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Ant Day

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Today we focused on some of the many ant species that habitate the Chiquibul forest. The cecropia tree has a symbiosis with azteca ants, which protect the tree from predators in exchange for shelter and food. We spent the morning testing a few hypothesis about how the cecropia trees avoid herbivores before they are colonized by the protector ants. 

This afternoon we excavated three leaf cutter ant colonies of different maturities. Once a queen colonizes a nest after a nuptial flight she can live for 20 years reproducing, expanding the colony until there are millions of ants at any given time. There are tunnels underground leading to chambers full of the ant’s fungus garden and pupae. The youngest ones are fairly small, but once they are 10 years old they get huge, with tunnels the width of your arm full of soldier ants ready to come out and attack you when you disturb them. They have quite a pinch and we were all thankful for our rubber boots today.

We had an unexpected amphibian sighting once we got back to our housing; one of the bedrooms had a large frog on a bedpost. I caught it and took it outside to get a closer look and try to identify it. It hiccuped in my hand, puffing out its chest, in protest to its capture. The frog was dark green and brown, with some stripy markings around the forelegs. I couldn’t examine its back without it jumping from my hands so I didn’t get a clear look. It was about 2.5 inches long with horizontal pupils, bronze irises and toe pads. The toe pads indicate that its a treefrog and since there aren’t many in the area I would have to guess that it was another common Mexican treefrog, based on size and color. I released it into the trees after a minute or two to not cause it too much distressed and it leapt from my hands with a defiant squeak.

Digging leaf cutter ant nest

Sophia Streeter

5-20

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Missed Adventures, Day 8

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By now I am sure you’ve read everyone else’s blog posts and know that we didn’t get to go to the ATM cave yesterday because our van was five hours late. Since we run on group time (meaning we are always never on time), I figured today that we definitely wouldn’t be leaving at 7am. Time passed by and then we learned that they would pick us up at 11am. So we took another tour around Las Cuevas and got back and listened to another taxonomic briefing. Then I went and rinsed off in the shower, which puzzled a lot of people because we were supposed to go caving that day. But somewhere deep inside I figured the clock had time out and we probably wouldn’t be going to the cave.

And I was right. Everything got mixed up but in the end I enjoyed a nice glass of iced chocolate milk and bought a lot of snacks. We arrived at our lodging for the night and proceeded to our night tour at the zoo. I’ve been to this zoo before during the day and loved it. We met Indy the tapir. I must say I thought his penis was another foot, and then I realized that it is actually that large. I’ve met Lucky Boy the black jaguar before and things don’t really change. We saw the ocelot, who was pretty irritable and I guess you could say he was growling and starting making “nom nom nom” sounds as he ate his strips of meat. We also met some pacas (adorable) another jaguar, some owls, and a margay. I was also attacked by a wasp during the tour and it crawled down my shirt and stung me. I killed it of course and squashed it in my panic and shook out my shirt. I can say that I am a little traumatized.

No bees today! Most likely because we were driving around all day. We leave for the reef tomorrow. Super excited!

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We had to wait in our van for 45 minutes while our tour guides, Adrienne and Scott, and the van driver talked out what we were going to do since we were five hours late. Meanwhile we were contemplating what we were going to do if the driver actually kicked us out!
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Camera Traps

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Our 13 mile hike in the rainforest, up and down hills, was the most physically exerting thing I’ve done in a long while, but it left me full of endorphins and with pleasantly sore muscles. We hiked all this way to set up 12 camera traps that will take pictures every time they detect movement over the next 5 days, until we collect them again. Hopefully this will let us see some of the more shy animals of the rainforest. We also found several interesting insects, spiders, and birds over the course of the day.

Amphibian update: we found some tadpoles in the muddy reservoir left by a car tire. Not an ideal spot but the dry season is coming to an end and there aren’t many options left for frogs and toads in the area, who need water to reproduce. More excitingly, I saw my first treefrog of the trip this afternoon. Adrienne masterfully caught it and held onto it long enough for me to snap a picture and identify it. After some consideration we positively identified it as a Common Mexican treefrog. It was large, at least 2.5 inches, and a shade of grey with green tinges. Once we were able to see its back, its species was obvious. It had the telltale darker splotches on a grey-brown body. At first its dark-eye patch threw me off but amphibians can be highly variable in coloration within a population and aren’t always a reliable form of identification.

Map of Las Cuevas

Mexican Treefrog

Sophia Streeter

5-19

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Caracol & Las Cuevas

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Today we completed our journey south-west through Cayo and into the Chiquibul rainforest. On our way to our home camp at Las Cuevas Research Station we took an anthropological detour through Mayan ruins. We were guided through the Caracol Archeological site and climbed up and in and down the ruins and tombs. Even though it was mostly overgrown and covered by years of sediment the pyramidal structures still stood and it was easy to image the bustling metropolis it was 2000 years ago. Hearing about the (hypothesized) reasons for its decline was ominous; overpopulation, agricultural collapse, drought… sound familiar?
Even though its citizens are long gone the city is still full of life. Almost everyone found an animal from their taxonomic group—bromeliads, philodendrons, birds, mammals, and a plethora of plants. The highlights included an edible red fruit (you suck on the seeds but don’t eat them, looks like gunk, tastes like papaya), toucans, a coati and a blue crowned mot-mot.
Sadly there were not any amphibians around for me to identify. The area was much too dry to be a suitable habitat. Amphibians require a damp habitat because they experience high evaporative water loss through their skin. Most also require water for reproduction. Caracal was in the forest but it was not dense enough to retain the moisture necessary for most amphibians. Here in the forest surrounding Las Cuevas should be a much more habitable medium and we can expect to see a variety of species in the next few days.

Caracol

Sophia Streeter

5-18

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The beginning

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Travel was smooth and breezy. It’s amazing to have everything all planned out for you so you don’t have to worry about transportation or lodging or food, I almost feel spoiled. Now I can worry about more important things- like tropical field biology.

We are staying at a beautiful lodge called Crystal Paradise and already have seem a surprising amount of flora and fauna, considering we’re not even in the jungle yet! In terms of amphibians there have been two cane toad sightings. I will try to get some pictures to share with you as we go on. There have been insects, arachnids, a large boa (I get to check that off my Belize wishlist now), and a plethora of trees and flora. The scenery was beautiful driving across the country, but I admit it mostly just looked like a bunch of trees and green stuff to me. I was glad for Sam’s lecture on the rainforest canopy, which was very helpful in starting to separate out the different kinds of plants and their relationship to one another.

Cane Toad

Sophia Streeter

5-17

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Day 8

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As per usual, something went wrong with the van. Our original plan for the day was to leave Las Cuevas early in the morning in order to make it to ATM cave for a swim and exploration. Then, we were going to drive across Belize to stay at the zoo. This is not how our day went at all.

Most of the morning was spent sitting on the porch, waiting for our van to show up. This went on for several hours. Rather than spend all our time waiting, we got the opportunity to tour other parts of the Las Cuevas research station and learn about their ongoing projects.

When our van finally arrived, we all climbed gratefully into its semi-air-conditioned space. Unfortunately, our massive time delay prevented us from being able to visit the ATM cave.

However, we did end up going on the night tour of the Belize zoo. Not only did we get to see two of the eighteen jaguars that they have, but we got to see margays, ocelots (so noisy), two types of owls (Rice!), a tapir, and three kinds of snakes.

Overall, I remain optimistic about the rest of the trip. Each thing that goes wrong does not faze our group at all. The new challenges that the reef will pose to us will be just new bonding experiences for us.

 

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Pre-departure fugue

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The night before a big trip never phases me the way it should. I pack, I sleep, and the next day I find myself somewhere else and just roll with it. I always feel like I lack the appropriate level of enthusiasm (whatever that it), but it beats travel anxiety so I don’t worry about it too much. The enthusiasm returns once I’ve settled in, and all is well. I worry and pick over everything else but travel is like “well, I guess I’ll get there somehow.” Perhaps this is some kind of physiological adaptive response to environmental stressors…

I look forward to returning to Central America in biological pursuits once again. During my 5 week conservation trip in Panama I really only worked with two species– Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and Hawksbill sea turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata)–so the breadth of my experience is limited (a generous way of putting it). I feel like I’ve barely skimmed the surface of all there is to know tropical field biology. I’ve read all kinds of books and primary literature, looked at pictures and diagrams, even experienced it first-hand in some of my trips abroad but it still feels like I know squat. There is just too much cool stuff!

Speaking of too much stuff, fingers crossed that we don’t encounter anything I don’t have on my taxonomic ID cards. Annelids and hydroid identification is fairly simple, but amphibians are a whole other story. There is clearly one very good way to avoid detection by predators because there are some pretty similar-looking frogs out there. Also I worry that some of my sources may have been a bit dated (2000 isn’t that long ago, right?). I tried to mentally absorb as much information as I could from a bunch of sources in the hope that some of it will be useful. Despite all this I genuinely enjoyed reading about amphibians even though I’ve never had any particular interest in them before. I look forward to developing even more new interests during this trip.

Sophia Streeter

5-16

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Day 7

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On our last day at the Las Cuevas Research station, we spent most the morning and afternoon retracing our steps from the first day. All of this was in the effort to understand if species richness differed between natural and man-made clearings. I am proud to say that the hike was not nearly as exhausting as it was at the beginning. I also got the change to see an example of epiphytic Encyclia cochleata, the national flower of Belize. I think I have achieved my peak of epiphyte. It was one of the most satisfying moments of this trip to date.

After cleaning up and showering we went over to the classroom for taxonomic presentations, my presentation on NTDs/ethnobotany, and to look at what our camera traps caught. I really enjoyed my topic, especially because I had taken a research seminar in the previous semester on the topic. We then got into an interesting discussion on how Brazil should manage the threat of Zika and the upcoming influx of people for the Rio de Janiero Olympics.

Our pictures from the camera trapping experiment were a bit disappointing until we got the last one. On its memory card, we found both and ocelot and a WHAT WAS THIS. Overall, our data set was way to small to be able to really tell anything about the preferences of animals in the Chiquibul for man-made or natural clearings. All in all, these past experiment (while they don’t yield statistically significant data) are doing a great job of showing me how to trouble shoot ecological/evolutionary experiments.

On to Glovers Reef!

 

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Day 6

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Today was not a great day for epiphytes. This isn’t because they weren’t out there, but just because we spent most of the day inside. Our main project was to interpret the results of our pitfall traps. After collecting the vials, we headed back to the classroom to assess the morphospecies found. Our hypotheses focused on whether species abundance and richness were different in the canopy versus the forest floor and whether or not canopy species were more attracted to a nitrogen source (our urine).

The first question was more straightforward than the second. We could clearly see that both abundance and richness were greater for the forest floor. However, teasing apart the question of nitrogen limitation in the canopy versus the forest floor proved to be much more complicated. In the end, we choose to represent the difference between the by creating data points by subtracting the amount of arthropods in the water from the urine (for canopy and ground). Upon discussing the report with Scott and Adrienne, we found many ways in which our work could be improved upon. Two of the most crucial changes we made was to use a proportion rather than a subtraction and to pool all samples we took (broadening our community). This refining process is both interesting and productive; many new research directions came from our discussion.

At the end of the day, we all went on a night hike. The difference in number of species we saw was really noticeable. As for epiphytes, I certainly saw them, but am becoming more and more convinced that this group is hard to pin down for any specific geographical location. So many of the factors of what species ends up where is tied to the specific characteristics of the niches of the Chiquibul forest. In the future, I would be interested took look into the literature for information on niche exploitation by epiphytes. I think it would greatly increase my comprehension of the epiphyte landscape.

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Everything Goes Wrong (pt. 2)

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Mishaps and miscommunication have become somewhat regular on this trip, and today’s adventure was no exception. We were supposed to say our forlorn goodbyes to Las Cuevas and the Chiquibul at 7am this morning and set off for a day of archaeological exploration at the ATM Cave near San Ignacio. But in true TFB fashion, absolutely nothing went according to plan.

After several hours of suspense, it became evident that our van was nowhere near Las Cuevas. Instead of wasting away the morning though, we learned about the fascinating conservation issues surrounding endangered scarlet macaws in the Chiquibul and enjoyed a surprisingly tasty lunch of peanut butter and cheese sandwiches (see me for more details on said sandwich). Our trustworthy van and driver arrived only 5 hours after its scheduled arrival, and so we set off by noon for our next caving experience.

Alas, my hopes of spelunking were dashed; we skipped the ATM cave and instead enjoyed an afternoon of wifi, souvenirs, and fresh fruit juices of the Orange Gallery. Despite our misadventures, our day ended with an incredible nocturnal tour of the Belize Zoo.

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Morelet’s crocodile.

Among reptiles, we were shown both a Morelet’s crocodile (Crocodylus moreletii) and an American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus). The American crocodile was substantially larger and had a much longer snout, although both were definitely creatures to avoid in the dead of night. We were also able to see a boa constrictor (Boa constrictor), which paled in comparison to the boa we saw on day 1, as well as a Central American rattlesnake (Crotalus durissus) and a yellow-jawed tommygoff (Bothrops asper). Given that we didn’t find many of these species in the forest, this was a great opportunity to see them up close.

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Ocelot jumping to catch meat.

And in case the reptiles weren’t charismatic enough, we also had the chance to see the different cat species found in Belize and a Baird’s tapir. If you were wondering, a hungry ocelot sounds a bit like an angry housecat, jaguars can be trained to do somersaults, and tapirs enjoy being fed carrots.