Daily Blog Entry 4:

We are on a lucky streak with animal sightings. Sam spotted a coral snake, and we all watched it slither in front of us and out of a log. It was very nice to see that the most venomous snake in the Americas is actually a very gentle snake that doesn’t want to bother humans.

Today I learned that soldier ants have the behaviour of just swarming in one direction as a colony looking for food and that they don’t have a formal nest for their colony. That is pretty wild and against my understanding because I’m most familiar with leaf cutter ants who are very organised (task partitioning) and have incredibly complex nest structures.

While walking in the rainforest while securing our nitrogen urine viles, Scott pulled a large plant leaf down to show us something. I initially had no idea what it was, but I saw that it was actually a very loosely constructed ant nest, and the disturbance actually caused the ants in the nest to hurriedly rescue the larvae of their colony- there were a lot of ants carrying white specs heading to the stem of the plant.

The most interesting ant finding of the day was cave ants. I was too busy looking at the bats and admiring the geological structures in the caves for me to even be looking at the ground. I didn’t even know that ants were in caves. When we found the ants in the cave we called Scott over and he excitedly joked “oh new opportunity for a grant” with Pedro, who guided us into the caves. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of the cave ants, but I did take pictures of my art work we left in the most remote chamber of the cave.

pictured below: TFB handling important limiting nutrients