Today was mostly one big recon mission to gather all the pitfall traps and camera traps we had set along the trails near Las Cuevas. We left at about 9 to gather all the pitfall traps, which involved cutting the wire we had used to strap the vial on the the tree, somehow unsticking the tubes from the ground, and of course, gathering all the flagging tape. This was a relatively short mission, especially compared to setting them up yesterday.
We got back to the research station, and began to collect our results and analyze our data. We didn’t finish the poster, so I’ll briefly explain what we found. Overall, we saw that there were more arthropods in the ground pitfall traps, and more arthropods in the the pee traps than in the water traps. This suggests that there are more arthropods on the ground than in the canopy, but that they are more attracted to nutrients.
our athropods!
We then left for the camera recon mission, which was also a shorter excursion than the one to set them up. We still have yet to look at the footage from them, but I’d image a lot of it will be pictures of us trying to set up and take down the cameras. Also, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but rubber boots are actually great for hiking!
I unfortunately did not see very many orthoptera today. I saw several small crickets, but they were too speedy for me to get a picture. One of them was really tiny, no more than 5 mm long. It was sitting on the dinning table, but it hopped away before I could invite it to stay and eat lunch with me.
I’m not sure how the next few days will look, but I will try to keep everyone updated!
Our morning birdwatching was fairly uneventful unless you’re a really big fan of turkey vultures, and while I don’t have anything against them they’re not very interesting at 5:30 AM. We had a morning lecture on soil, and I learned that dirt and soil are not actually the same thing, and there’s a lot more complexity to soil then I thought. We were given our next activity to compare arthropod abundance in tree canopies versus forest floor and how that changed with nutrient levels provided. Maybe we should have been more suspicious when the professors kept telling us to drink water all morning but they were just getting us ready to provide our nutrients, by peeing into vials then leaving them around the forest. At least carrying around your own pee isn’t as bad when everyone is doing it, and we thankfully made it through without any spills.
Would like to call out Michiel for being super dehydratedPeeing in tubes isn’t weird if everyone else is doing it!
After setting that up we had lunch before another activity, this time just a chance to observe some ant behavior. We found a young leaf cutter ant colony, still a single hill and entrance and probably around 1 year old. Once located we dug into the side of it and slowly chipped away at the dirt until we reached the fungus gardens, which were super cool! I’m not sure what type of fungus they’re growing in particular but it looked pretty spongy, at least the parts that weren’t covered in ants. After a few ant bites and some more digging we were even able to find the queen! She was probably three times the size of all the other ants but wasn’t nearly as aggressive, and just kind of sat there as we passed her around. We put her back and sealed up the hole in the side, but that colony wasn’t ever likely to survive for long since it was directly next to a building.
(I will put a picture of me with the queen here once I get it, I’m not sure who’s phone it’s on! Whoops)
We went to find a more established colony, about 3-4 years old and we found one that looked promising, with multiple hills and entrances and air shafts, but once we started digging we didn’t find any ants, and as we kept going it seemed increasingly obvious that the nest had been abandoned for a while. We checked the other side just to be sure and right as we started digging Michael found a squishy lump in the dirt, and after extracting it we found a Mexican burrowing toad! Which Rusty had just told us yesterday was on his wish list of things to see on this trip! It’s the cutest and weirdest frog I’ve ever seen before, it had legs and a face but no neck and it’s body was really just one big lump, and looked kind of liquidy almost but it was just very jiggly and wiggly. We put it back in the hole we found it in and it turned around to face us before using its back legs to start digging itself further into the burrow!
Jiggle jiggle toad
After that we had some more lectures before dinner. Then after dinner we did an optional night hike. I’m so glad I went because we saw so many cool things! We walked down to the frog pond, which last we checked had a bunch of tree frog eggs on leaves above what will eventually be the pond when it rains enough. While we were looking around we saw a Morlet’s tree frog! It looks a lot like a red eyed tree frog but darker green with black eyes. I think they’re listed as critically endangered by the IUCN so it was super cool to just run into one out in the wild. While we were taking pictures it jumped right up onto Rusty’s hand, and then onto his head! Maybe it could tell he was the amphibian guy, or he just has very soft hair, regardless we eventually got the frog off his head and back onto a tree.
I can’t blame the frog, I’m sure Rusty’s hair is super soft and comfy
Soon after that Michael spotted a snake right in the tree that had the frog eggs, and it turned out to be a frog egg eating snake. We watched for a while as it went up and down the branches trying to find the eggs, very slowly moving along because if the tree shakes too much the eggs will fall off the branch onto the ground as a defense mechanism against snakes! While we were watching it slide around someone spotted another Morelet’s tree frog! Seeing one is already amazing but seeing two in the same 20 minutes was crazy! After that one hopped away we saw the snake devour a leaf of eggs before we spotted another snake on some vines behind it. Once we started looking upwards we were seeing snakes everywhere in the canopy, all feasting on frog eggs, which explains why they lay so many.
(Once again, will have to wait on the pictures and hopefully the video for this!)
For fungi today it was a lot of repeats to what we had already seen hiking around, I guess those are more common but something exciting is that we spotted a rounded earthstar!
(It looks really weird, feel free to google it until I get the photos)
It was one of the weird looking fungi on my wish list of mushrooms to see while here, so that’s one down and several more to go, hopefully we’ll have even more luck spotting and running into rare things tomorrow!
Living my animal crossing dream
Today’s snake sighting total: 9 ish
Night trail snake sightings: 7
Frogs/toads: 3
We woke up to the sound of howler monkeys and a ton of birds. I wasn’t planning on doing the 5:30 morning birding but I apparently had no choice since the birds were so loud. They have turkeys here! I had no idea, and the turkeys here are so much prettier than the turkeys at home, they have lots of cool colors. We also saw some vultures and Scarlet Macaws! There are so many birds in the Chiquibul, I had no idea!
After breakfast we started our question using the camera traps and decided we want to see what functional groups of animals are using which parts of the forest splitting up by trails, roads, and just the jungle. After deciding everything we went out into the jungle for the first time hiking! It was sprinkling when we left and it continued to rain on and off the whole day. Right away we saw a ton of lichen on trees, all crustose so far, and plenty of mushrooms! Unfortunately a lot of them weren’t on my ID card, and I’ve been told that the fungi here isn’t well recorded or published so it’s hard to find comprehensive information on everything we could see. Most of the mushrooms were tan and brown, relatively close to the ground and maybe a couple inches across, with a pretty flat top. The smaller mushrooms were more bell shaped and much smaller, less than an inch but had longer stalks. I did manage to identify some turkey tail mushrooms on logs since they’re shelf-like, and easy to tell apart from the shape and the stripes (which look like a turkey tail), and even some puffball mushrooms! The puffball mushrooms were super cool, they had already released their spores, and were covered in mud from the rain but still had a little puff left in them if you bumped them a little. I’ve seen those mushrooms all over tiktok as food or just a cool thing to find in the forest so it was so cool to see one in real life!
We also saw some slimes and possible jellies, none of which were the ones I had put on my sheet specifically but hopefully with the pictures I took I can try to identify them eventually. The problem is it’s hard to get a good look at some of them since the fungi are off trail oftentimes, or under logs (where snakes like to hang out) or near ant nests, or are just in awkward positions and I don’t want to touch mushrooms unless I know what they are. At least eating mushrooms isn’t an issue, I can’t stand the texture of mushrooms, so I can admire them from a distance and not worry about getting poisoned by some random mushrooms out in the woods. I do have a lot more respect for anyone who really knows their fungi and can actually identify species and safe versus poisonous types, especially since so many mushrooms have look alikes! I’m hoping tomorrow out in the woods we’ll find something new, since today the mushrooms got pretty repetitive, I have a lot of really cool colorful mushrooms on my wish list of things to see here, so hopefully we’ll have some luck tomorrow finding more!
We finished up the day with some lectures, unfortunately without lights we couldn’t actually write in our notebooks, however we did manage to come up with some good field biology DIY solutions!
What an exhausting day! We had breakfast at 6:30 and planned to be out around 7 am. After a few hours of driving, a gas pit stop and a pretty uncomfortable nap we were really in the jungle. The change was pretty apparent, you couldn’t see anything past the road because the trees were so dense, the road became more of a dirt path with lots of ditches and rocks and plants overgrowing it, so we spent several hours of the drive being jostled back and forth and generally tossed around, it felt bumpier than the boat trip yesterday! We got to talk to our guide Leo, during the ride, ask him lots of questions about the area, the plants the animals, and even just the history of Belize. We eventually arrived at Caracol, a Mayan city that was now an archeological site. Our guide estimates that they’ve only excavated 1% of it, and they haven’t even been able to
thoroughly study that 1% that’s been uncovered. He was even in some of the excavations back when they were doing major excavation work. We saw the palace/temple of Caracol, apparently it
started as a temple, then the king built his palace on top of it, and we got to climb the steps all the way to the top, someone said it’s the highest manmade point in Belize, and it seemed like it, you could practically see over all the other mountains around us!
I bet today was great for anyone with an insect or bird or plant taxon, plenty of those around, but it was much harder to find lichens and fungi, even trying to tell what was lichen and what was the pattern of the tree bark was difficult. In Caracol I managed to find two lichens, both crustose, one was white (like your standard tree bark lichen), the other was orange and was growing along the stone of the palace towards the top of the site. We also saw a shelf mushroom, it was looking a little degraded so I couldn’t get any distinct pattern or color or shape, but I’m sure we’ll find plenty more tomorrow!
Every day here is one for the books, but today was especially special.
We started the morning with a surprise. We would be performing an experiment to measure the abundance of bugs in the canopy vs the forest floor, as well as how attracted they are to nutrients. We are going to take our data based on how many of the bugs fall into these “pitfall traps,” which is liquid in a vial that the bugs get stuck in. We had a water control vial, and a nutrients vial. But here’s the surprise-guess what we were using for nutrients? Our pee! It was definitely weird, but sometimes that’s what you have to do for science!
don’t look too closely at the vials…
We then headed out to set up the pitfall traps. We each had four vials-two controls (water) and two nutrients (urine). We would put a water and a urine vial on a tree to catch bugs from up there, and then one of each buried up to the brim in the ground to catch the bugs from the forest floor. We spread out our vials, so each tree with a pitfall trap was about ten feet apart. Setting up the traps took up the rest of the morning, so we came back for lunch. Along the way I saw some crickets-there was a small brown cricket with beige legs in the leaf cover of the ground, and a dark brown cricket under a rock. We also saw a small jumping pit viper in the middle of the trail and an eyelash viper coiled on a log! The eyelash vipers are very elusive, so it was exciting to see one.
jumping pit vipereyelash viper
For the afternoon, we were focused on leaf cutter ant nests! We found a young (<1 year old) nest in the clearing by the research station. We dug next to the nest, and we came upon the chamber below the ground that contained the fungus garden! The leaf cutter ants bring the leaves they cut up to the fungus garden to feed, it, and it in return grows nutrient-rich so the ants can feed upon it. Professor Solomon scooped out some of the fungus and found the queen! She was huge-almost the size of my thumb! After we took a look at her, we put her back and sealed the nest.
the queen ant
We then went to look at a bigger nest, to see how it was different. We were digging in one spot, but no ants were coming out. The trip was not fruitless, in fact quite the opposite! We found a Mexican burrowing frog, which is usually hard to come by because they live underground.
Mexican Burrowing Toad!
We then moved on to another nest, which had no frogs, but was teeming with ants. We saw that there were more types of worker ants, and that the fungus garden chamber was bigger. I caught one of the biggest ants-the soldier ant, which is specialized to protect the colony. I wanted to see how strong she was, so I let her bite me, and her long, sharp mandibles drew blood even through a callous! The nest was really cool to look at, but we sealed it up and moved on.
Ava and I with our soldier ants!
We had to do a bunch of presentations before dinner, but afterwards, we went on a night hike! We walked to the Frog Pond, a dried-up pond where we had seen red-eyed tree frog eggs the day before. Tonight, we saw two Morelet’s tree frogs, which are critically endangered! We also saw a ton of northern cat eye snakes, one of which we watched feed upon the tree frog eggs ☹ The rest of the snakes were in the canopy, which brought the day’s snake count up to nine.
top ten pictures taken before disaster (pic cred: Sophia)Morelet’s Tree Frog!
I also saw some cool orthoptera! There was a giant grasshopper atop a palm frond, with beige and brown coloring. It was really high up, so it was difficult to identify. There was also two different medium sized brown orthopterans-one was sitting atop a leaf, and one was hanging out with the Morelet’s tree frog! The one on the ground sort of looked like the white kneed king cricket, and the other like a brown dead leaf katydid, but it was hard to tell. There were also some tiny crickets, but I didn’t get a good look at any of them.
big grasshopper!possible brown dead leaf katydidpossible white kneed king cricket with the Morelet’s tree frog! a taxa crossover episode if you will
The rain forest has been super cool, and so far I have managed not to get as many bug bites as I did at Glover’s Reef. I will keep you all updated about what we get up to tomorrow!
I know I said yesterday was the first day in the rain forest, but today was the actual first day in the rainforest!
We started out the day by figuring out how we were going to conduct research with the camera traps. We decided to look at the abundance of different types of mammals on different passageways, including the main road, the trails, and forest. Once we had our methods figured out and a plan for which path to take, we were on our way! We set six camera traps in the morning-all five road traps and one trail trap. We returned to the station for lunch, and then set out for the afternoon to walk another trail and set the other ten traps (four more trail traps, five forest traps, and one for-fun trap at a pond). We were out in the rain forest from 1:30 until 6:15, which was absolutely amazing. We got rained on a bit (which is always exciting for me because I’m from CA), and the forest was super lush and full of so much life.
Sophia lost her boot in the mud
We saw a lot of amazing things. I actually saw a bunch of orthoptera, which I wasn’t entirely expecting, since they’re so good at camouflage. I saw some tiny crickets in the grass, possibly a pygmy mole cricket, and a small green katydid on the branch of a tree.
I saw a group of black grasshoppers with red heads on the branch of a small tree as well. I thought it was odd that they were in a group, as grasshoppers and other orthoptera are usually solitary. I also saw a small-ish brown cricket that looked almost like the the jerusalem cricket.
The most amazing orthoptera sighting for me was at night during the post-dinner presentations! I got to see a huge leaf mimic katydid (shoutout Michael for grabbing it for me)-it was probably about 3 or so inches long! In order to grab katydids, you have to grab their wings and their femurs because their back legs are so strong, they can push against your hand and make you lose your grip. We also saw a smaller katydid, maybe two inches long (shoutout Rusty for catching it). Both were a vibrant green, and their wings really did look like leaves! Too bad they were in a classroom, so their camouflage didn’t work so well.
Overall the day was jam-packed with excitement. We saw a bunch of other really cool organisms, such as birds, beetles, cockroaches, and ants, as well as countless trees and epiphytes that we had only just read about in the text book. We got to try eating termites (which taste sort of like carrots!), and we climbed to the top of a bird watch tower to see the amazing view! We also saw a cave that had maya pottery and a wall in it, and a giant leaf cutter ant nest, that was probably about three or four feet in diameter.
from the top of the bird watch tower!scarlet macaws
I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings, since today the main focus was just setting the camera traps!
Today was our first day full day in the rainforest! We drove from the Tropical Education Center to Caracol, an archeological site full of Maya ruins! Along the way, we saw a Morelet’s crocodile laying on a rock in a stream. Once we got there, our guide, Leo, who had worked on the excavation of the site in the nineties, explained to us the relevance of the site. He told us that it was a large Maya civilization, home to about 200,000 people at its peak, and the pyramid at its epicenter is actually the tallest building in all of Belize. We got to climb the pyramid, which is both a temple and a palace, as the king built his home atop the temple to show his divine right to power.
Group photo on top of the Caana
We saw some other structures, including an astronomical observatory, a ball court, middle class homes, and a reservoir. The ruins were extremely impressive, and it was cool to imagine people living in that city hundreds of years ago.
We also got to see the ceiba trees, which although they were only about 200 years old, were already over one hundred feet tall! In the plants on the ground around the trees, Faith found a small lime green grasshopper. I think it was some type of nymph, as I didn’t see any wings on it. It promptly hopped away, but it was very cute, and I managed to snap a photo of it.
tiny green grasshopper!
We got rained on towards the end of the tour, but we took refuge in the abandoned houses that were used for the archaeologists. We then had lunch, during which we got to hear howler monkeys. Their howls were a lot lower than I had anticipated. Some other cool things we had gotten to see were leaf cutter ants and their huge nests, as well as a wild cilantro plant, which is more potent than the commercially available cilantro.
After lunch, we headed to Las Cuevas! On the drive over, we saw some scarlet macaws flying overhead, a toucan in the canopy, and multiple turtles that were crossing the road. When we got to the research station, we were welcomed by Rafael, the manager, and then we enjoyed dinner and our class presentations. I’m excited for tomorrow and getting to truly experience the rain forest!
This morning we went on a long and speedy hike to pick up all the camera traps we laid out on our first day in the Chiquibul! I had a great time using the GPS to help find the location of our camera traps, although it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to zoom in and out on the GPS map!
On our hike, I was able to confidently identified a butterfly! I saw an orange striped butterfly in the genus Heliconius. It looked just like the tiger-striped long wing, with orange striped wings and white spots on the ends of the front wings. However, as this butterfly has several mimics it could have been one of them instead. This genus of butterflies has been used in many studies about mimicry, so this was especially exciting for me!
I also saw a really cool massive wasp (?) while hiking this morning. It had long orange legs and a black body with yellow markings. It was giant, about the size of a ping pong ball, and just resting on a leaf. Hopefully I can look it up when we get back to civilization and figure out what kind of wasp it is! ( Or ask Scott!)
[[[[insert was picture]]]]]]
In the afternoon there was a heavy rain, and the previously dry frog pond filled up a bit. This was very exciting as it meant that the frogs began to loudly call from this area. We hiked out to see them, and although we didn’t have any spottings it was very cool to be surrounded by their loud strange calls. According to one of the staff members at Las Cuevas Research Station, it was likely a bunch of Mexican Burrowing Toads.
We drove out of the Chiquibul this afternoon, and although it was a long and bumpy car ride, I am happy to have warm water again!
Today we opened leaf cutter ant colonies and laid out pitfall traps for Arthropoda in the canopy and on the forest floor. While laying out our pitfall traps, we were able to see two moths which had been infected with ophiocorticeps fungi! This fungi infects the host, hijacks its nervous system and causes it to move to a preferable location, then kills it and sprouts out of its body to release its spores!
[[[[[[zombie moth pic will be inserted later]]]]]]]]]
Near the research station, we opened up two leaf cutter ant colonies and were able to see the fungus farms on the inside! The first colony we opened was only about a year old, and we were able to take out the queen. She had a massive swollen body and was around 2 inches long. I learned how to pick up the soldier ants in the second colony and was able to capture a few. I let one bite my nail and a callus on my hand to see its biting power. I also let it bit a small hole in my shirt for a souvenir!
Between the two ant colonies, while digging, Michael came across a Mexican Burrowing Toad. This toad is quite difficult to spot, as it is generally burrowed underground. Its body is wide and flat, with red spots. It had pretty short appendages and basically no neck – making it look both incredibly goofy and cute.
After dinner, we went on a night hike to the dried up frog pond. This was the coolest experience I have had in Belize so far! We were able to see 2 endangered Morrelets Tree Frogs, one of which hopped onto my shoulder! We also saw a snake climb a bush and find and eat a clump of tree frog eggs! Elena spotted a second snake behind this one while we were watching it, which led to us finding an additional 5 snakes in the canopy above us!!
We had our first full day in the Chiquibul today, and it was action packed! I started off the day birdwatching at 5 am. I saw a group of 3 wild ocellated turkeys, a pair of plumbious kites (predatory birds), many black vultures, and several toucans! The morning chorus is nearly deafening and occasionally accented by the black howler monkeys.
We spent the rest of the day laying out camera traps to try and see some mammals, and got to hike many of the surrounding trails in the process. On one of the trails, we ran into a large termite colony. After advice from Scott, several of use ate a few termites, which shockingly taste just like carrots!
This afternoon, I got some practice catching butterflies and was able to successfully capture 3! The most common butterflies around were sulfur butterflies, but I also found some other more rare and interesting ones! At the bird watching tower nearby the station, I caught a moth/butterfly that had a black body with iridescent blue spots, and wings that had orange borders and clear centers! Maybe related to the glasswing butterfly (due to the shared clear wings), although this is very vague speculation on my part!
[[[[[ insert moth pic]]]]]]]
At the end of our day, we visited a seasonal frog pond (fills up with water through the rainy season) that was currently muddy but not yet pond-like. Hanging from a branch above the center of the ‘pond’ was several clusters of red-eyed tree frog eggs! These eggs slowly develop, and when the pond is full of water they will hatch and the tadpoles will drop into the pond.
