Hey y’all,

Today was a bit different than the past few days because we spent most of it indoors for a bunch of reasons. First, we finished the trials with the insects in the leaf containers. After releasing the insects, we found that the leaves from the ant-guarded trees had been eaten less than the leaves from unguarded trees. I was shocked because I would have thought that the leaves usually guarded by ants would be easy to eat once the ants were gone, but what we saw indicates otherwise.

We then got two big surprises: The directors of the Friends for Conservation and Development talked to us about their work in preserving the wildlife of the Chiquibul Forest, especially the Scarlet Macaw, and the Chiquibul Cave System! This is the largest cave system in Central America with at least 40 miles of passages mapped out! We’re even gonna explore some of it tomorrow morning! I’m super excited because there are a whole bunch of different animals that only live in caves and a lot of sites with ancient Maya artifacts!

Our project for the day was to find fungi gardens inside Leafcutter Ant colonies. We first found a small one that was around one year old, and the fungi colony was about the size of a tennis ball with an enormous queen!

Then, we found a colony that we thought was between 10-25 years old. While digging for the colony, ant soldiers swarmed out of the hole like lava out of a volcano, and I was hopping the entire time to keep them off of my boots!

I did not see a bunch of spiders today except for a Wolf Spider and another bigger spider carrying babies on her back! Sadly, the mama spider crawled underground before I could snap a picture of her, but here’s a cool picture of the Wolf Spider below.

While I’m a little nervous for my arachnid presentation tomorrow, I think it should be pretty fun to finally share with my classmates what I’ve learned about arachnids!

Keep it Cool!

Serenity