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Day 5: Insects, insects, and more insects

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My day started by being woken up to someone shouting “SCARLET MACAW!” Naturally, I woke up and went outside to see the macaws. I also ended up seeing a toucan and many different species of parrot in the surrounding trees too. 

During the middle of the day, Dyllan spotted a stick bug on the side of the cabin we were in. We picked it up, and it crawled all over us! We passed it between people and the stick bug kept wanting to climb to the highest spot it could reach, meaning it was going up and down our faces and hair. I loved this little guy (we named it Stella). He hung around on my water bottle as we watched presentations, and then he got released back outside. I’m happy to see him thriving outside, but sad to see him go.

(Stella)

This afternoon, we went out into the field to observe young and old leaf cutter ant colonies. Dr. Solomon found us a 1 year old colony (~6 in deep, ~6 in wide). Leaf cutter ants sustain themselves with a mutualistic fungus that they cultivate. Our goal was to extract this fungal garden. After about 20 minutes of digging, we found this fungus and Dr. Solomon pulled it out of the mound with a spoon. The queen ant was also on this fungus and she was HUGE. 

(Leaf cutter ant fungal garden with the queen on top)

We then moved on to trying to excavate fungus from the large, old colony. This colony was multiple feet out of the ground, and is speculated to be many feet deep (10?). It had an impressive surface area with holes to intake O2 and exhale CO2 from deep in the colony. When Dr. Solomon started to dig, it took a few seconds for the soldier ants to come out, but after about a minute, they started to SWARM. It was super cool seeing how many ants could come to the colony’s defense. Eventually, Sam and Dr. Solomon dug deep enough to excavate the fungus inside which was very impressive (though super scary with so many aggressive ants trying to crawl up our boots). 

The last thing we did was we went on a night hike. On this hike, we saw multiple tarantulas and large spiders, a large scorpion, many beetles and cockroaches, highly active leaf cutter ant highways with many leaves being transported, an incredibly camouflaged bird called a pauraque, and 2 anoles (one of which Dr. Evans taught me how to catch and I did!) This hike was fascinating for seeing how different a jungle ecosystem can be at night vs the day. Though we did not see any mammals, we smelled a smell likely coming from a large cat in the same area that I heard the potential puma last night!

(the silky anole Dr. Solomon caught)

(Night hiking!)

Next up… caves!

Claire C

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Welcome to Peelize

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Daily Blog Entry 6:

Today was a different day than normal because we only went on a hike once, and I don’t think I got any more bug bites today. It feels strange to not walk around drenched in sweat and fighting the urge to scratch every inch of my body.

In the morning while I was bird watching, Jessica and Scott were talking about the ants by the sugar containing by the coffee station. Jessica called it a sugar ant but Scott said they were ghost ants. The ghost ants had a light, beige colouring to it. Some were crawling around the sugar jar while the others were walking in a single line towards the sugar. I have never seen a ghost ant before, so that was a cool find. I had no idea that ants could have such light coloered abdomen.

Another cool thing that had happened was the experience of working on the urine sample project and presenting them to the Southern Mississippi University students. I didn’t know that the gloves that I used to handle the urine samples had a hole in it. While handling Jessica’s urine vile, my hand got wet and I thought it was just my sweat, but as I was washing my gloves I realised that the gloves had a hole in it. Yikes.

When I introduced the urine project to the other students who came to the research centre today, I welcomed them and started my presentation by saying “Welcome to Peelize”. Pun credits to Sami.

We also saw a scorpion under black light, and it turned to a florescent green. It was wild. Sami, our arachnid expert said that it was because of a protein in their exoskeleton.

Attached are the pee insects. photo credits to Jessica

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Red and Yellow Kill a Fellow

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Daily Blog Entry 4:

We are on a lucky streak with animal sightings. Sam spotted a coral snake, and we all watched it slither in front of us and out of a log. It was very nice to see that the most venomous snake in the Americas is actually a very gentle snake that doesn’t want to bother humans.

Today I learned that soldier ants have the behaviour of just swarming in one direction as a colony looking for food and that they don’t have a formal nest for their colony. That is pretty wild and against my understanding because I’m most familiar with leaf cutter ants who are very organised (task partitioning) and have incredibly complex nest structures.

While walking in the rainforest while securing our nitrogen urine viles, Scott pulled a large plant leaf down to show us something. I initially had no idea what it was, but I saw that it was actually a very loosely constructed ant nest, and the disturbance actually caused the ants in the nest to hurriedly rescue the larvae of their colony- there were a lot of ants carrying white specs heading to the stem of the plant.

The most interesting ant finding of the day was cave ants. I was too busy looking at the bats and admiring the geological structures in the caves for me to even be looking at the ground. I didn’t even know that ants were in caves. When we found the ants in the cave we called Scott over and he excitedly joked “oh new opportunity for a grant” with Pedro, who guided us into the caves. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of the cave ants, but I did take pictures of my art work we left in the most remote chamber of the cave.

pictured below: TFB handling important limiting nutrients

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Leeches :(

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Daily blog entry 2:

I fed a lot of critters with my blood today. I had around a dozen 4 mm long leeches on me this morning, and I also just applied anti-itch lotion on 14 spots on my legs.

It was a long day today. After waking up at 5:25 from all the noises in the rainforest, we had a nice breakfast courtesy of the Crystal Paradise Ecolodge staff (thank you!) and headed to Rio on Pools. I followed Adrienne and Scott to what seemed like a cool water-slide location, but I WAS WRONG. I just ended up getting leeches on my butt from all the butt-scooting I did on the rocks. Other than that, Rio on Pools was absolutely gorgeous. I was definitely thinking about the Pools at Caracol as I was sweating and struggling to climb up the pyramid. We reached Caracol after we crossed the Macal River and moved from the Pine Ridge forest to the Rain forest. 

Caracol was such an interesting place. I have never seen Mayan ruins before, and I was glad that I was able to learn about ancient culture while also observing the nature around me. In total, we got to climb two temples, enter a tomb, look at half a dozen beds, and enjoy the great view of the Rainforest. We even saw Guatemala. Leo, our tour guide, even got Guatemalan service. In terms of flora and fauna, we really got lucky. We saw banana trees, howler monkeys, wild avocado, birds and lots of ants.

At Rio on Pools I got to see one ant on my taxonomic card. It had a shiny golden streak on its abdomen. That was the only remarkable ant that I saw. We saw some leaf-cutter ants on the way to the sites at Caracol. That’s when I learned that they have extensive trails that they clear out. Then we went to Las Cuevas, and that’s when I saw the leaf-cutter ant nests. They were everywhere. We just gathered around one giant ant hill, and I got to learn so much. It’s really nice to have Scott as the ant expert because I got to hear a lot of information, such as the fact that no one has actually seen a leaf-cutter queen ant and a male ant mate in the air before. I also learned that there’s a death chamber for dying ants and used leaf. Scott said that there’s a pheromone that ants emit when they die, and when that pheremone is put on alive ants, other worker ants still move that ant to the death chamber. Pretty Nifty stuff.

I received a suction device where I can collect ants. I hope I get some pretty interesting ants tomorrow!