Happy Sunday everyone! Today’s schedule was a bit different than those of our other days here. The morning began with a short hike along the Maya trail to pick up the pitfall traps that we had set up yesterday and analyzing our data. Specifically, we examined species’ richness and abundance on the forest floor and compared those values to the canopy’s. We also investigated whether there would be greater species’ richness and abundance in the urine vials relative to the water vials in the canopy as opposed to the vials in the forest floor. Interestingly, we found that both richness and abundance were higher in the forest floor than in the canopy and that the abundance in urine was greater than in water in both locations.
Many beetle specimens were collected today (10 species and 18 specimens to be exact) from our pitfall traps! A few of the most interesting were a fairly large beetle of about 3.5 cm long with a shiny black body rimmed with red that I believe may be a female pinching beetle (Lucanus capreolus), a very small slightly shimmery dark brown or olive green color leaf beetle (perhaps either a Dogbane Beetle with scientific name Chrysochus auratus or a type of flea beetle), and a black darkling beetle with a segmented body (species possibly Alobates pennysylvanicus).
As you can see, today was a fairly light day in terms of physical activity, but I am sure we will make up for it with the night hike tonight and especially with collecting all of the camera traps tomorrow. I am excited to see what animals are in the images we’ve captured (hopefully a picture of a jaguar?!?)! Thanks for reading! 🙂
Update: We got to hear from a Ph.D. student named Lauren tonight! She’s currently a little more than halfway through an eight month study here and is using 52 pairs of camera traps to conduct research on carnivorous forest creatures. Also, the night hike along the Maya trail was super cool! We saw tarantulas and other spiders the size of our palms, a cockroach the size of a large mouse, and a coral snake among many other species!
