Day 1 at Las Cuevas (May 18)
Today was another great day here at Las Cuevas! We began our first big project for the class, and the prompt was to use motion-detection cameras in some way. We decided it would be best to use them to assess animal motion on man-made trails (disturbed area) versus undisturbed area. We settled on the research question: How does the presence of man-made trails influence the biodiversity of the vertebrate animals in the immediate vicinity surrounding the LCRS (Las Cuevas Research Station?)
We decided to set up cameras both on trails of all sizes (Small Mayan and Bird Tower Shortcut Trails, Intermediate Monkey Tail Trail, and along the overgrown San Pastore Road and the more maintained main access road) and for each camera set up on a trail, there was one ~50 steps into the woods to monitor undisturbed animal activity. My camera was set up in the woods near the Monkey Tail Trail, at N 16.73019, W 088.98109, in case you were interested.
It wouldn’t be my blog without this next part: the ants of today! The morning was fairly ant-less. There were ants, but I didn’t see anything too noteworthy. The afternoon, though, was quite fun. Early on (first 5 meters of the Bird Tower Shortcut Trail) we saw a leaf cutter ant pathway breaking up leaf litter. I thought it was cool how the leaf litter was broken up in their path, that shows often they walked it & how many there were. After that, we saw a leaf that had been cut up by a leaf cutter ant, which was really cool! Dr. Solomon shared that these ants have zinc-lined (really really hard) mandibles with which they clamp on to the edge of a leaf, vibrate (like a jigsaw,) and rotate their bodies to carve out a semi-circle shaped piece of leaf roughly the size of their bodies. In the image below, the size of the semi-circle gives the size of the ant! After a bit of time, I was bored while people were setting up their cameras, so I went and caught a leaf cutter ant with the pair of forceps (pictured below!) This was the first of what I assume will be many ants caught this week. After that, I found a Pseudomyrmex family ant on a flower. I was initially puzzled because this was a less likely species to see, but when I realized the large silvery eyes, I could tell it was a Pseudomyrmex. If I had to guess specific species, I would guess Pseudomyrmex gracilis. That’s all I got ant-wise for today.
What a great day, and I can’t wait for the adventure tomorrow will bring!
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