Hi Blog,

Unfortunately, my day did not start extra early for the birding, but I’m hoping one of these days I will get a chance to join the bird watching.

Like always, we had breakfast at 7 AM, and then gathered shortly after to have a class discussion on our next research project. Also, during our class discussion, we were greeted with a friend — a scorpion in the drawers (we named it Sean)! The morning’s project was about  investigating the nitrogen limitation between the forest floor and the canopy and its impact on forest invertebrates. Since it is the end of the dry season, adn leaflitter accumulation on the forest floor are at its maximum, we hypothesized that the nitrogen levels would be much higher in the forest floor as opposed to the canopy.

We each set up four pitfall traps — one pair on the ground and one pair on the tree trunk. Each pair consisted of a water vial and a nitrogen source vial, with the nitrogen source being… urine. Putting the traps in the ground looked easy at first, but once we actually got to digging, I realized it was much more difficult in reality just because of the sheer number of small roots surrounding the tree roots.

In addition to setting up our pitfall traps, we also saw other cool things along the way. For example, we saw an insect with huge eyes eating another insect! The bug being eaten was twitching, so I felt bad, but I suppose it is the cycle of nature. We also saw a super giant ant crawling on the forest floor!

In the afternoon, we went back to adventuring in order to investigate the relationship between cecropia trees and ants. In order to investigate this plant/ant interaction, we not only collected two leaves from two different trees (one colonized and one uncolonized), but we also captured 6 different herbivore invertebrates in plastic containers. As a little side quest, we also captured around 10 beetles, put them in a box, and set up our version of Hunger Games. I’m excited to see who will be the final and sole survivor, because one of the beetles had already started munching on one of the nymphs we had caught.

To examine the plant/ant interaction, Dr. Solomon, with his iconic machete, chopped down a colonized cecropia tree. It was amazing to see the countless chambers all along the tree and the swarm of ants that came out in order to defend their tree. It was so interesting to think about how all of these ants were living towards the top of the cecropia tree.

Tomorrow, we will analyze the results of this experiment, and I’m excited to see the results!