One thing about living in LCRS during the dry season is that the mornings are HOT. Sweltering, with sweat running everywhere—which is why I was so grateful that we spent our morning indoors instead of in the forest.
We started off by analyzing our results from the Cecropia project yesterday. We collected the masses of leaves now that the grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids had been in their boxes a full day. As we soon realized, we would need to dry out the leaves and take out any potential excrement as well, which I wasn’t expecting to be the case. But that was the easy part. The harder part was reconciling from some of our previous miscommunications. Some had thought the colonized Cecropia leaves would be less likely eaten (myself included) while others had thought the opposite. For the former, I had thought that any chemical presence the ants had left, along with the physical resistance of withstanding ants for so long, would have meant a tougher leaf that insects would not eat much of as a result. In contrast, others had thought that the ants themselves, being the Cecropia’s main defense system, would cause the colonized leaf to be eaten more now that the ants were gone.
Soon enough, we tallied the masses and we got some numbers that matched up with my prediction! The total biomass of leaves before was pretty much the same after for colonized leaves, while the biomass of the uncolonized leaves decreased! Between individual leaves though, there were some differences that made this a bit weirder, where some leaves even gained mass! Maybe they just got super wet and really absorbed water? Or maybe some secret third thing happened. Who knows… unless we do a full-fledged experiment in the future!
After that though, it was time for a series of lectures! Every day, we do two taxon briefings of organisms in the rainforest, and a topic lecture about concepts in the forest. Right after our first taxon briefing on ants, however, we were in for a surprise! The director of the Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD), Dr. Rafael Manzanero, made a surprise visit to LCRS. FCD is one of the largest Belizean nonprofits focused on protecting wildlife in the area. He described the various strategies they employ as rangers, mentors, researchers, and tour guides to elevate the status of the forest. It was so amazing to hear, especially understanding how the forest has transformed in his time here. We also learned more about the caves underlying the Belizean system with Ms. Yasmini Manzanero, who heads the Karst Management Unit for FCD. Having understood the natural importance of caves in my own topic lecture, it was especially eye-opening to learn about the cultural significance of the caves, and what they meant in Maya religious culture. With its 60 sinkholes and 65 km of passages, it’s no wonder there’s so much to document!
And a couple more amazing lectures on epiphytes and plant-insect interactions later, we were off to find some leafcutter ant fungal colonies! I’d been really looking forward to this because the Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, the fungi grown within the garden has a really interesting hyphal swelling mechanism that I’d read about earlier, digesting food for the ants to eat. I will say, digging the ant colonies up was really hard. I haven’t yet developed that arm strength, I realized, but hopefully at some point! Looking at a young colony (1 yr) and an old colony (15 yr), it was interesting to see the difference in structure based on colony width, worker count, and more. At that 15-year-old point, the nest was also almost breathing, with channels selecting for oxygen inflow and CO2 outflow. The porosity of these hills was also amazing to observe.
Lastly, we went on a cool, night hike with a ranger on LCRS, Steve! Using our headlights, we saw glowing spider eyes all around us. We also saw a nocturnal bird, some tarantula, and a line of ants. I think the best part though, apart from all the cool critters we saw, the best part was watching the stars and hearing the nightlife. Chirping crickets, whistling birds, snapping twigs, and shining stars, wafting along a cool breeze. What better place to be?
And… some mushroom updates! On the way to Las Cuevas Road, we saw some white-brown fungus that I thought could be some Turkey Tail. And on the night hike, I got to see this really cool red, fleshy mushroom that might have been a Ganoderma. These reishi mushrooms have been found in certain areas in Belize like in Cayo, so really cool to see here as well. Hoping to see a bioluminescent one next #manifesting #fingerscrossed #puttingitoutthere
