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Welcome to Peelize

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

Day 4: The Caves Cave

When we woke up today, we were handed two tubes and were asked for a urine sample. Many of us were, understandably, quite confused. Later, we learned that our samples were a great source of much-needed nitrogen in the rainforest. We placed our samples in different locations across the forest, both on the ground and in the trees.  We will later collect our tubes and see what type of insects were collected in the tubes, which they wanted to access for the nitrogen content. Insects drowned in urine is something I would have never imagined before, yet here we are.

While we were placing our samples across the forest, I tried to look for the Madre de cacao tree. Madre de Cacao means mother of cacao, because this tall-ish tree is usually grown next to quite short cacao trees, who prefer the shade, therefore “mothering” the cacao trees. I have seen its pods in many different areas, some with seeds still intact, but I have yet to identify exactly what the tree looks like. A lot of the tree leaves here have the same general oval shape, so its somewhat hard to differentiate between similar trees, especially when their trunks are covered by moss and lichens and you can’t really tell what they look like underneath. However, with the help of a field book, I was finally able to identify the source of all the pods.

After lunch, we went to Las Cuevas Cave. Las Cuevas means the caves in Spanish, so the name of this cave is essentially The Caves Cave. There were no trees inside the cave. However, we did see lots of ancient Mayan pottery, a human femur bone and many, many bats. There was a whole family bats that were all clustered together. They probably got scared with we all came in to the cave loudly with our bright headlights, because they all flew away. Many bats mean that the floors and wall were covered in guano, or bat feces, which we had to crawl through to access several parts of the cave.

Kristen giving us a lecture about cave life while inside a cave

I think I’ll start to feel clean again after about 34 more showers.

Turtles can glide

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:

Red and Yellow Kill a Fellow

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

Day 3: Fruit Hoarding

It’s a little strange to come to a rainforest and see bare trees. After all, you probably would expect rainforests to stay lush and green all year round. Once you go bird watching, however, you find that the dry season is actually useful. Its really easy to see any bird that would ordinarily blend into the leaves sitting on a perfectly bare branch.

Macaws in a bare tree
Waking up at 5:30 to watch birds requires a few mini naps

Today we were able to use our Science Skills™ to develop a research project, complete with question, hypothesis and methods. The perfect triad for beginning any scientific investigation. We were wondering how human trails and roads affect the presence of mammals, more specifically, how many mammals come through a human made trail, how many species and how many individuals of each species. So we set up motion-sensing cameras all around the field station, both on and off trails, and in a few days we’ll see what type of mammals show up in our pictures, and see if our theory is correct.

Sam tied his Camera trap to this Give and Take Palm- which is called this because the leaves have medicinal properties, hence the give, but you need to climb up the trunk that looks like this, hence the take

During our hike, I collected many different fruit and leave samples that I found on the forest floor that looked interesting to me. I found a green and brown round shaped fruit, a little smaller than a baseball. They might be the same fruit in different stages of maturity, but to confirm this I need to open the fruit, look at the seeds and do some research, which I intend to do as soon as possible.

I don’t know what type of plant this was (probably some type of epiphyte) but it was pretty!

The director of the Friends for Conservation and Development NGO (nongovernmental organization), Rafael, talked to us about what makes the Chiquibul unique, and about all the different threats that are posed to it. It’s very worrying to hear that this beautiful region may soon be deforested and developed. But hopefully, our friends at Friends for Conservation and Development can success in their quest to protect the magically Chiquibul, and all of the trees that keep this ecosystem alive.

Oh also we saw a 25 foot wide leaf cutter ant hill and an enormous boa constrictor. I gotta say the ant hill was slightly more threatening to me than the boa constrictor.

 

Between an ant hill and a boa constrictor

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.

Leeches :(

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!

Day 2: THAT is Mahogany!

Today we walked 6.11 miles (according to my Fitbit). I have been told that we will walk more.

We went to a location on the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve called Rio on Pool, which means “river on pools.” I took many pictures of the pools and waterfalls (see pictures above). While doing some research on the trees of Belize prior to this course, I was pretty surprised to discover that a Tropical region had pine trees, let alone entire pine forest mountains. Unfortunately, a lot of the mountain’s pine trees had been destroyed by an infestation of the southern pine bark beetle, as well as frequent fires.

Fire damage in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest 🙁

After Rio on Pool, we drove to an ancient Mayan ruin site called Caracol (which means conch shell in Spanish). We learned a lot about Mayan history, and saw some of the king’s and elite’s housing structures. We then climbed an enormous pyramid, and we could see Guatemala from the top of the pyramid. It was amazing when we were able to talk to people who were still on the ground- they could hear us and we could hear them, even though we were pretty high up.

Taken from about 1/2 way up the pyramid
Me (and Elena)
The Chicle tree (Manilkara zapota), used to make chewing gum. The slashes on the trunk are evidence that chicle has been extracted.
A freshavocado! A avocado tree (Persea americana)

We then drove to Las Cuevas Research Station, which we will be staying at for a few days. It was built in 1994 by the British Army and is used exclusively for research and not open to the public. It is an amazing opportunity to be able to stay here and learn all about the Chiquibul forest and all (read: some) of its inhabitants.

While driving out of Rio on Pool, we saw a logger’s trunk full of mahogany. Yay!

Day 7: 10 Miles and Several Mammals Later…

Blog Post #7

Day 7: 10 Miles and Several Mammals Later…

Written May 22ndat 6:25 pm

This post was meant to be for yesterday (May 21st), but you are about to find out why I haven’t written it until now.

I think we were told to make a scary/confused face

We started the morning at 4:45 am. We wanted to wake up and reach the Bird Tower around early morning light, but the hike up there is extra steep. So we set our around 5:15 am and headed to the trails. Probably one of the steepest (and slipperiest) hikes I’ve ever been on.  I had hoped to see some amphibians since it had rained last night, but unfortunately, none were out. The rest of the day wasn’t successful either, so today’s blog post will just report on my general day.

But the view from the top was gorgeous–the pictures below don’t do it justice. We also climbed into two chambers of a cave along the way 🙂

Then we came back down for breakfast, then went on a 5 mile hike to collect our camera traps. We didn’t view the photos right away because we wanted to wait for nightfall to get the best contrast with the screen.

So in the afternoon, we went to excavate some leaf cutter ant nests (Scott’s favorite) and brought along a few of our new Southern Miss. friends. First, we excavated a one year old nest after much digging on Scott’s and Zach’s (Southern Miss student) behalf. They had a small fungi garden, and we were able to find the queen! (See pic below) She lives for 25 years and all her babies only live for about one, so think of all the millions of eggs she lays in her life (after just one mating flight with stored sperm nonetheless!)

Claire needs to become a hand model 🙂

Then we went to a 15-20 year old nest slightly off trail in the woods. Scott started digging and we all took turns trying to shovel, but the ants just couldn’t seemed bothered. Turns out, we had dug up a dead fungi garden chamber and dumping ground. It was super weird; this was only the second time that Scott dug that up in his entire 17 years of ant experience!

That night, we checked out our camera traps. It was so AMAZING. On the first card that we looked at, there was a tapir taken one night and a jaguar the next night as the immediate next picture!! The shouts and hollers were amazing. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to those pictures right now, otherwise I would include them. For the rest of the pictures, we snapped a coatimundi, a 9-banded armadillo, 2 puma, several peccaries, male curassow, female curassow, and a coral snake. Apparently, this was the best luck in all of TFBs history.

We went to bed pretty late for a 4 am wake up call to leave Las Cuevas… Stay tuned!

Cave + Urine Experiment + Coral Snake = 4.3 miles.

I woke up to people commanding me to pee inside a tube. “50 mills in two tubes” they said. I beat everyone else’s pee in coloration, which I like to think may be indication I have the highest concentration of nitrogen in my urine. And that’s relevant because, Scott tells us, one of the crucial limiting nutrients of the the canopy in tropical rain forests. After about an hour of questions, discussion, and writing in our field notebooks, we narrowed in on what exactly this urine experiment was going to be.

General question: How does different levels of limiting nutrients, such as nitrogen, affect insect biodiversity.

Context: In nutrient-poor soils of the tropical rainforests, nitrogen is often a limiting factor of life. It is more limiting in the canopy.

Main Hypothesis: The species richness in urine traps of canopy will be higher than water traps of canopy. This differential is greater than the same type of differential found in the forest floor, suggesting that nitrogen is more of a limiting nutrient in the canopy than in the forest floor.

After 2 days, we will collect our traps and count the numbers of the insect species we have captured.
For more on our project, please check a later blog post, which will contain our findings.

Also, today I found a bee hive outside of the dining room, with many yellow-abdomen bees coming out. They had all the similar morphological traits of a bee I had on my taxon identification card, but these had white front feet. I will have to look through more identification literature to see which species this is.

EBIO 319 In front of Las Cuevas Cave

The other half of our daytime was dedicated to something that better resembled the night. Walking in complete darkness during our first cave exploration. Las Cuevas (spanish for ‘the caves’) caves, are unlit karst formations that resulted from acidic water cutting through limestone. After many years, a whole underground network of life has formed, including the fertilizing bats who power the cave ecosystem through their feces and the accidental venturers who decay inside after failing to find a way out. Guano, truly, is a a glorified name for bat shit. You know, when people say, “that’s some crazy bat shit”… Well, it turns out that a whole ecosystem inside of the Las Cuevas caves (and many other caves around wthe world) depend on guano, both those of bats, and those from crickets. Cave millipedes ingest and digest guano and without it would not be able to survive. I would like to say more, but the fact on the matter is that we do not konw enough. Life there has been unidentified to a large degree, comparable to the deep sea or even extraterrestial life.

Currently, many explorers in these caves are people who are daring and willing to take on the complete darkness and the scary unknowns that come with being in caves. We were told by Raphael, leader of the Friends of Conservation and Development (NGO in Belize), that “we know that each time someone goes into the cave they find a new species”. At the very least, someone ought to write a post-apocalyptic novel revolving around life in the caves. One of the last things we did in the caves was to use guano mud to write and draw on the cave wall. Having heard stories about the Mayan demise, it makes me wonder, when it comes to cave art, how much we, as a species, has evolved in leaving behind markers of our existence and what, if any, meaning can be derived from our symbolic representation after our species has either evolved or died out.