Our morning birdwatching was fairly uneventful unless you’re a really big fan of turkey vultures, and while I don’t have anything against them they’re not very interesting at 5:30 AM. We had a morning lecture on soil, and I learned that dirt and soil are not actually the same thing, and there’s a lot more complexity to soil then I thought. We were given our next activity to compare arthropod abundance in tree canopies versus forest floor and how that changed with nutrient levels provided. Maybe we should have been more suspicious when the professors kept telling us to drink water all morning but they were just getting us ready to provide our nutrients, by peeing into vials then leaving them around the forest. At least carrying around your own pee isn’t as bad when everyone is doing it, and we thankfully made it through without any spills.

After setting that up we had lunch before another activity, this time just a chance to observe some ant behavior. We found a young leaf cutter ant colony, still a single hill and entrance and probably around 1 year old. Once located we dug into the side of it and slowly chipped away at the dirt until we reached the fungus gardens, which were super cool! I’m not sure what type of fungus they’re growing in particular but it looked pretty spongy, at least the parts that weren’t covered in ants. After a few ant bites and some more digging we were even able to find the queen! She was probably three times the size of all the other ants but wasn’t nearly as aggressive, and just kind of sat there as we passed her around. We put her back and sealed up the hole in the side, but that colony wasn’t ever likely to survive for long since it was directly next to a building.

(I will put a picture of me with the queen here once I get it, I’m not sure who’s phone it’s on! Whoops)

We went to find a more established colony, about 3-4 years old and we found one that looked promising, with multiple hills and entrances and air shafts, but once we started digging we didn’t find any ants, and as we kept going it seemed increasingly obvious that the nest had been abandoned for a while. We checked the other side just to be sure and right as we started digging Michael found a squishy lump in the dirt, and after extracting it we found a Mexican burrowing toad! Which Rusty had just told us yesterday was on his wish list of things to see on this trip! It’s the cutest and weirdest frog I’ve ever seen before, it had legs and a face but no neck and it’s body was really just one big lump, and looked kind of liquidy almost but it was just very jiggly and wiggly. We put it back in the hole we found it in and it turned around to face us before using its back legs to start digging itself further into the burrow!

 

After that we had some more lectures before dinner. Then after dinner we did an optional night hike. I’m so glad I went because we saw so many cool things! We walked down to the frog pond, which last we checked had a bunch of tree frog eggs on leaves above what will eventually be the pond when it rains enough. While we were looking around we saw a Morlet’s tree frog! It looks a lot like a red eyed tree frog but darker green with black eyes. I think they’re listed as critically endangered by the IUCN so it was super cool to just run into one out in the wild. While we were taking pictures it jumped right up onto Rusty’s hand, and then onto his head! Maybe it could tell he was the amphibian guy, or he just has very soft hair, regardless we eventually got the frog off his head and back onto a tree.

Soon after that Michael spotted a snake right in the tree that had the frog eggs, and it turned out to be a frog egg eating snake. We watched for a while as it went up and down the branches trying to find the eggs, very slowly moving along because if the tree shakes too much the eggs will fall off the branch onto the ground as a defense mechanism against snakes! While we were watching it slide around someone spotted another Morelet’s tree frog! Seeing one is already amazing but seeing two in the same 20 minutes was crazy! After that one hopped away we saw the snake devour a leaf of eggs before we spotted another snake on some vines behind it. Once we started looking upwards we were seeing snakes everywhere in the canopy, all feasting on frog eggs, which explains why they lay so many.

(Once again, will have to wait on the pictures and hopefully the video for this!)

For fungi today it was a lot of repeats to what we had already seen hiking around, I guess those are more common but something exciting is that we spotted a rounded earthstar!

(It looks really weird, feel free to google it until I get the photos)

It was one of the weird looking fungi on my wish list of mushrooms to see while here, so that’s one down and several more to go, hopefully we’ll have even more luck spotting and running into rare things tomorrow!

Today’s snake sighting total: 9 ish
Night trail snake sightings: 7
Frogs/toads: 3