Today was our second full day at Las Cuevas, and unfortunately the rain appears to have stopped so the rainforest has become quite dry. Even when we went to the pond nearby it had dried up, so sadly no amphibians were spotted today.
Despite not seeing any members of my taxon group today, it was a very exciting day, and not just because we were surprised this morning with vials to collect our own urine. We spent the morning placing these vials of pee as well as controls containing water on tree trunks and in the ground the trap Arthropods and see if they prefer the nitrogen rich urine to water.
In the afternoon, we finally got to explore a bit of the namesake of this place- Las Cuevas (the cave). We went into the second of five huge chambers in the cave that are accessible from our station and when we turned off our headlamps there was no light. We stayed in the cave during our lectures because it is naturally cool underground, although we did get quite a bunch of bat guano on our pants.
My favorite part of today was going night hiking after dinner. I have slowly begun to fall in love with the huge red-rumped tarantulas that live in holes around our rooms and got to see a bunch more of those. We also found Glue-Butt Cockroaches, which are big black roaches with a sticky substance on their backs to dissuade predators. On the second try, I managed to catch one and it crawled all over my arm. We also found a stick bug and a different large spider with orange and black stripes. We saw our first snake and saw another scorpion- a Florida Bark Scorpion to be exact.

Hopefully tomorrow will be less hot and dry so the frogs come back out, but one things for sure, I’ll be out looking for tarantulas again tomorrow night!