This morning after breakfast, we had to say goodbye to Glover’s Reef (and Ruth). I had really started to get comfortable at Glover’s. The food, the views, the reefs, the hermit crabs and blue land crabs, the pelicans and frigate birds, iguanas, the snorkel shed, poster sessions, Clivus, and even the mosquito mangroves of death…. I’m grateful for it all.

After a 3.5 hour boat ride, we (quite fittingly) made our transition from ‘surf’ to ‘turf’ by dining on the shore at Calypso, a restaurant on the marina. After lunch, we all piled into two white vans and hit the road for the Tropical Education Center (TEC). On the drive, we passed a couple Police Security Checkpoints and got to see the dominant landscape features shift between developed cities, thick twisting mangroves, karstic mountains, and savannah peppered with palmettos.

At TEC, we received a lecture from Dr. Boris Arevalo, a conservation biologist who studies northern scarlet macaws. These macaws are a flagship species for several countries in Central America, so Dr. Arevalo wanted to better understand their nesting preferences on local and regional scales. The main points that I took away from his presentation was the importance of having a holistic understanding and management of BOTH breeding and foraging habitat, and that collaboration and communication are the most important tools for scientists. Some of my favorite quotes from Dr. Arevalo’s presentation:

• “Conservation is a human issue”
• “Scientists are professional beggars”
• “Conservation is a business”

After dinner at TEC, we got a night-time tour of the Belize Zoo! We saw more animals in an hour than I can recount here, but I’ll try to list as many as I can remember. We saw three types of owls (spectacled, mottled, and barn), four types of cat (puma, jaguar, ocelot, margay), coatimundis, a paca, white-lipped peccaries, a tapir (which we got to touch), a four-eyed possum, a termite nest, an anteater, and most importantly…. I finally saw leafcutter ants (Atta cephalotes)! My excitement at simply seeing their little nocturnal parades across the paths bodes well for this trip. I’ll probably fully lose my mind when I get to see their fungus gardens.