Hey y’all,

Today started pretty quiet with a relaxed time to watch for the beautiful birds of the rainforest, including a little hummingbird who was very tricky to take a picture of!

We then kickstarted our morning project to figure out how different the amounts of nutrients (namely Nitrogen which is REALLY hard to get for animals and plants) for animals living in trees versus those living on the ground. We used pitfall traps. This is where we dug two holes in the ground (one with water, one with Nitrogen) and tied two more of these tubes to a nearby tree. If the Nitrogen tube has more insects that have fallen into it than the water tube, this tells us that insects have a higher demand for Nitrogen than for water.

(Us preparing the tubes for the pitfall traps)

After lunch, we set up an experiment to compare the leaves of two  Trumpet trees: One that has ants living in it and one that does not. We think that Trumpet trees with ants have softer leaves than the trees without ants because the ants can defend said leaves. After getting the leaves, we collected six leaf-eating bugs and placed each into a container that also had one leaf from either tree to see which leaves the insects eat more of.

The craziest thing happened today! While collecting the Trumpet Tree leaves, we spotted a tarantula den and for my special project as the arachnid “expert” I used a long twig, ran it into the den, and just when I thought the den was empty, giant fuzzy gray legs lunged out of the den opening! I totally didn’t yell and dart backwards… But It was so awesome to finally find an active tarantula den. I’m gonna work on figuring out what kind it is!

Can’t wait to share how both these projects turn out!

Serenity