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We Love Time Designated for Tick Removal!

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May 16, 2019

Today was our first full day at Las Cuevas Research Station, and we actually got to explore the trails here, as we set up seven camera traps (cameras strapped to trees that take photos when motion is detected – we’ll be checking the photos on our last day here). The crazy overgrown trails of the Chiquibul revealed some pretty interesting finds, including a group of curious spider monkeys and several blue morphos!

The sightings that really interested me (of course) were the beetles, my assigned taxon. Some of the more flashy beetles included a metallic wood-boring beetle (likely from the genus Euchroma) with a blue-green metallic body, as well as a large black beetle with a distinct red outline around its thorax and abdomen and vertical ridges along its abdomen only.

But there’s nothing like the feeling of finding a beetle that exactly matches a species from your taxon ID card, and I’m talking not just the kind of beetle, but also its exact position and proportions. This beetle was (drumroll please) Eburia pedestris, a longhorn beetle with four symmetrical yellow spots and long orange antennae and legs.

And believe it or not, all this was worth the ticks! After our hike, we spent around 30 minutes laboriously checking for and removing ticks. Many of us had to stop knowing the unfortunate truth that we may have missed one.

2016

Trekking, Trapping, and Tick-biting

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Day 3 gave us all a true sense of what hard-core field work is like. The entire day was spent hiking through the forest to set up camera traps. Half of the hike was relatively flat, while the other half was filled with steep ups and downs. Overall, we trekked well over 13 miles.

Before heading out on the trails, we had to decide what we wanted to test using the camera traps. By placing camera traps on both human roads/trails and in naturally open areas, we can explore the differences in species composition and richness along man-made pathways and natural areas. This may demonstrate the effects of human interference on these species measures in the Chiquibul.

We saw no mammals on the hike, which was a bit disappointing but not surprising. As a group of 16 tromping through the forest during the dry season, we make quite a bit of noise, and thus animals can move out of sight long before we arrive. In addition, many mammals are most active at dawn, dusk, or night, and thus spotting mammals during day hikes will be more difficult. I am hoping that we will see at least some mammals during night hikes, in the mornings, or in camera trap images. Some animals that we did see included a plumbeous kite, scarlet macaws, morpho butterflies, and nymphs of an unknown bug species.

I had some crazy mishaps during today’s activities. I must have sat on a congregation of ticks at some point during the hike because I was covered in them. Thankfully, not many had actually bitten me, though the ones that had were relatively difficult to find! Then, once we had returned for the day, I discovered a large red rash going down both my legs. We think it’s just heat rash or something similar, as I feel fine otherwise and it isn’t really painful, but definitely counts as a bit of a mishap!