“We began this morning monkeying around (literally)” – Elise Trenk, 2025, Rice University.

Elise wasn’t wrong. We really did. During birding, Jane (LCRS Manager, researched Howler Monkeys) noted that the monkeys were out behind the Classroom building, so out we went. It was so cool to see the family of 5 howler monkeys and their cute baby! After monkeying around, we had breakfast.

From breakfast, we departed for the cave entrance directly next to Las Cuevas Research Station (Las Cuevas = The Caves!) I really enjoyed the cave, as I loved hearing about the geology. The most interesting part for me was the soda straws dripping acidic liquified calcium carbonate which was forming stalagmites over millions of years. It was interesting that the soda straws’ products were regarded as “virgin water” to the Maya people and venerated similarly to holy water. I wish we were allowed to take pictures, but I will try to find one online!

After the cave, we departed for the 50-Hectare Plot where we got the nitrogen limitation pitfall traps (pee tubes) and brought them back to LCRS for analysis. We performed a morphospecies analysis similar to what we did with soil samples in Brazos Bend in BIOS 213. For those who haven’t taken that course, we had designated experts for each type of organism who would then identify which species an example was. It was easy to pick who was going to be which expert, as we are all designated taxon experts for the class, so I ofc ourse Wa the ant-man. This was quite interesting, as the traps had a surprising number of ants in them. I had a line of people at my microscope for ant identification. My favorite part of the analysis was seeing Adam’s 2 Acromyrmex ants, as this was the only time I saw them the whole trip! The poster demonstrating the results for this project is inserted below!

Following poster presentation, we departed for a beautiful sunset hike to the Bird Tower. We enjoyed the sunset, great conversation, then headed back for a wonderful dinner!

Images:

Nitrogen Limitation research poster

Las Cuevas/ Stalagmites/ Soda Straws (image from https://belizefuntours.com/belize-caves/)

Acromyrmex ants (image from antwiki.org)

Sunset from Bird Tower (Photo creds: Noelle Hall)