Today we had our first introductions to the Chiquibul rainforest! We got to come up with a new research project using a bunch of camera traps to get pictures of animals that we might be scared away if we tried to see them in person. We set up 16 total camera traps all around the research station to see which predators and prey of the forest use areas of human influence such as trails and roads differently. This gave us a great opportunity to spend pretty much all day hiking around the rainforest and getting to know the area!
On these excursions we sawso many cool things! We could look up and see so many different trees, palms, and other epiphytes such as bromeliads. Dr. Solomon also showed us a truly magnificent leafcutter ant nest that was nearly 20 years old and ridiculously huge! At the peak of one of the trails, we climbed up a tower that looks over the whole rainforest with nothing but trees for miles and miles! And then on the way down, we found a small cave that the Maya used, which was so beautiful and we even found a small area of ceramic sherds!
Within this cave, and throughout the entire hike, I found so many examples of cool arachnids! Along the trails in the leaf litter, I saw (and held!) some harvestmen, which are a class of arachnids that include daddy long legs. I also sawso many different types of webs, such as thick funnels in the tree trunks. Some of the coolest ones we saw though, were the huge black spiders hanging from the ceiling in the cave! Although I couldn’t identify these sentinels (or get good pics because my camera died), it was still awesome to see so many of them!
Hi all, it’s Faith with Day 10 updates from the 2022 Belize trip!!!
Today we woke up extra early (mostly on accident) to birdwatch from Las Cuevas Deck! We didn’t see any macaws, but we saw two- four toucans flying across the sky. They were gorgeous!
Then we went to plan out next research project. For our question, we chose “which area (trails, jungle, roads) will each animal group (large predators, small predators, large prey, small prey) use the most measured by relative abundance?” Our hypothesis was that big cats would be the dominant animals using paths and roads whereas small prey and mammals would stay under forest cover. We planned on using trap-cameras to get photos of animals as they cross the trails. By the way, while we were planning, we saw 4 scarlet macaws flying around!
Then we set off to se tho the cameras. Our first trip out we ran into our first of three white lipped turtles (Kinosternon leucostomum). This one was easy to identify because of its white lip, it looked just like one of the ones on my taxa sheet, and we found it swimming in a muddy puddle after the morning rains. After we saw the turtle, I set up my first camera on the “shortcut path” back to Las Cuevas. Because I went first, I was deemed the “camera soldier” and had to fix/ mess with lots of peoples cameras.
We did so much in this hike: set up cameras, use gps markers, walk through the jungle, eat termites, climb a bird tower, trip on Mayan stairs, see huge cave spiders, the list is endless.
I didn’t see my taxa again until after a light evening rain, and they were two mud turtles swimming around in mud puddles. I’m finding that these turtles vary greatly in shell appearance and patterning. The last two turtles lacked the classic white lip coloring, which caused me to misidentify them at first. However, their “bridge shell pattern” between the carapace and bottom shell indicated their true species. Plus, they were found in the same environment as the other white lipped mud turtle!
I’m hoping to see other types of mud turtles, like the Tabasco turtle. The wet season is proving to be good for turtle hunting but bad for reptiles and snakes. I’ll let you know what we see next!
Til’ Tomorrow!
QOTD:
“ if you leave me I’m signing up for an online orphanage”
Giant Cave SpidersThe view at Las CuevasOne of the three white-lipped mud turtles! (Generously picked up by Caio)Scarlett Macaw!
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!
Today we did a total of four things, each one more exciting than the last.
In the early morning, we hiked up a very steep hill to the bird tower, a two-story wooden structure that looks out across a huge expanse of raw rainforest. The hike was difficult, but the view absolutely worth it, especially since it was morning and blue mist settled over an endless horizon of canopy. We stayed for a while, then hiked back, stopping at a small cave along the way.
The view from the bird tower. PC: Sam
In the late morning, we set out to collect our camera traps. Though the hike was long and strenuous, I found three hatched light-blue eggs under a tree slightly off-trail, which was new. Orhoptera wise, I didn’t see as much as I usually do, but I did see one very large and bright green grasshoppers at the base of the bird tower. Though I didn’t see its wings, I assumed it to be a red-winged grasshopper from the size.
In the afternoon, we went out to excavate leaf-cutter ant hills, led by Scott. The Mississippi group of college-age kids staying with us at Las Cuevas came with us, too. We all watched Scott as pulled out a queen from the heart of a one-year-old leaf cutter ant nest. It was a large and disturbing version of ant that I wasn’t used to, but the whole excavation process was really interesting. We also excavated a much larger (25 feet or so) ant nest, hit a dump tank, and instead got to touch warm, decomposing fungus. During this hike, I did in fact see an actual red-winged grasshopper very up close, since the guy I was walking with saw it and picked it up. It was huge–likely 10 cm across, and flew away almost as soon as it was picked up so I couldn’t get a picture.
In the evening, we finally checked our camera trap cards. Already on the first camera we found a Baird’s tapir, and then, amazingly, a jaguar. All of us collectively screamed at the sight of the rosette patterning. The unbelievable part came later, however, when we caught yet another jaguar on a separate camera trap. Both were absolutely stunning, and I think I screamed louder on the second than the first. We also found three pumas, an armadillo, a coral snake, curassows, and a variety of other animals we hadn’t seen yet. But the jaguars were really the crown jewel of the whole piece.
This was the only day that was relatively calm so far. Effectively, we only did one activity (which is far less than we usually do) and this was retrieving our samples for our second project on nitrogen limitation in the rainforest. Yes, this is the pee one. After finding and tagging our urine and water vials, we went back to the lab and spent approximately four hours sorting throuhg the insects we found in the liquid, dividing them into different categories based on appearance alone. This meant we were each assigned an insect group, to keep the identification standardized across the whole project.
I was assigned Orthoptera, as this is my regularly-assigned taxon, and this may as well have been the most Orthoptera I saw today. On our morning hike, there were no interesting Orthoptera organisms, though I did catch what seemed like a few quick, small crickets jumping throuhg the leaf litter. The lack of recorded Orthoptera for today may be partially due to the fact our morning hike was short, and I wasn’t paying close and particular attention to the leaves, since we were all preoccuped with collecting our samples.
Halfway through our four-hour analysis, a second group arrived at Las Cuevas Research Station. They were college students, here to study ecology and biology like us. We somehow got offered the opportunity to present our project to them, so we did—standing at the front of the lecture lab, holding a poster titled “To Pee or Not to Pee”, discussing our day-long analysis in front of a group of strangers. They were sympathetic and seemed genuinely interested in our study, which was reassuring and honestly very sweet. It was a good (if not slightly eccentric) introduction to the first outsiders we’d seen in days.
Besides this, it was a quiet day. At about 2 pm, it started raining in traditional rainforest fashion: brief, ephemeral torrents of rain, followed by open blue skies. We all stood on the deck of Las Cuevas and basked in the falling rain.
After sunset (pictured above), we had an opportunity to go out into the rainforest, and this was quite the adventure. As you would imagine the rainforest is foreign and unforgiving already in the daytime, but in the nighttime it takes up a different sort of personality—a more threatening one, and for the first time I felt slightly un-safe while cruising the trails. My general disregard for the danger of animals helps me feel safe in the jungle when the sun’s out, but at night even I started feeling hints of fear.
We saw many spiders and many crickets. The crickets were plentiful. I saw at least four that were large, maybe 5 cm, with long antennae often the size of their body. They were shiny and easy to spot in the dark. I also saw a surprisingly large amount of monkey grasshoppers, five in total. This is surprising since grasshoppers tend to be diurnal. I also saw katydid nymphs with very strange morphology, longer-limbed than their adult sizes, pictured to the right next to a monkey grasshopper picture.
One of the many monkey grasshopper I saw on the night hike; note how it’s not as colorful as the ones I saw by day.A katydid nymph with a very strange pronotum and very long legs and antennae.
Once again there was a moment of total darkness, as we all turned off our lights and stood in the rainforest. It was different from the cave—more alive. We stood in the darkness for a few minutes, and the stars shone above a lot brighter than they ever are in Houston, or anywhere else. We spent the rest of the night watching the stars off the staircase of the station, talking and listening to the sounds of the rainforest.
There were two main activites of the day—one involved urine and the other involved feces.
The urine one: we collected our pee in the morning as a nitrogen source to entice the elusive insects of the forest. Essentially, we were comparing the diversity of insects between the canopy and the forest floor. The urine (and a control sample of water) will attract some insects, and we can then quantify the insects and compare biodiversity between the locations.
My Orthoptera of the day were plentiful: a small, striped one that looked like Cornops aquaticum (pictured below)but probably wasn’t because the latter tend to be found in semi-aquatic habitats; a beautiful red-winged grasshopper that I only saw fly away like a bird into the skies, scarlet wings beating; a lovely dull-brown katydid (that I touched! and then immediately un-touched) on a leaf in the jungle; and about four other smaller species that I didn’t know the names of.
A fairly poorly-taken photo of the little cricket Adrienne found on the side of her cup.
The highlight of the day was the caving, which took place in the afternoon. We headed into a local cave that almost no one goes into, and began our trek into the darkness. Honestly, I was more taken by the formations of stalactites and stalagmites (beautiful white crystalline structures, hanging like sharp teeth) than by the tiny biological life forms on the floor (which included worms, millipedes, isopods, ants, the like). There were bats as well, important cave creatures, and we saw a whole flock of baby bats huddled together on the ceiling.
The baby bats huddled at the roof of the cave. PC: Jessica
There was a moment, a very good and unforgettable moment, of total darkness where we all turned off our lights. Something about it was surreal. I grinned the whole time, eyes wide staring into nothing. I swear to you I saw silhouettes of crickets carved into the darkness—this is the level of my imprinting.
WE SAW A SNAKE TODAY. A very large one. Boa constrictor. Maybe 5 feet? Very pretty, just laying on the ground across from a massive leaf-cutter ant’s nest.
So I think that’s really it for me—that’s all I really came to see, thanks very much. Seeing a snake in the wild is always a thrill, but a boa constrictor in the rain forest is just an unparalleled delight. I do admit the whole experience threw me right back into my on-and-off obsession with herpetology, and I spent the next few hours rolling over logs in the vague hope I’d see another slither out.
The boa constrictor we saw in the middle of the jungle.
We encountered the boa while setting out the camera traps, which was our main project of the day. The project required that we set one camera facing the trail and another paired camera a few minutes off-trail, and this was where the real adventure was at. With Scott machete-ing a path through the thick jungle underbrush and blazing our trail, I felt like a proper Indiana Jones and decided right then to buy a machete as soon as the opportunity arose. The first time we went off trail I spotted my prettiest Orthotera yet—a lubber grasshopper nymph, about 2 cm across, black with abstractly placed yellow and orange stripes. I caught it with a jar, and have it sitting atop my dresser right now, awaiting my Orthoptera lesson tomorrow where I’ll show it off. I’ve attached a picture of it and the quick sketch I made of its patterning. Additionally, someone else found a pink oblong-winged katydid (and as you know, katydids are by far my favorite Orthoptera). Apparently these are genetic mutants, and rare to find in the wild. I kept it for a while, watched it actively defecate in the jar, and then released it after feeling bad that I’d left it in a glass case filled with its own feces. I took a few pictures of it, and managed to snap the only actually-good, well-focused photo I’ve taken so far.
The rare pink katydid we caught on the edges of the road.A lubber grasshopper nymph looking very pretty in this jar.
As of yet I have not touched an Orthoptera, and this is starting to weigh on me psychologically. I feel slightly like an unloving mother. Maybe tomorrow the resolve will strengthen, but no promises.
