Day 4: May 18th 2018, Las Cuevas

Bird watching started at 5:30 today, so that means we got those 30 extra minutes of sleep!  I thought I heard male howler monkeys calling this morning, and loudly raced out of bed.  Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be anything, and I woke up my roommates in the process but at least we were up.  During bird watching, we saw Red Lord Parrots, Oropendola, and a pair of Scarlet Macaws. Then, breakfast was at 7, and we were off to the lab for our second experiment. 

For our second experiment, we created two sources, water and urine (nitrogen source), one set for the canopy and one for the forest floor per student.  The sources will act as traps as organism fall in them, allowing us to collect and analyze them.  We aimed to test the effect of limiting nutrient (nitrogen) differences between the canopy and forest floor on insect biodiversity.  We are expecting to observe nitrogen as a greater limiting nutrient in the canopy as compared to the forest floor. We placed each of our vials in 10 different locations as to test this with the understanding that the water would help to understand the richness of species in the canopy vs the floor, and the urine would act as a nitrogen source drawing proportionally more organisms into it the urine trap the water on the same level (canopy or forest).  We will go back and collect the traps in two days and analyze our results then.

We had lunch around noon which was a great soup and rice.  After we got to our surprise activity… caving! We got all geared up and headed down to the cave with our guide, Pedro.  At the massive entrance their were swallows fling about, that I almost mistook for bats.  It was explained to us that the Mayans used to use this cave, believe both that Chaac, the water god, live in the caves, and that the caves were the entrance to the underworld.  As we entered, we saw amazing stalactite and stalagmite formations.  The ground was muddy with bat guano, but areas with high concentrations were full of life when you look closer.  There were many cave insects, including millipedes and pill bugs.  The organisms here often lack significant pigmentation, eyes, and have longer appendages, making for some very interesting sights.  We also saw several bats! I believe there was at least two species, one that eats insects, Glossophaga soricina, and one that eats fruit that I could not identify.  They were flying and screeching about as we shown lights on them.  We even saw a cluster of baby fruit bats hanging from the ceiling with the adults flying around them.  As we went deeper into the caves, we saw also saw an ant nest and a white cave crab.  

After dinner, we had our lectures including Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), Orthoptera (crickets, grasshoppers, etc.), and Biodiversity in Cave which I presented.  After that, we observed a frog, a gecko and a long-nosed beetle insect that actually played dead!  It was a thoroughly engaging day.