When we woke up today, we were handed two tubes and were asked for a urine sample. Many of us were, understandably, quite confused. Later, we learned that our samples were a great source of much-needed nitrogen in the rainforest. We placed our samples in different locations across the forest, both on the ground and in the trees.  We will later collect our tubes and see what type of insects were collected in the tubes, which they wanted to access for the nitrogen content. Insects drowned in urine is something I would have never imagined before, yet here we are.

While we were placing our samples across the forest, I tried to look for the Madre de cacao tree. Madre de Cacao means mother of cacao, because this tall-ish tree is usually grown next to quite short cacao trees, who prefer the shade, therefore “mothering” the cacao trees. I have seen its pods in many different areas, some with seeds still intact, but I have yet to identify exactly what the tree looks like. A lot of the tree leaves here have the same general oval shape, so its somewhat hard to differentiate between similar trees, especially when their trunks are covered by moss and lichens and you can’t really tell what they look like underneath. However, with the help of a field book, I was finally able to identify the source of all the pods.

After lunch, we went to Las Cuevas Cave. Las Cuevas means the caves in Spanish, so the name of this cave is essentially The Caves Cave. There were no trees inside the cave. However, we did see lots of ancient Mayan pottery, a human femur bone and many, many bats. There was a whole family bats that were all clustered together. They probably got scared with we all came in to the cave loudly with our bright headlights, because they all flew away. Many bats mean that the floors and wall were covered in guano, or bat feces, which we had to crawl through to access several parts of the cave.

I think I’ll start to feel clean again after about 34 more showers.