Daily Blog Entry 5:

The cool interesting ant find of the day was the Cephalotes that Sam found! He said that the Cephalotes ant just glided onto him, which is what the Cephalotes are known for, giving them the common name ‘gliding ant;. Although Cephalotes are supposed to glide onto trees and not to humans, to the ant’s credit, Sam was wearing a green shirt and dark pants. He was basically dressed like a tree. Cephalotes have a very flat head, abdomen, and thorax, which gives them a second common name go ’turtle ant’, so it was pretty easy to identify the ant as a Cephalotes because it too had an incredibly flat, rectangular head. I wanted to see the ant to exhibit their turtle-like behaviour of retracting their legs when they were scared, but it didn’t seem to be scared by people’s presence. Sam wanted to see it glide, so dropped the ant to test if it would glide back onto Sam’s leg. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the ant anymore. I was so excited with finding the Cepahlotes and testing its interesting behaviour that I forgot to take a photo of it. Dang it.

In other news, I walked right into a vine that was right on my eye level, so now I have a cut above my left eyebrow. To be fair, I was on the lookout for ants for I was only looking at the forest floor. Speaking of critters, I am now very paranoid about chiggers. I’ve picked off a few tics from my body and it doesn’t bother me too much because I have the satisfaction of crushing it with my fingernails and killing it. Meanwhile, chiggers can cause so many bites on the body before its death, and you can’t even see it!

To end on a positive note, WE SAW A TOUCAN TODAY! It was smaller than I expected, but I am so happy I got to see one!

The toucans were too small to take a photo of, and I didn’t take a photo of the Cephalotes, so enjoy a photo of a cute baby leaf cutter ant’s nest that we saw: