Tag Archives: Liliana

The Big Goodbye- final blog

I didn’t wake up to birds today, I woke up to the sound of my sister getting ready for school, and my brother playing video games. Instead of being greeted in the morning by hermit crabs and bees, it was my dog. Instead of the smell of soil, rain, and the sea, it’s the smell of a city (pee and cigarettes). My dad kept asking if I would want to go back someday, and my answer is always “yes, of course!” Like I would sit in the mangroves of death every day for an hour just to go back with everyone for another week.

It’s crazy how despite all the differences between the coral reef and the rainforest, the thing that really relates them the most is the vast diversity they hold and maintain. I’m sure we could get into scientific differences, the framework of the reef being built on the exoskeletons of coral, the forest reliance on the nutrient cycle to maintain the trees which provide for the rest. I’m inclined to say that rainforests are the coral reefs of land (instead of the opposite, but that might just be my personal preference for the reef).  But instead of thinking too hard about all the scientific levels these two ecosystems relate, I think they’re related in that they each filled me with the same sense of awe, wonder, curiosity, and endless excitement. I could stare over each environment for hours, and never get bored, there’s always something new to look at, a different fish, a new bird, a new interaction, a tree so tall you can’t see the top, or a reef so deep you can only imagine what’s on the bottom.

My expectations going in were that it would be much more formal, more pressure and much stricter. In reality it turns out our professors are kind, understanding, and just as curious and excited as we are, they’re just happy to help us grow in our knowledge and experience and push our interests even further.

My favorite part of the course was Glover’s reef, without a doubt. I think it’s really solidified for me that marine biology is what I want to continue to study, that I can thrive not just in a lab at my lab bench with pipettes, but also in the field. I know that I can handle unexpected circumstances, changing plans and uncertainty and not freak out.  I’m supposed to write about my least favorite parts of the course but I can only think of the van rides, not because they weren’t fun, just because I get carsick really easily. Honestly, I kind of miss the mosquitos and the bugs. I also learned that I can make new friends, even when it’s scary and it’s all people I’ve never met before. I always thought I was really shy and I was really scared of meeting new people, but even after a couple days I was ready to call everyone there with me a friend, and I hope that we will all continue to be friends even as we continue through undergrad or graduation, and I really hope to be able to work with everyone again in the future in some capacity or another.

Not to bash premeds, but this course has completely erased any doubts I had about changing paths. No matter how much work we were doing, how long the days were, how frustrating the waves, how seasick I was or how itchy I got, I was always happy. I was completely engaged and eager to learn. I really thought that medicine would be the only thing worth pursuing for me, and when I was forced to drop premed because it was making me miserable I was worried that nothing else would be as worthwhile or fulfilling. But I’m realizing there’s no point in having the most respected career or the most intense academics if you’re miserable the whole time and not even interested. I wanted to be a marine biologist in elementary and middle school, and even the first few years of high school, then I changed my mind to becoming a doctor, but that clearly didn’t last, I just don’t think I can stay away from the ocean and everything there is to learn and explore there.

EEBIO full steam ahead!!! This isn’t the last time you’ll see me on a reef, and hopefully someday I’ll be able to go all the way to the bottom of the ocean!

“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”

My toad don’t jiggle jiggle (except this one does) (18/06/2022)

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 dehydrated
Peeing 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

Fungi-full Day! (17/06/22)

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!

Not shown: bugs swarming our water bottles

 

Caracol but no snails???? (16/06/22)

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!

Welcome to the jungle (we’ve got tapirs and jaguars) (15/06/22)

I’m actually so sad to leave Glover’s Reef, I miss the hermit crabs, the iguanas and lizards, the giant blue crabs, the breeze, I even miss the sand everywhere and maybe even the mosquitos. We said our goodbye’s to Glover’s this morning, I can’t believe that was still today!

Then got back on the boat to Belize city. I slept through most of the boat ride, even the bumpier parts, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the first ride into Glover’s. I also got to eat some of the candy I bought back when we first got into Belize, some chile and chamoy lollipops, (I bought some more sweet and spicy candies when we went to the store again today). We had a long and relaxed lunch at Calypso, right on the dock where we got off of the boat. Then set off to the Belize Zoo and education center. I unfortunately did not see any of my taxon today. My rainforest taxon is lichen and fungi! Both pretty interesting but super hard to identify specific species or even classify in some cases!

Also yesterday on Glover’s we got to eat Lionfish ceviche! It was so good, I’ve never had ceviche until now and I think I’ve been missing out. I don’t know if it’ll taste as good without the fresh caught lionfish. We also had conch at dinner, it’s common to eat here in Belize but I’ve never had it before, and it was pretty good! I’m not a huge fan of seafood so I’m glad it was fried and had a relatively light flavor and a nice texture.

We also got a night tour of the zoo here after dinner. They only have animals native to Belize and all of them are rescues, either from people keeping wild animals as pets then dumping them when they get too big or aggressive, or were going to be killed for hunting livestock by farmers, or brought in as infants that wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

I think my favorite was the Tapir, his nose was just so long and funny and kept wiggling around!

Tomorrow we have another long travel day, but hopefully it’ll be just as much fun!

Dreams Coming True (14/06/22)

In 6 minutes we’re going to make lionfish ceviche. I have always wanted to eat a lionfish since I started working at the New England Aquarium and learned about them as an invasive species, I knew I had to do my part to help. Unfortunately (? maybe fortunate) they’re not found in New England, and I haven’t been desperate enough to go to Florida just to eat a lionfish. We caught our first lionfish a few days ago and it was huge, since then we caught about 2 more. I have no idea if I’ll like lionfish ceviche, since I’ve never had ceviche before.

In other things we did today, we went to a non-protected reef to finish our coral data collection, and then another reef just for fun. Did not encounter many crustaceans today other than the normal hermit crab population here.

I can’t believe it’s our last night here, I don’t think I’m ready to go, there’s still so much to learn and explore here on the reef and the island. I think it’ll be hard to adjust to the new environment but hopefully it’ll be just as much fun!

Drop off and Sea Sick (13/06/22)

Another early and eventful morning. After breakfast we went out on the boat to the fore reef, just outside the coral circle of the atoll. Once we got outside the reef the waters got choppy and I got seasick a little bit, I thought once I got in the water I would feel better but I still felt sick whenever I looked up out of the water. I was perfectly happy to just lie in the water and stare down below and get pushed around by the waves. Wherever we were was at least 60 feet deep I think, but it felt way deeper. One of our water safety officers free dove all the way almost to the bottom! I had no idea that was even possible for someone to do, but we looked down and he was just swimming along the bottom below us. We saw lots of fish, but a little too deep to get a good look, and even a sea turtle way below us. We swam over to the drop off, like in finding nemo, you suddenly can’t see the bottom of the water anymore and it just drops into deep blue and then black, maybe it only goes a little bit deeper, maybe it goes miles deep, you just can’t tell or see anything past the darkness. Weirdly instead of being scared I was just more curious then anything. My first lab research experience was with hydrothermal vents and those extremophilic organisms around them, so most of my first marine knowledge was of the deep sea instead of coral reefs. I would love to someday get SCUBA certified and dive right down to the bottom to just see what’s there past what I can see from the top. And someday I’m going to go in a submarine to the bottom of the ocean if I can, I want to see everything down there, it’ll be like stepping into a completely new world.

I got pretty seasick on the way back, luckily I kept my breakfast because it’s a shame to lose a good meal, and took a short nap on the dock to get my bearings. After lunch we put together a beach cleanup activity! We managed to collect about 64 kg of trash across the island and sort it out for disposal. Highlights include:

a complete fish skeleton (not trash, just cool).

A full tube of mascara

A tiny plastic sheep

A bottle of bright blue dye that turned everything else blue

A bottle of yellow smelly liquid (pee? I really hope not)

Several baby flip-flops (why do they need shoes, they can’t even walk)

A single Balenciaga slide

and lots and lots of plastic bottles.

There was plenty more trash but our bags were overflowing and we can only carry so much. It’s really sad how much there is on what’s supposed to be a conservation site, just washing up from other islands and everywhere else in the world the currents take it.

Before dinner Nate handed out some of the shells he collected to the local hermit crabs. One of them actually accepted it, and began to examine it closely, preparing for a move. We stood in a circle around it, completely frozen so we wouldn’t scare it and watched and cheered when it moved shells into a nice new shell that was a better shape and size.

The crab was treated to some coconut, because moving is stressful.

And the coconut was quickly swarmed by the other crabs, hopefully our friend got plenty to eat before it got crowded!

Lionfish: 4 TFBs: 1

Another early morning and right onto the boat! We went to two different marine protected areas. After laying out our transects and quadrats and collecting our data on live versus dead coral we did another sea urchin hunt. The first area I was only able to find one dead urchin skeleton, but as a class we got 52 sea urchins and a sea egg named Harry. The second site I had a little better luck, I managed to find one sea urchin, but with it was a bonus brittle star! I also found 2 crabs while searching for urchins but I couldn’t see any of them aside from colors before they scrambled away. Best guess is that they’re either green porcelain crabs, or emerald crab/green clinging crab. I didn’t see any lobsters, but Ruth, one of our water safety officers, found a ton and took some photos on my camera (her photography is miles better than mine!) that I’ll add here after I figure out how the camera works. We also caught another lionfish on this trip out, it’s in the freezer now waiting to be eaten. Everyone is saying we’re going to make ceviche at the end of the week with the fish, I’ve never had it before so hopefully it’s good!

Our post lecture snorkel took us to a reef just a little off of the island, this reef had lots of fish and even a stingray and reef squid! We also saw 4 lionfish around the reef but since they were small they were hard to catch and we didn’t manage to get any of them. Hopefully we’ll have better luck tomorrow. This reef was much more bleached and dead then the other patches we’ve visited, and there was a lot of algae on the sea floor decaying and suffocating the coral with their decomposition. Despite that the living parts of the reef were amazing and the fish were huge! I can’t wait for tomorrow, I’m really hoping conditions are good enough for us to visit the fore reef.

Coral graveyard and crab shenanigans (09/06/22)

Hi y’all, it’s Liliana again.

I am completely exhausted right now so lets hope that I can write something coherent. We started early again at 6:30, and I hate to say it but waking up that early is becoming more normal. We practiced using our transects and quadrants on land before we formed our research question and went out on the water. This time we stuck to the sea grass and swam through it looking for a specific green algae, penicillus. Each group of two with a total of seven groups swam at least 100 feet out, looking to see how many we could find in a 2×4 area every 10 feet, in the end despite all the ground covered we did not find that many. My group only found two, but we found some other exciting stuff instead like an upside down jelly! And more relevant to my taxon we found a crab next to the upside down jelly, but it was very dead and I didn’t want to get close enough to the jelly to see what the crab was. We wrote our findings and made a group poster and presentation about our mini experiment.

After lunch we went to the coral graveyard, which is great for identifying coral species since you can get a really close look at all the parts and how it looks underneath the living tissue.

After that I got to present my lecture on lionfish/invasive reef species, and my years long mission to eat a lionfish, and I hope that this trip will finally be my chance, since there are many lionfish on this reef that need to be removed.  Today was interesting in terms of crab behavior.

On my way to the bathroom I spotted this hermit crab dragging a small lizard across the ground into a hole.

We also discovered that the hermit crabs like coconut, they’ve been swarming the area where the children were cracking and eating coconuts.

Anyways, it’s time for me to go to sleep, I am exhausted and need all my rest before tomorrow.

Crab: 1 Liliana: 0

It’s day 2 on Glover’s and our first day in the water! We had a super early (in my opinion) start, everyone woke up around 6:30 and we all geared up and headed to breakfast at 7. After some delicious banana pancakes we got into the water for the first time and went to a patch reef a little ways off. It was a pretty calm swim through a lot of sea grass and then before we knew it we were at the reef! It was incredible and I wish I had photos to add here but I didn’t bring my camera on the first swim, hopefully someone else here will have photos for you to see! We saw so many corals and fish, and such a wide variety of organisms all over the place. Everywhere you looked there was something new to see. We even saw a small lionfish sitting on the reef, which is not ideal for invasive reef species control, but still interesting to see one out in the wild in real life! The first swim was a good one for my taxon group, crustaceans; we saw a Caribbean spiny lobster hiding in a hole underneath some coral, another organism I have been hoping to see in real life. After about an hour in the water we went out for a break and some land prep for tomorrow before lunch. Around this time I was outside with the two kids who had collected a bunch of crabs in coconut shells. They showed me one smaller crab and despite their warnings that he was (understandably) angry, I tried to pick it up to get a better look. Alas, the crab outsmarted me and got a good chunk of my finger in his claw, luckily it didn’t draw blood, just a long scrape and my hurt pride. Clearly my crab catching skills are a little rusty, but there are plenty of other crabs around that are hopefully a little friendlier.

We went back in the water after lunch, but not before a quick jog through the mangroves of death. While dramatic sounding, it’s pretty much a trail through the island that goes along the mangroves, and is absolutely filled with mosquitos, it felt like they were completely covering us until we all sprinted into the water and hid under the surface for them to go away. Once we got through that we shuffled our way through a bunch of sea grass until we got to a sandy area with lots of patch reefs, and we went swimming through looking for behaviors and organisms as part of a scavenger hunt. This area was less protected by the island from waves so we were pushed from side to side and through the reef and pulled around. My handwriting is already terrible, but with the waves pushing my arms and clipboard around I don’t think any of my notes are legible. Unfortunately these waves also pushed me up against the coral, and soon after I swam further away I realized that the part of my hand that had gotten smacked into the coral was turning red, and felt a little like it was burning. I discovered that I had the misfortune of bumping into a fire coral, named that probably because it hurts when you touch it. Coral: 1 Liliana: 0

However at the end of the day we went through our first round of taxon presentations and lectures, and by then my finger didn’t hurt from the crab and my hand wasn’t burning from the coral, and despite all the bug bites, I can’t wait to do it again tomorrow!