One of the mysteries in insect biology is the mating of leaf-cutter ants. Although we know a lot about their nuptial flights (mating gatherings) we do not know where they actually gather and mate. Scott tells us that queens and males fly high in the sky during nuptial flights, flying above the forest canopy. No one has recorded their mating behavior, still.
A soldier leaf-cutter ant locking down its jaw on my field notebook…
Today we set out to do an ant excavation with the large crew from the Mississippi University. We dug out an 1-year old leaf-cutter ant’s nest and found the queen, which was about 8-12 times bigger than the worker ants. We also excavated a 20+ ft long nest, which was likely over 25 years old, and located the dump chamber. It was a first experience for us, even for Scott, who for the first time noticed the higher temperature of the dump chamber, likely due to its decomposing cycle.
In the evening, we went through the photographs that we captured via camera traps. They were some of the best things that has happened to us so far because of the surprising nature of the reveal. From dark, incomprehensible images to bright jaguar images, the experimental results made us scream aloud. Some of the most exciting results we collected were timestamped photographs on peccaries, jaguars, a puma, curracels, an agouti, and a tapir. We were able to conclude from this experiment that there is higher biodiveristy found off trail in the Las Cuevas Research Station area than on trail.
We had the most bee sightings yet today. Sweat bees, Carpenter bees, Honey bees, and Stingless bees. Carpenter bee was spotted during noon near muddy water on the Maya Trail. Its behavior was interesting in that it did not seem to be pollinating bees but was sensing around the dirt where it was moist but not covered in water. Its large size and distinct, loud buzzing sound cannot be mistaken.
Large (3/4″) Carpenter Bee chewing wood off of fallen tree limb
Unfortunately, this species of Carpenter bee was not included in my taxon id card, which only had one Carpenter bee species. Pictures will have to suffice for now. The Honey bee and Stingless bees were the only ones observed pollinating and feeding from flowers. During an off-trail hike, there was a 6 feet tall flowering tree that was surrounded by Honey and Stingless bees.
Although others were super afraid, turning around asking me to check if a bee was on them, I could only zoom in with my body and camera to get the best possible picture of the Honey bee. However, the most involved encounters we had today with bees were with the Sweat bees who liked to land on human body for salt consumption. While entering an off-trail path, could hear students and a professor scream out that they had bees on them.
Sweat bee found near trail
As a bee specialist of the group, I really had no fears. Because I had known that around the region were these small (2-3 inches) ant-hill-looking structures on the ground were evidence of bee burrowing, I knew that they were surrounded by Sweat bees and not killer bees (the Africanized Wester Honey bee being the killer bee of this region). If they were indeed killer bees that landed on my fellow tropical field biologists, it was likely that they would have stung them and I would have heard painful screams – we are not a quiet crowd, as the later boa constrictor incident shows.
These are not very social bees, although they live in small communities that are mostly made up of a single family. Most mounds house fewer than 10 bees, compared to the tens of thousands of bees some beehives contain.
Other cool animal encounters had to do with a boa constrictor, a super large (15ft+) leaf-cutter ant hill, and unidentified nymphs that Claire decided to bring back to the station to ask others, including the locals here, and no one could tell us what it was.
To call our day a day of travel, which it was, would be inappropriate because of all the spectacular sights we saw. Between Las Cuevas and the Tropical Education Center we stopped at a cave and a zoo.
At the Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave, meaning Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre, we swam in Blue-Gatorade-color water into the ritual sites where Mayans of the Classical Period connected to the gods. We were told that the priests ventured in harder and harder places to get to out of a sense of desperation. Previous attempts to make offerings and build a rapport with the gods seemed to have failed when drought, famine, and starvation stirred unrest among the people. To reach these caves was to get closer to the gods so they might better hear the demands and receive the sacrifices that the Mayans wanted to share with gods like Chaac, the god of rain.
Desperate they must have been, in a sense. Captives, heavy, clunky pottery were dragged in to spaces that people can barely fit through. One spot in particular was dangerously small, which we joked was capable of decapitating cave travelers who were not careful. Once in a carefully selected site, chocolate, pottery, captives, and infants were offered to the gods. If you have any interest in the type of human remains of Mayan human sacrifice, look up the name of the cave and you will be able to find photos of it. Due to past accidents involving cameras, we were not allowed to bring cameras to take our own photos.
At the Belize zoo, we saw native animals that we have already seen in our camera traps (tapir, jaguar, puma, peccary) and many animals that we haven’t (pygmy owl, ocelet, Morrelet’s crocodile). The animals were so well trained that some would sit, walk around a tree, and do a somersault.
These are definitely places I want to return to in the future and have definitely be a highlight in our trip so far!
I woke up to people commanding me to pee inside a tube. “50 mills in two tubes” they said. I beat everyone else’s pee in coloration, which I like to think may be indication I have the highest concentration of nitrogen in my urine. And that’s relevant because, Scott tells us, one of the crucial limiting nutrients of the the canopy in tropical rain forests. After about an hour of questions, discussion, and writing in our field notebooks, we narrowed in on what exactly this urine experiment was going to be.
General question: How does different levels of limiting nutrients, such as nitrogen, affect insect biodiversity.
Context: In nutrient-poor soils of the tropical rainforests, nitrogen is often a limiting factor of life. It is more limiting in the canopy.
Main Hypothesis: The species richness in urine traps of canopy will be higher than water traps of canopy. This differential is greater than the same type of differential found in the forest floor, suggesting that nitrogen is more of a limiting nutrient in the canopy than in the forest floor.
After 2 days, we will collect our traps and count the numbers of the insect species we have captured.
For more on our project, please check a later blog post, which will contain our findings.
Also, today I found a bee hive outside of the dining room, with many yellow-abdomen bees coming out. They had all the similar morphological traits of a bee I had on my taxon identification card, but these had white front feet. I will have to look through more identification literature to see which species this is.
EBIO 319 In front of Las Cuevas Cave
The other half of our daytime was dedicated to something that better resembled the night. Walking in complete darkness during our first cave exploration. Las Cuevas (spanish for ‘the caves’) caves, are unlit karst formations that resulted from acidic water cutting through limestone. After many years, a whole underground network of life has formed, including the fertilizing bats who power the cave ecosystem through their feces and the accidental venturers who decay inside after failing to find a way out. Guano, truly, is a a glorified name for bat shit. You know, when people say, “that’s some crazy bat shit”… Well, it turns out that a whole ecosystem inside of the Las Cuevas caves (and many other caves around wthe world) depend on guano, both those of bats, and those from crickets. Cave millipedes ingest and digest guano and without it would not be able to survive. I would like to say more, but the fact on the matter is that we do not konw enough. Life there has been unidentified to a large degree, comparable to the deep sea or even extraterrestial life.
Currently, many explorers in these caves are people who are daring and willing to take on the complete darkness and the scary unknowns that come with being in caves. We were told by Raphael, leader of the Friends of Conservation and Development (NGO in Belize), that “we know that each time someone goes into the cave they find a new species”. At the very least, someone ought to write a post-apocalyptic novel revolving around life in the caves. One of the last things we did in the caves was to use guano mud to write and draw on the cave wall. Having heard stories about the Mayan demise, it makes me wonder, when it comes to cave art, how much we, as a species, has evolved in leaving behind markers of our existence and what, if any, meaning can be derived from our symbolic representation after our species has either evolved or died out.
It’s felt like we’ve been here for months, and when new faces showed up at the Research Station, we naturally told them: welcome to Peelize and continued to talk about our urines for the next half-hour.
48 hours since the start of our pee experiment, this morning was the deadline for the end of our experiment. We started on trail at 9 am to pick up the pitfall traps we have placed on the forest floors and in the canopy two days prior. Of the 40 pitfall traps, most had all sorts of organisms in it, mostly arthropods like spiders, beetles, bees, ants, and grasshoppers.
We then sorted individuals into morpho-species, or species distinguished by their morphological characters. For example, I was the ‘expert’ in charge of assigning morpho-species to bees, and found a total of 2 morpho-species of bees that we referred to as Bee A and Bee B. Bee A had a ‘green v-neck’ on the back of its thorax while Bee B did not and was about 3-4 times smaller. At the end of our sorting, we analyzed our data and found that proportionally speaking, there were more arthropods in the nitrogen pitfall traps in the canopy than there were in the forest floor. Our main conclusion was that nitrogen is likely to be more of a limiting nutrient in the canopy than it is in the forest floor.
Afterwards, we presented our data to fellow students that arrived at the station from Mississippi, starting with a warm welcome to Peelize.
Today was a day of travel, enjoyable conversations, and relative luxury at our tourist hotel.
Jeff Boschert, the father of one of the students on this trip, made a shout out to our class on the intercom before he performed take-off on the Southwest flight taking us from Houston to Belize City. Upon arrival, we went through the typical process of entering another country: declaration of goods, going through immigration, and packing and loading up on a bus. Edward, a local driver, takes us and our baggages (in an attached trailer) on the Western Highway, outside of Belize City, to the place we are staying at tonight, Crystal Paradise Hotel. Upon arrival and settling in to our rooms, we had delicious dinners of tostada, vegetable curry, rice, cooked plantain and chocolate cake.
As far as scientific endeavors go, we spotted cicadas, ants, moths, palm trees, a cartoon bee, cactus, and too much life to describe. As I am sitting inside right now, to avoid bug bites, I hear the sound of crickets, cicadas, and other animals I know not the name of. Still, I found a very obvious vinegery-smell in the pheromone of a large ant I saw working on devouring a beetle. I also learned that a cicada is a true bug because it is an arthropod with sharp sucking mouth parts. The next few days’ blog post, I can predict, will be heavier with species identification especially since that was not our focus today.
As I enter and exit from recollections of today, I am struck by the images of fires we saw, both from the airplane and in our van. Large clouds of smoke emanated from the distance, and sometimes they were up close. As far as I can tell, they all occurred in the Savannah ecosystem, some leaving blackened trunks on palm trees. I wonder what are the uses of these fires, whether they are wild or controlled, sparked by lightning, cigarettes, or a torch. Claire said that some people practice the slash and burn farming strategy, whereby plants are reduced to ashes so they may enter the soil as useful nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, quicker than they would if they had decomposed naturally. Whereas the rainforest can flourish on soils that are not rich in nutrients, human crops usually rely on rich soil for their growth.
Belize is going to be fantastic, if I have learned one thing from the readings from the class. New words have entered my vocabulary, like karst and lagoon, but they are things I have not personally experienced. I am excited to be in these places that I have only heard of and emerge from Belize as some sort of a tropical field biologist, perhaps as a TFB that Surf and Turf has warned us of becoming.
Not having been there is what makes it exciting, but it also makes it more difficult to predict what type of life I will see there, and what it will look like when I see hundreds of species of life right in front of face. Although the readings have been good about providing descriptions, I am a visual learner and I expect that I have a lot more to learn through trial and error when it comes to identifying species, or even families.
One thing I have learned about identification of species from looking at images online is that there are tons of variation. Take a species of red algae for example, one image may be pink, another greenish-purple. A brown alga often looks yellow or green. Although I don’t usually have trouble identifying colors, the types of coloration in these algae has overwhelmed my ability to describe them. I hope with experience in the water I will be able to become sensitive to all the subtle differences in the color of algae, as it can be helpful in identifying them.
In addition to learning to identify species, I hope to be comfortable in the rain forest, the cave, and the ocean. With enough practice, I am sure these blog posts will become more interesting and I hope you will follow my journey to a fascinating place!
human remains of Mayan human sacrifice, look up the name of the cave and you will be able to find photos of it. Due to past accidents involving cameras, we were not allowed to bring cameras to take our own photos.
