Monthly Archives: May 2018

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Waterfalls and Mayan Cities

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We woke up early and left Crystal Paradise to begin our journey to Caracol. We made a stop at the Rio On Pools on the way and were surprised with beautiful waterfalls and pools of fresh water. Swimming in the pools was such an amazing experience, but after about an hour I heard Veronica shouting about leeches. I promptly jumped out of the water onto a rock and proceeded to check myself to make sure there wasn’t any on me, thankfully there wasn’t any.

Once we left the beautiful Rio On Pools, we headed towards Caracol to see an ancient Mayan city. Our tour guide Leo gave us a brief history of the Mayans of Caracol and then led us to some of the monuments and structures. Climbing up the steep steps of one of the monuments and being able to see to treetops of Guatemala in the distance was a breathtaking view. While at Caracol, I also spotted a brown anole on the side of one of the Mayan structures and later on the tour Scott was able to grab another brown anole so we could see it up close.

We then piled back into the van and continued the drive to Las Cuevas research station. I slept a good chunk of the ride, which was surprising because it was so bumpy. Once arrived at Las Cuevas we met Raphael who runs the station. Then we went on a hike around the station to get better used to the area. On the trail, we saw a Mexican tree leaf frog that we disturbed by trying to get a better look, so it squirted pee on us. Finally, we ended the hike back at the station and saw the beautiful and endangered scarlet macaws, which was absolutely amazing.

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So excited for Belize!

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I am so excited and a little nervous, about going to Belize tomorrow. I have never been to Belize before but I’ve traveled to tropical places before (Costa Rica & Puerto Rico), and go on a lot of hiking trips with my family. However, I know that this is probably going to be way different than just hiking, and I’m hoping to be able to keep up, but I’m looking forward to what’s in store.

To prepare for this trip I’ve been reading the Natural History of Belize textbook and also researching my taxon groups and presentation topic. Studying my topic of the rainforest canopy has given me a lot of interesting facts about different species in the rainforest.

Over the course of this trip, I’m hoping to learn a bit more about the rainforest and the animals that live there, as well as get more information about what could be future paths for someone in ebio or doing ebio research. I’m also really excited to study at Glover’s Reef and be able to snorkel.

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First Day of Belize

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Today after rushing around my house grabbing extra things that I had forgotten to pack the night before, we met on campus and took a bus to Hobby Airport to leave for Belize. We landed in Belize City, and Claire’s dad who piloted the flight even gave us a shout out:)

 

Once we got through customs we loaded our luggage onto another bus and started our journey to Las Cuevas. The ride wasn’t too bad, the windows were so tinted I fell asleep a couple times before we reached the ecolodge, Crystal Paradise.

 

We dropped our things off in our rooms and met back in the common area for an amazing dinner. It was really nice to able to have a nice “family” type dinner and get to know everyone a bit better on the way to the lodge. Scott and Adrienne talked a bit more about the plan for tomorrow and what it’s going to be like once we get to Las Cuevas (it’s going to be a lot less cushy than the lodge).

 

After dinner, we walked back to our room and saw two lizards above the door. It was pretty dark, so it was hard to see what type they were, but they looked a lot like typical geckos that sometimes get inside my house at home. I’m looking forward to the excursion tomorrow, I just have to keep reminding myself to put on sunscreen because the goal is to not get burnt during the whole trip (fingers crossed).

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Day 4: Into the Belly of the Earth

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So I know the title is pretty dramatic, but then again, it was a pretty dramatic sort of day. It started off uneventfully. I woke up a little later than usual but made it to breakfast on time, just before we had another meeting about today’s project: pee traps! As in, we peed in test tubes and used the urine samples to set pitfall traps for insects. Our urine has a lot of nitrogen in it, so the basic idea is that the nitrogen will attract insects that we will then fish out of our pee pee in a couple of days, all in the name of science.

DeLiciOUs!!

The hike this morning was mostly uneventful. There were the standard blue morphos that flew by, close enough for me to see but not to touch. It’s fine, I’m very much used to those butterflies flying circles around me by now. BUT I AM DETERMINED. I WILL CATCH ONE BY THE TIME WE LEAVE THIS FOREST!! I did, however, manage to catch 3 more butterflies and two moths today, so I’m  sharpening my skills. One of the moths was beautiful yellow and black, and it was a rare diurnal moth! Again, I found all the Lepidopterans flitting near the road on low foliage.


Unidentified diurnal moth.

By far the coolest spot of the morning was a coral snake that Sam found under a rotten log – one of the most venomous snakes of Central America. It was smaller than I expected, and very shy. It slithered away almost as soon as we could spot it.

After lunch, we went to hell.

Not really, but it sure did look like it. We entered a cave near Las Cuevas that is not only home to all sorts of creepy cave fauna, but also remnants of the ancient Maya civilization. The black maw of the cave loomed up suddenly over the forest path. Its entrance was filled with hanging stalactites that looked like fangs and cave swallows that nest between them. The Mayans believed this cave to be the entrance to the underworld, and it sure looked the part. We entered via ancient steps carved by the Maya and slowly made our way through the bat poop (guano)-covered cave. I thought the squelchy brown substance spread all over the cave floor was mud, but it was not long before I noticed that it was actually guano. Delicious. Not a single one of us made it out without being covered in the stuff, except maybe our incredible guide, Pedro.

View from the inside of the cave.

There were definitely some scary moments in the cave involving uncomfortably narrow passages and slippery footing. In some of the most claustrophobic recesses of the cave, I became supremely aware of just how deep I was in the Earth: only alien creatures that are adapted to life in utter darkness can exist here, and I am nothing but an intruder who would stand no chance if my headlamp goes out. It was a humbling and freakish experience that I am glad to have had, but that I am not sure I would repeat. Emerging from the cave was like being reborn.

Goodnight for now! I’ll be up again in too few hours.

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Day 8: Of Caves and Cages

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Today started out even brighter and earlier than the rest of the days here. We had breakfast at 5am and headed out of the Chiquibul by 7am. Our first stop: ATM Cave. ATM stands for “Actun Tunichil Muknal,” which translates to “Stone Sepulcher” in an ancient Mayan dialect. You can guess what that means. The ancient Maya used this cave for ceremonies. It’s an incredible natural formation that requires a 30 minute hike, three river crossings, and a short climb down some limestone formations to reach the cave entrance from the parking area. It’s a wet cave, meaning that it is largely filled with water. The entrance lies just beyond a series of riverine pools filled with aquamarine waters and tiny darting fish. Sadly, no cameras have been allowed near the cave ever since a stupid tourist dropped their camera and damaged the remains of a human skull.

We had to jump into the frigid water and swim into the yawning mouth of the cave. Our guide, Gliss, led us through the treacherous terrain. That place was scary! I  almost slipped and landed on my already bruised butt maybe ten times. We had to wade through water for maybe an hour and scramble on slick rocks and limestone for another to reach the end. It was the first time on this entire trip during which I actually felt mildly scared for my life – sharp rocks poked out from everywhere, and some of the crawls just barely fit my body. We were in good hands with Gliss, though.

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Neither of the above images belongs to me. First photo is of the inside of the entrance to ATM Cave, taken from www.cahalpech.com. Second photo is the view of the cave entrance from the outside, taken from Belize Escape Artist. 

At the end of the cave lies the reason for its name: human remains of 14 individuals who were ceremonially sacrificed. An almost complete female skeleton, nicknamed the Crystal Maiden, lay in the very farthest recesses of the cave. It was eerie…especially since my headlamp chose that exact moment to flicker out. I was ready to hightail it out of there by then.

This photo does not belong to me. It depicts the human skeleton found at the very back of the cave, and for which the cave is named. Photo from Cayo Island Expeditions. 

After the cave, we drove the rest of the way to the Tropical Education Center, which is where we’re staying tonight. We were given a nighttime tour of the Belize zoo, which was both fascinating and disheartening.

I could go on and on about zoos and the many mixed feelings they give me. I appreciate them because they allow me to witness wild animals that I would never be able to encounter in real life. They also serve as ambassadors to the public regarding wild animals that may be surrounded by many misconceptions by humans. For that I am grateful. But my heart breaks every single time I enter one, because not a single animal in the zoo was built to live in an enclosure. The Belize Zoo is a rescue zoo that only takes in injured or confiscated animals that would not survive in the wild, but still. I found myself almost brought to tears when we saw a jaguar, an expertly honed hunter of the jungle, reduced to a tame pet that rolled over and did somersaults to receive chicken from the zookeepers. The Belize Zoo and others like it do important work, for sure. But not all zoos are rescue zoos – many obtain their animals from poachers – and I hate the fact that zoos are necessary in the first place.

We humans really need to take a look at ourselves and the way we treat our co-inhabitants of this planet.

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Day 7: In Which I Do Not Catch a Blue Morpho

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Our last sunset from Las Cuevas

Our last day in the Chiquibul Forest started with a 5 am hike over some extremely steep paths that were still wet from yesterday’s rain. The leaves, tree roots, and mossy rocks were so slick, and I took two nasty spills – I landed on a tree root with my left butt cheek. Despite my searing leg muscles and the blossoming bruises on my butt, the view from the top of Bird Tower was worth the strenuous uphill hike. The sun was still low in the sky, and the forest still seemed to be waking up. Mist rolled in across lush montane forests as far as the eye could see. It was  breathtaking – both literally and figuratively.

View from the top of Bird Tower.

After breakfast, we set out for another long trek to retrieve our camera traps that we set on our first day at Las Cuevas. The hike was long, but the forest here is so inherently beautiful that I didn’t mind the sweat, sore muscles, and countless bug bites. I caught this strange goldenrod-colored butterfly that was bobbing along San Pastor road:

As per usual, every single blue morpho butterfly that we saw flew out of my reach. I’m very, very sad that I haven’t managed to catch Belize’s most iconic butterfly on this trip, but I guess it just means that I have to come back someday to finish my mission!

In the afternoon, we dug up a couple of leaf cutter nests to examine them from the inside. Scott, our resident ant expert, located the queen of a smallish nest for us, as well as the ants’ fungus garden in which they grow their food. The excavation was great exercise, but the ants that we uncovered were definitely not happy with us.

I got bitten by a mosquito right in the middle of my forehead as I was excavating the nest. Here’s Elena helping me put Cortisone on the largest bump in the history of ever.

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for – the checking of the camera traps. I don’t think any of us expected to actually find anything. Maybe a peccary or two if we were lucky. See, as loud, clunky humans that make huge amounts of noise as we travel along the trails, any mammals in the area were aware of our presence before we could even come close to spotting them. By this point in the trip, spotting large mammals in the Chiquibul seemed equivalent to seeing a unicorn.

But.

In the very first trap! A tapir! And a magnificent jaguar, in perfect profile! Right there in the first trap, we captured two of the mammals that we most wanted to see. It only got better and better as we opened the rest of the traps. Of course, not all yielded anything, but most captured at least one or two animals. We saw so many peccaries – nine total.

We also saw a few curassows, two pumas, a coatimundi (kind of like a mix between a raccoon and a red panda), a coral snake, and a 9-banded armadillo. It was truly wild. When the first jaguar appeared on screen, all of us started screaming our heads off – spotting a jaguar is like the mother of all animal sightings in the Chiquibul.

But that wasn’t all! We saw not one, but TWO jaguars in our traps. Practically unheard of!! The big cats were of stocky, muscular build, and had intricate rosette patterning on their hide. I’m still in awe of them and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of looking at these pictures.

What a satisfying end to our stay at Las Cuevas and the Chiquibul Forest. It’s been an amazing, eye-opening experience. I can truly say that I’ve fallen in love with this place – chiggers, ticks, and all. I’m sad to leave tomorrow morning, but look forward to experiencing the reef.

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Day 6: The Rainforest Lives Up to Its Name

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There’s nothing that centers me quite like a torrential downpour can. I’ve always loved the scent of the Earth after it’s been washed clean. I find it calming and restorative. (And I just learned that this scent is actually the odor of soil bacteria!) I’m writing this blog as thunder is rolling through the gray skies and fat raindrops are pelting the ground. The sheer velocity of the rain is blowing a breeze through the screen windows.

I really can’t describe how oddly serene it is to sit on the floor of a non-air conditioned, wooden research station in the middle of the rainforest as the sky empties itself. It’s humbling. All life here depends on this rain, and today marks the first huge rain of the season. That means that the forest is about to come to life, even more than it already has been. We may get to witness the nuptial flight of ants, in which newborn queen ants and males take to the air in a gargantuan swarm to mate. Amphibians will be more active. It’s going to be a different forest now.

Other than enjoy the rain, we also collected our urine samples from a couple of days ago! On the way back from collecting the traps, I found a dying swallowtail butterfly on the side of the road being eaten by ants. It was was an elegant creature even as it was being gnawed on.

Poor little guy 🙁

Nitrogen an extremely important element that is vital to most life forms. It’s a surprisingly scarce element in a place as rich in life as the rainforest is. Because of this, we figured that more arthropods would cluster to our urine, which we used as a nitrogen source, in areas that are more nitrogen-poor. The forest canopy is actually more nitrogen-poor as compared to the forest floor, so we expected more critters to end up in our traps that we placed in the canopy.

After we sorted and counted the species of bugs, insects, and other invertebrates that we discovered in our pitfall traps, we actually ended up finding some pretty cool results. It was a long afternoon of sorting, counting, and identifying dead insects and bugs that were soaked in our own urine, but we ended up getting to present to a new group of college students that arrived at the station today. I think they were slightly grossed out by our poster, titled “To Pee or Not to Pee,” but I think our presentation went over pretty well.

Today was again a quiet day on the Lepidoptera front. I only spotted 4 blue morphos, all of which evaded me. I know that they purposely fly extremely erratically in order to escape from birds, and they’re certainly doing a great job of escaping from me. Alas.

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Day 6: You Gotta Get Rained on in the Rainforest

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This morning I went bird watching again. We saw a lot of the same birds we’ve been seeing all week: Montezuma oropendolas, a plumbeous kite, scarlet macaws, a ton of turkey vultures, and a few social flycatchers.

After bird watching, we found out that Adrienne was leaving for medical reasons. I’m super glad she’s going to get checked out by a doctor and being safe, but I’m also sad she won’t be with us at the reef.

We collected our urine samples in the morning and then started sorting all the bugs we found into morphospecies (sorting them into ones that look like the same species without actually identifying the species). We found way more species on the forest floor than in the canopy and way more species in the nitrogen (urine) than in the water, which wasn’t surprising but it was still really cool to see the science come out the way we expected. We also came across this really cool hemipteran that looked sorta like a hammerhead. It has big black spots on its back that look like fake eyes, but its eyes are really much smaller near its antennae.

During the afternoon it absolutely poured. I ran out into the rain and got completely soaked because, as I’ve said every time it’s rained a little so far, “you gotta get rained on in the rainforest.” I proceeded to get completely soaked. Sammi and I did pose like Titanic. However, contrary to our faces, it was super cool.

Afterward, termites were everywhere because the first big rain is commonly used as a signal for nuptial flights for termites and ants.

This evening I was watching this bird that has a nest inside the satellite dish base. It’s a slaty ant-wren, really small and plain brown. It comes to the nest with food pretty regularly and its babies stick their heads out to grab food. But there’s also this other bird that comes and hangs out around the nest and it’s SO CONFUSING. I can’t figure out what it’s doing, I did figure out that it’s a sulfur-breasted flycatcher though.

(I apparently don’t take pictures of birds. -This is Claire in retrospect trying to post now that we actually have internet.) Here’s a picture of what the slaty antwren and the sulfur-breasted flycatcher looked like from the internet.

Image result for slaty antwrenImage result for sulphur breasted flycatcher

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Day 5: Creatures in the Night

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Today started off with a spirited morning hike that was less than successful for me in my mission to catch a blue morpho. Sad. But, Elena did spot a helmeted iguana casually clinging to the side of a mossy tree! He/she/it was so cute, with little red eyes that casually watched us as the 12 of us bumbling humans oohed and aahed as only true TFBs can.

Helmeted iguana

Adrienne also spent the whole morning peeling bark off dead trees to look for scorpions and finally managed to find a couple hiding out in a lichen-covered log! I also snagged three butterflies in my net as we headed back to camp. Two were small orange and yellow sulfur butterflies, but one was a large golden butterfly that I’d never seen before. I found all three floating in the lower branches of understory brush.

Today marked the completion of our first full project. Belize is a tiny country flush against the ocean, making it vulnerable to hurricanes that periodically sweep through the country and flatten areas of the forest. Two years ago, Hurricane Earl was no exception.

Our project today aimed to understand the effects of these areas of hurricane-caused tree fall on the regrowth of understory plants. Since every tree that falls exposes a rare patch of sunlight on the forest floor, we thought that maybe there would be more plants growing in the fallen areas to suck up all the sunlight!

Unfortunately, we didn’t actually find any real difference in plant growth between fallen and non-fallen areas. It’s probably because all 10 of us are fools when it comes to identifying leaves – maybe we’ll have better luck once we actually learn how to identify plants.

After an afternoon of making a poster to display our non-data and listening to lectures, we ate dinner and headed out for the first night hike. We stopped by the frog pond, which is usually dry at this time of year, but to our happy surprise, there were actually a few inches of muddy water and dead leaves in the pond! The water teemed with tiny turtles. Scott picked one up, but it didn’t seem to be too happy so we let it go soon after. I caught an anole with an orange scale pattern on its back near the edge of the lake. He was also quite angry with me, so I let him go after he flashed his red neck flap a few times.

Here’s one of the mud turtles!

Can’t really see the anole in this pic, but he’s there, I promise! Also, don’t I kind of look like Jane Goodall? #goals

Overall, the night hike was filled with creepy crawlies of the night – plenty of katydids, one banded gecko, and a super strange gray moth that, when we lifted its wings, turned out to have a bright orange and black-striped furry body. It was resting on a broad leaf hanging into the trail and wasn’t even remotely disturbed by the annoying humans prodding at it.  Sadly, I couldn’t get a great photo of it because the lighting was so dim.

The Lepidoptera front was otherwise quiet today because we spent so much time inside on the poster, and butterflies didn’t seem to like the hurricane fall areas.

Tomorrow, we collect our pee traps. Yay!

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Day 3

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Killer bees were spotted around the camp and on Elena’s hair. There is only one species of ‘killer bees’ in Belize that are particular aggressive: Africanized Western Honey Bee. When provoked, more individuals from a single colony is likely to sting a intruder than non-Africanized bees.

Africanized Honey Bee pollinating flowers

After breakfast, we set up camera traps to capture large mammals, hoping to find jaguars, pumas, and other wildcats. We hypothesized that off trail activity would be greater for these mammals because human activity discourages the presence of other mammals. 10 locations were chosen, 5 on trail and 5 off trail. Adrienne made special appearances on some of these traps as we were setting them, I wonder what they will look like once we collect our traps. As we walked on trails and loitered around traps, we set off the motion sensor and took many selfies in the process.

After carrying out our experimental methods, we listened to a lecture presented by the leader of Friends of Conservation and Development. Rafael updated us on the status of the forest conservation and the unique challenges faced by the conservationists because of the forest’s proximity to Guatemala. Poachers and loggers from Guatemala have been found in the Chiquibul extracting endangered species from the field for sale as products. Poor residents close to the boarder have few incentives to observe rules of the forest, as a single successful poach can give them the amount of money many day’s worth of work can provide. However, in the recent past, things have been improving due to rangers that patrol the area.

 

It was a day of much walking and we were more than ready for the night to come, and for much needed sleep.