Monthly Archives: May 2018

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Day 6: Crap Kingdom Pt 2: Urine Trouble

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I woke up again at 6:15 to finish my blog from the previous day and go birding. We ate a quick breakfast and met outside to regroup before the collection of our urine samples. Before we left, we read sections of the novel Crap Kingdom, which we found in the book exchange in the lab, which was entertaining because it was so bad. We left for our hike and collected our urine samples one by one while making sure to label our samples. We saw a smoothed anole, a Gasterocanthis cancriformis (a type of orb weaver spider) and a jumping spider, all of which were chilling in the leaf litter.

Gasterocanthis cancriformis

 

We came back and began sorting through our samples. We used a fish net as a sieve to catch the bugs and sorted through them using microscopes to identify the morphospecies. We all separated our tasks and worked on the poster while sorting through the species. We took a quick break to play in the rain for a while before getting back to work.

We finished our poster while two new groups came in: one was from the Belikan Beer Company and the other was from University of Southern Mississippi. We finished our poster and were asked whether we wanted to present to the other college group. After deliberation, we decided to and presented for all 25 of them. Elena started the presentation with Welcome to Pee-lize so it went really well. After presenting, we went to dinner and ate beans, tortillas, and potato salad. We did our lectures with Kristen covering mammals, Chloe covering reptiles, and Sam talking about tropical diseases. We all went to the lab and headed to bed after working on blogs and notebooks.

Arachnids found: Gasterocanthis cancriformis- small white morph, found on underside of a leaf found in leaf litter of 50-hectare plot; Jumping spider- green spider, jumping around in the leaf litter of 50-hectare plot; Florida bark scorpion- large black with red/brown legs, found on deck outside lab caught in jar by Scott.

All of these were expected

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Day 5: We turn the Chiquibul into a Tropical Rave Forest

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I woke up bright and early at 6:15 again, as I’ve taken to for every day of this trip. After spotting a chachalaca and more oropendolas, we had a breakfast of eggs, fryjacks, and beans. After that, Scott gave us our briefing for the day over hurricane gaps and their affect on the abundance of pioneer species if trees that fall have new growth or not. After deciding as a group that we would try to compare the growth of pioneer species on new growth trees vs dead trees, we headed out on the shortcut trail. After an hour of looking at the hurricane gap, we decided that our question was almost impossible to answer so we decided to compare richness in gap areas and nongap areas instead.

We went down the gap and took five samples and then took five more samples in nongap areas on the rest of the shortcut path and the bird trail. For the samples we threw a quadrant of four white pipes and collected all the leaves in the quadrant. Along the way we spotted a hooded basilisk, two Florida bark scorpions (one with babies on her back) and a few species of harvestmen that I had couldn’t identify but were cool. We came back to the station and had a nice fried rice lunch. We headed to the lab and began working on a poster to present our data. We sorted the leaves into morphospecies and drew up the poster before presenting to Scott.

A Slightly Blurry Harvestmen

 

An Unidentified Green Spider

After a short break, we headed to the classroom for lectures. Sam presented on bees and Jessica presented on amphibians before I presented on auditory and visual communication. At one point during this talk, Adrienne threw her notebook at me after implying that she and Scott were old for not knowing the ultimate sexy song, “Careless Whisper”. So all in all, lectures went well.

 

After dinner, we went on our first night hike to the frog pond and the Mayan Trail, which Pedro joined us on. We saw many cockroaches, white-lipped turtles, wolf spiders, a baby red-backed coffee snake. We turned off all our lights and stayed quiet for a few minutes to see and hear what the rainforest truly is at night, which lasted like five seconds until I put my flashlight under my light blue water bottle so that Elena and I could have a forest rave. We came back and looked at the stars and saw a large wolf spider with an egg sac under the cedar tree. We all showered and worked on our notebooks until we all headed to bed.

Arachnids spotted: harvestmen along every trail-unidentified species but had a very ovular body and differing body lengths; 2 Florida bark scorpions on a log near hurricane gap, one with babies on her back; Many different types of wolf spiders on all trails-notably large one with egg sac underneath cedar tree near dorms. Also, a large one with a yellow abdomen on a leaf in the Monkey Trail; A few furry green spiders with striped legs on tree trunks along all trails- unidentified but had ovular webs

All of these were expected but I was unable to identify a lot of the species and occasionally not even the family so I’ll have to find out more when we have internet.

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Day 4: You Belong with TFBs: Taylor Swift’s World Tour Brings Her to the Chiquibul

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After a slightly more restful night, I woke up at about 6:15 AM and got ready for the day. I chilled on the birding deck for a while before eating a little breakfast. The main issue with the morning was that we had to chug a ton of water to get hydrated for peeing in two vials for our leaf litter experiment. It took me an hour and three water bottles, but I eventually did it. We discussed our plans for the leaf litter pea traps and set off down the 50-hectare trail for our experiment.

We set each trap 100 feet apart on the two segments of the 50-hectare plot. Each of us handled our own pee and buried one in the floor and one tied to a tree, with a water trap next to each. On the trail we ran into a red-banded coral snake, a tailless whip scorpion (Taylor Swift Scorpion), and plenty of blue morphos. We spent the entire morning setting the traps and came back for lunch, where we had broth and rice. I’m still having trouble eating but I was able to get a more of this down.

The Infamous Taylor Swift Spider

We left at 1:20 for caving, after many warnings about how gross we were about to get. Pedro lead us through the nine chambers of the cave, which was covered in guano and mud. Inside, we saw many troglobites, bats, a few other smaller species of tailless whip scorpions, Mayan pottery, and tree roots. We came back after exploring the entire cave, we headed back, showered, and went for dinner.

After dinner, we had out lectures on butterflies and moths (Veronica), Orthoptera (Andressa) and Cave biology (Kristen) Afterwards, a lot of us headed down to the dining room to work on our notebooks and blogs before heading back to sleep.

Arachnids seen: tailless whip scorpion on log of the flagpole of 50 hectare plot that we picked up with our notebook; 2 smaller species amblypygids (unknown name) in the cave on a rock close to each other; Baby Florida bark scorpion in the cracks of the deck of Las Cuevas; Mexican Red Rump Tarantula in its burrow outside the dorms; Unknown large brown spider outside our door- Andressa caught it in a jar; Very large Florida bark scorpion inside the middle sink of the bathroom- fled into the sinkhole

All of these were pretty expected, though the scorpions and the tailless whip scorpions did kind of spring up on us.

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Day 3: We Got a Few Ticks Up Our Sleeves

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I woke up bright and early at 5:15 to bird watch, where we saw oropendolas, a flock of Red Lore parrots, and a friendly bee that loved Elena’s hair. All these sightings were pretty expected but were really cool nonetheless. We ate a nice breakfast of eggs, beans, and journey cakes which I didn’t really eat because I’m still feeling a little queasy. We went up to the lecture hall and Scott gave us a briefing on Camera Traps. We had a quick discussion on some ideas for the traps and, after a long deliberation, we decided on testing how the presence of trails affects mammal presence and abundance.

An Orb Weaver Spider Web Chilling in The Trees

We set off on our hike at 9:30ish and headed down the Monkey Trail, up the Saffron Trail and then down the San Pastor road. Along the way, we ran into a boa constrictor chilling on the forest floor and a huge leafcutter nest, which gave all of us a jump. We came back for lunch, ate some rice and plantains, and headed back out on the 50-hectare plot. We set up our last two camera trap pairs and spotted a zombie ant on a fern. We came back, I showered quickly, then Rafael M. director of the FDC gave us a talk on the conservation efforts on the region, which was really fascinating. We ate dinner and headed to the lecture room for talks, which I gave on arachnids, Elena gave on ants, and Claire gave on the Paradox of Tropical Soils. Afterwards, we all headed to the dining room to work on these blogs!

Arachnids spotted: a wolf spider in the leaf litter of the Saffron Tree-unidentified species; Wolf spider mother on San Pastor Road, spotted by Adrienne with eggs on her back; Unidentified red mite on breakfast table; Many many chigger bites on Veronica, Jessica, and Adrienne (RIP); Almost everyone got a tick bite, including me, under my watch – they hurt; Red Rumps in the clearing by the lecture hall that scurried back into their holes after they saw us.

Can you spot the spider?

All of these are expected, unfortunately, but still really cool.

 

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Day 2: Being Rio On Fleek

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We woke up bright and early at 5:30 AM, even though it definitely didn’t feel that early at all. We got ready, had breakfast, and packed up to drive to our next destination.

First, we stopped at the Rio On pools,

The Rio On Pools

where we had a lot of fun tumbling down the waterfall slides and swimming in the small pools at the base of each waterfall. That is, until we found out that there were leeches in the pools (I was bitten 4 times). We still had fun in the pools though, even doing a train down one of the waterfalls. We got out, changed, and went back into the bus for the next leg of our journey.

Wolf Spider Hiding in the Leaf Litter of Caracol

We arrived at Caracol at about 11 and our tour guide Leo gave us a tour of the Mayan ruins. Along the way, we ran into some cool organisms, including black Howler Monkeys, Oropendola birds, wild avocado, and more. We ate a quick lunch and hopped into the van to go to Las Cuevas

We arrived at Las Cuevas around 4 and met the station manager Rafael, his wife Angelica (in charge of kitchens) and Pedro (the assistant manager) After a quick orientation and some scarlet macaws, we put our stuff up and took a quick hike around the station. Along the way, we saw leaf cutter ants, give-and-take palms, parrots, and a few others. We headed back to the station, ate dinner, and listened to Claire give a talk on birds, Ceyda give a talk on trees, and Chloe give a talk on the canopy. After that, I showered and got ready for tomorrow!

Arachnids: This morning I saw a small garden spider in the bushed of the ecolodge along with his web. I wasn’t able to identify it but it was 5mm and a transparent green in color, with a long ovular. We saw many Mexican Red tarantula webs at the bases on trees near the Mayan plaza though we didn’t get to see the actual organisms and that wold spider above in the leaf litter. Leo gave us information about the mating dances of the males which was fascinating. At Las Cuevas, we saw two Mexican red rumps in the grass outside our lodgings after dinner as they scurried into their burrow. We expected to see a few here so it was unsurprising to find them.

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I cANT Belize what we saw today

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Daily Blog Entry 7:

Today was a wonderful day.

We woke up at around 4:40 to go on the Bird Tower hike, and at around 5:20 we started our hike. The hike was pretty steep, and the trail was slippery from all the leaf litter that was wet from the night rain. Many of us fell on our butts on the way up and our way down. The view from the bird tower was spectacular because we saw the mist covering the rainforest canopy while the sun was rising.

Later while we were walking to retrieve our camera traps, I got to focus on ants and got to see a lot of them, hence the pun in the title. We saw the leaf cutter ants, soldier ant swarm, and a different ant that I did not know much about. Scott squished the ants to figure out what type of ants they were. I always see Sam squishing the ants and smelling them, so I’m glad I got to smell them today. They smelled very herbal and mint-like.

In the afternoon we went to two different ant nests. In the first ant nest, we got to see the fungal chamber of a leaf cutter ants and got to touch it. It was moist and soft. We also got to touch the queen ant and it was about 4 cm big. I let it crawl on my hand and I couldn’t believe it. It was way bigger than I could have ever imagined, and I was very shocked.

Then we went to the second ant’s next where a couple of us started digging and we found the dump chamber. Scott said digging these chambers are not that common, so I was very excited. The consistency of the fungus was different- it was dryer and more brittle to the touch.

We finally got to see our camera trap photos and I cannot believe what we saw. We all lost our minds. WE SAW A PUMA AND A FEW JAGUARS!!!! I know my taxonomic group is ants but man… after seeing the jaguar, we all just screamed with excitement because we couldn’t believe how lucky we were. We also saw a lot of collared peccaries, a rice rat (peck em’ owls), a coatimundi, an armadillo, a tapir, a few curassows, and a coral snake. Our photos were incredible, and it went beyond my wildest imaginations. We also saw a few photos of Adrienne being goofy, which made all of us miss her even more. We miss you Adrienne and we all hope you are feeling well!

Scott just caught a leaf cutter ant male, and it was so long. The ant was probably about 4 cm long, and its abdomen was incredibly thin and long. Since Scott was holding it by its wing, the ant kept curling its abdomen back and forth- it was pretty wild. Since it was out flying, it was on its mating flight, so it’ll probably die today. RIP unexpectedly large male leaf cutter ant.

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Welcome to Peelize

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Daily Blog Entry 6:

Today was a different day than normal because we only went on a hike once, and I don’t think I got any more bug bites today. It feels strange to not walk around drenched in sweat and fighting the urge to scratch every inch of my body.

In the morning while I was bird watching, Jessica and Scott were talking about the ants by the sugar containing by the coffee station. Jessica called it a sugar ant but Scott said they were ghost ants. The ghost ants had a light, beige colouring to it. Some were crawling around the sugar jar while the others were walking in a single line towards the sugar. I have never seen a ghost ant before, so that was a cool find. I had no idea that ants could have such light coloered abdomen.

Another cool thing that had happened was the experience of working on the urine sample project and presenting them to the Southern Mississippi University students. I didn’t know that the gloves that I used to handle the urine samples had a hole in it. While handling Jessica’s urine vile, my hand got wet and I thought it was just my sweat, but as I was washing my gloves I realised that the gloves had a hole in it. Yikes.

When I introduced the urine project to the other students who came to the research centre today, I welcomed them and started my presentation by saying “Welcome to Peelize”. Pun credits to Sami.

We also saw a scorpion under black light, and it turned to a florescent green. It was wild. Sami, our arachnid expert said that it was because of a protein in their exoskeleton.

Attached are the pee insects. photo credits to Jessica

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Day 4: The Caves Cave

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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.

Kristen giving us a lecture about cave life while inside a cave

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

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Turtles can glide

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Daily Blog Entry 5:

The cool interesting ant find of the day was the Cephalotes that Sam found! He said that the Cephalotes ant just glided onto him, which is what the Cephalotes are known for, giving them the common name ‘gliding ant;. Although Cephalotes are supposed to glide onto trees and not to humans, to the ant’s credit, Sam was wearing a green shirt and dark pants. He was basically dressed like a tree. Cephalotes have a very flat head, abdomen, and thorax, which gives them a second common name go ’turtle ant’, so it was pretty easy to identify the ant as a Cephalotes because it too had an incredibly flat, rectangular head. I wanted to see the ant to exhibit their turtle-like behaviour of retracting their legs when they were scared, but it didn’t seem to be scared by people’s presence. Sam wanted to see it glide, so dropped the ant to test if it would glide back onto Sam’s leg. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the ant anymore. I was so excited with finding the Cepahlotes and testing its interesting behaviour that I forgot to take a photo of it. Dang it.

In other news, I walked right into a vine that was right on my eye level, so now I have a cut above my left eyebrow. To be fair, I was on the lookout for ants for I was only looking at the forest floor. Speaking of critters, I am now very paranoid about chiggers. I’ve picked off a few tics from my body and it doesn’t bother me too much because I have the satisfaction of crushing it with my fingernails and killing it. Meanwhile, chiggers can cause so many bites on the body before its death, and you can’t even see it!

To end on a positive note, WE SAW A TOUCAN TODAY! It was smaller than I expected, but I am so happy I got to see one!

The toucans were too small to take a photo of, and I didn’t take a photo of the Cephalotes, so enjoy a photo of a cute baby leaf cutter ant’s nest that we saw:

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Red and Yellow Kill a Fellow

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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