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Day 6: Welcome to Peelize!

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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.

 

Bonus: Caught a brown anole in the forest!

 

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Day 7

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On our last day at the Las Cuevas Research station, we spent most the morning and afternoon retracing our steps from the first day. All of this was in the effort to understand if species richness differed between natural and man-made clearings. I am proud to say that the hike was not nearly as exhausting as it was at the beginning. I also got the change to see an example of epiphytic Encyclia cochleata, the national flower of Belize. I think I have achieved my peak of epiphyte. It was one of the most satisfying moments of this trip to date.

After cleaning up and showering we went over to the classroom for taxonomic presentations, my presentation on NTDs/ethnobotany, and to look at what our camera traps caught. I really enjoyed my topic, especially because I had taken a research seminar in the previous semester on the topic. We then got into an interesting discussion on how Brazil should manage the threat of Zika and the upcoming influx of people for the Rio de Janiero Olympics.

Our pictures from the camera trapping experiment were a bit disappointing until we got the last one. On its memory card, we found both and ocelot and a WHAT WAS THIS. Overall, our data set was way to small to be able to really tell anything about the preferences of animals in the Chiquibul for man-made or natural clearings. All in all, these past experiment (while they don’t yield statistically significant data) are doing a great job of showing me how to trouble shoot ecological/evolutionary experiments.

On to Glovers Reef!

 

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Day 6

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Today was not a great day for epiphytes. This isn’t because they weren’t out there, but just because we spent most of the day inside. Our main project was to interpret the results of our pitfall traps. After collecting the vials, we headed back to the classroom to assess the morphospecies found. Our hypotheses focused on whether species abundance and richness were different in the canopy versus the forest floor and whether or not canopy species were more attracted to a nitrogen source (our urine).

The first question was more straightforward than the second. We could clearly see that both abundance and richness were greater for the forest floor. However, teasing apart the question of nitrogen limitation in the canopy versus the forest floor proved to be much more complicated. In the end, we choose to represent the difference between the by creating data points by subtracting the amount of arthropods in the water from the urine (for canopy and ground). Upon discussing the report with Scott and Adrienne, we found many ways in which our work could be improved upon. Two of the most crucial changes we made was to use a proportion rather than a subtraction and to pool all samples we took (broadening our community). This refining process is both interesting and productive; many new research directions came from our discussion.

At the end of the day, we all went on a night hike. The difference in number of species we saw was really noticeable. As for epiphytes, I certainly saw them, but am becoming more and more convinced that this group is hard to pin down for any specific geographical location. So many of the factors of what species ends up where is tied to the specific characteristics of the niches of the Chiquibul forest. In the future, I would be interested took look into the literature for information on niche exploitation by epiphytes. I think it would greatly increase my comprehension of the epiphyte landscape.

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Day 5

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Caving was just as exciting (and tiring) as I thought it would be. The first half was not that bad in terms of the amount of mud that I got on myself. Prematurely, I thought that I would come out unscathed. But no, it was the last part of the cave walk that really got me. After going through the main chambers in the system, there was an optional offshoot where they had previously found a peccary skeleton. The first crawl through was narrow, but the second was so narrow that you absolutely had to get down on the ground (flat on your belly) and army crawl through. My clothing was obliterated. But completely and totally worth it. I hope that I get to continue caving after this trip.

Otherwise, the day consisted of us finishing up the analysis of our Cecropia hypotheses and making posters. Our data, though it seemed to indicate higher investment in leaves and juveniles (consistent with the herbivore satiation hypothesis) was limited by our small samples size and estimation techniques. In the end, none of the groups has conclusive evidence, keeping the question of how young Cecropia defend themselves against herbivory prior to Azteca ant colonization open for future study.

Lastly, we set up our pitfall traps (using our own urine and water) to compare biodiversity in the canopy and forest floor settings. Specifically, we hope to learn about the differing needs in nitrogen in both. Tomorrow, one of the things that we will be doing is collecting the traps and analyzing the subsequent data.