

We went out hiking before and after lunch to set up camera traps. We put half of them on trails and half of them off trail which was difficult, but also pretty fun. I spent a lot of the hike whistling at the birds. I had a great time imitating the calls often rather poorly and hearing them seem to whistle back even though they were just repeating their call regardless of me. It was amazing to see how quickly the forest became super difficult to get through. Along the way, we saw a bunch of these small red bugs that looked like the bugs I work with in my lab red-shouldered soapberry bugs). They were very small and bright red, but we had no clue what they were because we don’t have any books or someone in charge of knowing stuff about true bugs (Hemipterans – an order of insects).

At one of the camera traps, we saw this huge leaf cutter ant colony. It was maybe 20 feet long. We were busy gawking at it when all of the sudden we realized there was a giant boa constrictor behind us. We stood watching it for a while, it was definitely very uncomfortable.

At the last camera trap before lunch, we found these two big bugs on a leaf. They seem to be true bugs (like what I study in my lab at school) but they were way bigger than any bug I’d seen and super brightly colored. I asked everyone who works here if they knew what it was and they all said no which makes me very excited about how rare they are. Sadly the only insect book we have doesn’t even include the order these bugs are in and without internet, I have no way of finding out more about them. For the time being, I’ll just have to settle for measurements and pictures with Sam’s really nice camera. (I have been unofficially anointed as the Hemipteran taxon expert.)

  

Tonight we had a lecture from Raphael Montenaro, the head of FCD, the NGO that runs Las Cuevas. He talked to us a bunch about how they protect and monitor the forest. It was crazy how much work his group was doing that normally would be expected of the government. I also gave my lecture on tropical soils tonight which I felt better about than expected.

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Day 2: Unbelizeable Views and Birds

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We got up around 5 this morning to get headed towards Las Cuevas. I was reminded at breakfast that fryjacks (a sort of fried dough thing) are a-mazing. We left Crystal Paradise Ecolodge soon after breakfast to head to Rio-On Pool and then Caracal.

The Rio-On Pools are a series of small pools connected by small waterfalls and rapids. They were beautiful. We easily spent an hour swimming around in the various pools and slipping down the rocks with the water like a slide. It was gorgeous and picturesque and reminded me of that one episode about the chakras from Avatar the Last Airbender.

From there, we headed to Caracal to see some Mayan ruins. We walked through the rainforest to find ourselves in front of the tallest building in Belize, an old Mayan temple. Climbing up the steps was difficult, they were sooo tall! Coming down was a bit scary, but the view was unbelievable. We could see layers of rolling hills and mountains, far more exciting than the endless flatness back home.

Surrounded by the gorgeous Mayan ruins we saw a ton of birds. There was an entire tree full of Montezuma oropendola nests. Their call was so cool, like a mix of musical scales and water falling onto metal. Their nests were also super cool. They weave their nests out of various fibers and wind up with this mesh sack that hangs from the tree they live in

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A ton will nest in the same tree so it’s almost decorated like a Christmas tree with these brown woven nest-bags. There was also a swallowtail kite circling above us, it was especially apparent because of its scissor-shaped tail.

When we got to the research station, we saw so many more birds. There were social flycatchers, black vultures, and turkey vultures flying around. We also saw a few scarlet macaws. We went on a hike when we got here and could hear a ton of birds, but couldn’t see them through all the trees.

We found out that we wouldn’t have any internet while here, so as you may have noticed, these blogs aren’t going up on time. But family and friends (mom) I promise you I’m doing just fine.

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Day 7: luck of the draw

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Today we did a total of four things, each one more exciting than the last.

In the early morning, we hiked up a very steep hill to the bird tower, a two-story wooden structure that looks out across a huge expanse of raw rainforest. The hike was difficult, but the view absolutely worth it, especially since it was morning and blue mist settled over an endless horizon of canopy. We stayed for a while, then hiked back, stopping at a small cave along the way.

The view from the bird tower. PC: Sam

In the late morning, we set out to collect our camera traps. Though  the hike was long and strenuous, I found three hatched light-blue eggs under a tree slightly off-trail, which was new. Orhoptera wise, I didn’t  see as much as I usually do, but I did see one very large and bright green grasshoppers at the base of the bird tower. Though I didn’t see its wings, I assumed it to be a red-winged grasshopper from the size.

In the afternoon, we went out to excavate leaf-cutter ant hills, led by Scott. The Mississippi group of college-age kids staying with us at Las Cuevas came with us, too. We all watched Scott as pulled out a queen from the heart of a one-year-old leaf cutter ant nest. It was a large and disturbing version of ant that I wasn’t used to, but the whole excavation process was really interesting. We also excavated a much larger (25 feet or so) ant nest, hit a dump tank, and instead got to touch warm, decomposing fungus. During this hike, I did in fact see an actual red-winged grasshopper very up close, since the guy I was walking with saw it and picked it up. It was huge–likely 10 cm across, and flew away almost as soon as it was picked up so I couldn’t get a picture.

In the evening, we finally checked our camera trap cards. Already on the first camera we found a Baird’s tapir, and then, amazingly, a jaguar. All of us collectively screamed at the sight of the rosette patterning. The unbelievable part came later, however, when we caught yet another jaguar on a separate camera trap. Both were absolutely stunning, and I think I screamed louder on the second than the first. We also found three pumas, an armadillo, a coral snake, curassows, and a variety of other animals we hadn’t seen yet. But the jaguars were really the crown jewel of the whole piece.

Jaguar 1
Jaguar 2
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Day 7: Rainforest Traphouse

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We walked 9.49 miles today, the most we have walked in a day thus far. Our morning started off with a very intense hike up to a bird tower, were we got an amazing view of the maya mountains and the chiquibul forest. I noticed a lot of fiddlewood trees had been knocked over, possibly because of the really hard rain yesterday. I was pretty surprised to see this because fiddlewood trees have buttressed roots to help support them and they are supposed to be pretty strong.

Wild Owls spotted from the top of the bird tower
Not a fiddlewood tree, but an example of buttress roots

In the afternoon we went to dig up leafcutter ant colonies with another student group from The University of Southern Mississippi. In one young colony, we were able to see a fungi “farm”, which the ants feed the leaves the collect too and raise the fungi as their food. We were also able to take the queen ant out of the colony, who almost looked like a large beetle.

Fungi farm on a spoon. Yum!

In the bigger colony that we saw a few days ago, we dug up a trash or “compost” chamber, where the ants throw away old fungi, general waste and dead ant bodies. In order to provoke the solider ants to come out so that we could see them, we tapped the trunk of a poisonwood tree growing right in the middle of the colony, so that the vibrations would stir the ants up. I noticed that as the tree was being hit, the bark peeled and exposed the blood red, fleshy inner bark underneath, seeping with white poisonwood sap ( see picture). I wonder why the ants decided to build their nest around something so dangerous, not to mention that there were multiple poisonwood trees growing out of the colony.

Bark of the poisonwood tree

FYI if you ever get poisonwood sap on your skin, the cure is the inner bark of the gumbolimbo tree, with is usually located in very close proximity to the poisonwood trees. I have yet to come up with an explanation as to why this is.

The gumbolimbo tree has reddish bark, antidote to poisonwood sap

After dinner, we took a look at the pictures from the camera traps that we set up on our second day here at Las Cuevas, since we will be leaving this beautiful place tomorrow morning. We were all ASTOUNDED to see 2 jaguars, a tapir, 2 pumas, many peccaries (which are like wild hogs but meaner), an armadillo and several other mammals. Rafael the station manager said that there were so many animals around because the breadnut tree is fruiting, which is a very important source of food for many of the herbivorous and omnivorous animals around here.

A jaguar picture from my camera trap :’)

I am going to miss this place and its vast expanses of more than 320 different species of trees that are able to support all the life in the Chiquibul. All I can say is that I really hope that we as scientists and as beings on this earth realize that majesty and worth of this forest and all its organisms, and that we are able to conserve it for generations to come.

Glovers Reef, we’re coming for ya.

 

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Day 6: Beetles and Breadnuts

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Today we got to go and retrieve our pit fall traps from the forest and see how many insects crawled into the vials. The collecting took a short amount of time- it seems as though we have gotten fitter within the past few days and are now able to trek through the forest swiftly with apt agility. I only stopped to catch my breath twice every ten minutes. Progress!

On our way out, I saw a tree I have never seen before called “Jobillo” (Astronium graveolens). I saw several of the growing along side the main road San Pastor. They are frequently used for wood, like mahogany. We found a brown anole on one of them, and I got the chance to catch it.

A lot of my taxa in LCRS were already labelled

Later in the lab, we needed to inspect the contents of our vials and see if our hypotheses were correct. We assigned each group such as ants, spiders, beetles, etc., to one “expert” (i.e one of us students) who would be able to divided them into “species” based on what they looked like. We came up with 52 unique species across all our samples, including many very large beetles about the size of a half dollar coin.

Our morpospecies chart

We took a lovely break from data analyzing and stood in the afternoon rain. It is only  that we get rained on in the rainforest at least one time. Right afterwards, I looked into some field book and decided that the spherical shaped fruit that I talked about earlier are breadnuts. They are eaten by many animals, such as the peccary, several different birds and deer.

Inside of the spherical fruit I mentioned are these smaller nuts called breadnuts, loved by both people and animals

In our vials, we found more insects in the ground vials than in the canopy vials. We also found more insects in the *hem* nitrogen source *hem* than in the water source in the canopy vials. In the ground vials however, we found more insects in the ground water than in the This indicates that canopy insects are more limited by resources such as nitrogen that ground insects are. The leaf litter and other decomposing matter on the forest floor probably provide the insects and other living things with a source of nitrogen. Later in the evening, we presented the data from our experiment to a student group from the University of Southern Mississippi.

PS: Adrienne, we miss you!

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Day 6: welcome to pee-lize

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This was the only day that was relatively calm so far. Effectively, we only did one activity (which is far less than we usually do) and this was retrieving our samples for our second project on nitrogen limitation in the rainforest. Yes, this is the pee one. After finding and tagging our urine and water vials, we went back to the lab and spent approximately four hours sorting throuhg the insects we found in the liquid, dividing them into different categories based on appearance alone. This meant we were each assigned an insect group, to keep the identification standardized across the whole project.

I was assigned Orthoptera, as this is my regularly-assigned taxon, and this may as well have been the most Orthoptera I saw today. On our morning hike, there were no interesting Orthoptera organisms, though I did catch what seemed like a few quick, small crickets jumping throuhg the leaf litter. The lack of recorded Orthoptera for today may be partially due to the fact our morning hike was short, and I wasn’t paying close and particular attention to the leaves, since we were all preoccuped with collecting our samples.

Halfway through our four-hour analysis, a second group arrived at Las Cuevas Research Station. They were college students, here to study ecology and biology like us. We somehow got offered the opportunity to present our project to them, so we did—standing at the front of the lecture lab, holding a poster titled “To Pee or Not to Pee”, discussing our day-long analysis in front of a group of strangers. They were sympathetic and seemed genuinely interested in our study, which was reassuring and honestly very sweet. It was a good (if not slightly eccentric) introduction to the first outsiders we’d seen in days.

Besides this, it was a quiet day. At about 2 pm, it started raining in traditional rainforest fashion: brief, ephemeral torrents of rain, followed by open blue skies. We all stood on the deck of Las Cuevas and basked in the falling rain.

All of us standing in the rain at Las Cuevas.
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Day 5: creatures of the night

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Today was night hike day.

One of the insane sunsets we saw.

After sunset (pictured above), we had an opportunity to go out into the rainforest, and this was quite the adventure. As you would imagine the rainforest is foreign and unforgiving already in the daytime, but in the nighttime it takes up a different sort of personality—a more threatening one, and for the first time I felt slightly un-safe while cruising the trails. My general disregard for the danger of animals helps me feel safe in the jungle when the sun’s out, but at night even I started feeling hints of fear.

We saw many spiders and many crickets. The crickets were plentiful. I saw at least four that were large, maybe 5 cm, with long antennae often the size of their body. They were shiny and easy to spot in the dark. I also saw a surprisingly large amount of monkey grasshoppers, five in total. This is surprising since grasshoppers tend to be diurnal. I also saw katydid nymphs with very strange morphology, longer-limbed than their adult sizes, pictured to the right next to a monkey grasshopper picture.

One of the many monkey grasshopper I saw on the night hike; note how it’s not as colorful as the ones I saw by day.
A katydid nymph with a very strange pronotum and very long legs and antennae.

Once again there was a moment of total darkness, as we all turned off our lights and stood in the rainforest. It was different from the cave—more alive. We stood in the darkness for a few minutes, and the stars  shone above a lot brighter than they ever are in Houston, or anywhere else. We spent the rest of the night watching the stars off the staircase of the station, talking and listening to the sounds of the rainforest.

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Day 3: Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick

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I honestly don’t know how I hauled my bug bite-riddled butt out of bed to go bird watching this morning at 4:45am, but it happened. We spotted so many parrots and kites perching in the tops of trees. Breakfast was at 6am, and then we headed to the classroom for a meeting to discuss out first project of the trip: camera traps! After a long and intense discussion detailing the methodology of our first experiment, we headed out into the jungle recesses for the second time.

Our goal of the day was to set up our camera traps at strategic locations to hopefully catch some cool shots of rainforest mammals. We tramped through the dense foliage on a path covered with leaf litter and all forms of creepy crawlies that make the forest floor their home.

I was torn between keeping my eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t take even more spills, scanning the area for cool terrestrial animals like snakes or frogs, or watching the skies for butterflies flitting by. I failed miserably on the “not taking a spill” front – I pretty much have a map of bruises.

Today was my first day with the butterfly net! (Peep Elena smoldering in the back.)

I was just a “little* too excited about the butterfly net. The impulse to swing my new toy stick at every flying insect won out over the survival instinct telling me to keep my eyes to the ground. Blue morphos kept flitting tantalizingly near but flying away before I could even get within swinging distance. I’m determined, however! I’m sure that with the amount of shouting I get from the group every time someone spots a blue morpho, I’ll manage to snag one. Maybe. Hopefully.

Despite my lack of success with the blue morphos, I did catch seven butterflies, a pink katydid, and a moth today in my net. I spent a solid half hour in the hot sun of a forest pathway swinging at passing butterflies, perfecting my technique and sweating profusely.

Wouldn’t say I perfected it – not by a long shot – but I did make some pretty neat catches, some of which I’ve inserted here! The brown striped one is a Many-banded Daggerwing, and the other I believe is a species of Swallowtail. They were both zooming down the sides of an open forest path, which is where butterflies tend to be found.

Swallowtail butterfly Many-banded daggerwing

But the star of today’s show was not a Lepidopteran. As we were hacking through the brush to place a camera trap, we came across a magnificent iridescent boa constrictor!! It was coiled in the leaf litter, regarding us with clear annoyance and suspicion. It was a truly beautiful creature. Its scales were brown with darker brown and black splotches, and its entire body gave off an iridescent sheen that reminded me of the surface of soap bubbles. It was probably 5 or 6 feet long. Here it is:

!!!!!!

Dinner tasted so, so good after a long day of meetings, lectures, and hiking. Tomorrow, there will be more. My body is protesting and my brain hurts a little from the sleep deprivation, but I’m ready to tackle the Chiquibul Forest once again.

But first, some sleep.

 

 

 

 

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Day 4: caving as an afternoon activity

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There were two main activites of the day—one involved urine and the other involved feces.

The urine one: we collected our pee in the morning as a nitrogen source to entice the elusive insects of the forest. Essentially, we were comparing the diversity of insects between the canopy and the forest floor. The urine (and a control sample of water) will attract some insects, and we can then quantify the insects and compare biodiversity between the locations.

My Orthoptera of the day were plentiful: a small, striped one that looked like Cornops aquaticum (pictured below) but probably wasn’t because the latter tend to be found in semi-aquatic habitats; a beautiful red-winged grasshopper that I only saw fly away like a bird into the skies, scarlet wings beating; a lovely dull-brown katydid (that I touched! and then immediately un-touched) on a leaf in the jungle; and about four other smaller species that I didn’t know the names of.

A fairly poorly-taken photo of the little cricket Adrienne found on the side of her cup.

The highlight of the day was the caving, which took place in the afternoon. We headed into a local cave that almost no one goes into, and began our trek into the darkness. Honestly, I was more taken by the formations of stalactites and stalagmites (beautiful white crystalline structures, hanging like sharp teeth) than by the tiny biological life forms on the floor (which included worms, millipedes, isopods, ants, the like). There were bats as well, important cave creatures, and we saw a whole flock of baby bats huddled together on the ceiling.

The baby bats huddled at the roof of the cave. PC: Jessica

There was a moment, a very good and unforgettable moment, of total darkness where we all turned off our lights. Something about it was surreal. I grinned the whole time, eyes wide staring into nothing. I swear to you I saw silhouettes of crickets carved into the darkness—this is the level of my imprinting.

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Day 3: serpentine king of the jungle

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WE SAW A SNAKE TODAY. A very large one. Boa constrictor. Maybe 5 feet? Very pretty, just laying on the ground across from a massive leaf-cutter ant’s nest.

So I think that’s really it for me—that’s all I really came to see, thanks very much. Seeing a snake in the wild is always a thrill, but a boa constrictor in the rain forest is just an unparalleled delight. I do admit the whole experience threw me right back into my on-and-off obsession with herpetology, and I spent the next few hours rolling over logs in the vague hope I’d see another slither out.

The boa constrictor we saw in the middle of the jungle.

We encountered the boa while setting out the camera traps, which was our main project of the day. The project required that we set one camera facing the trail and another paired camera a few minutes off-trail, and this was where the real adventure was at. With Scott machete-ing a path through the thick jungle underbrush and blazing our trail, I felt like a proper Indiana Jones and decided right then to buy a machete as soon as the opportunity arose. The first time we went off trail I spotted my prettiest Orthotera yet—a lubber grasshopper nymph, about 2 cm across, black with abstractly placed yellow and orange stripes. I caught it with a jar, and have it sitting atop my dresser right now, awaiting my Orthoptera lesson tomorrow where I’ll show it off. I’ve attached a picture of it and the quick sketch I made of its patterning. Additionally, someone else found a pink oblong-winged katydid (and as you know, katydids are by far my favorite Orthoptera). Apparently these are genetic mutants, and rare to find in the wild. I kept it for a while, watched it actively defecate in the jar, and then released it after feeling bad that I’d left it in a glass case filled with its own feces. I took a few pictures of it, and managed to snap the only actually-good, well-focused photo I’ve taken so far.

The rare pink katydid we caught on the edges of the road.
A lubber grasshopper nymph looking very pretty in this jar.

As of yet I have not touched an Orthoptera, and this is starting to weigh on me psychologically. I feel slightly like an unloving mother. Maybe tomorrow the resolve will strengthen, but no promises.