Day 5 (5/20): Ants, FCD, and More Ants!
Tag Archives: Night hike
Day 5: Presentations, leafcutter ants, night hike and more!
We spent the morning going over the results of our cecropia tree experiments and making a poster to present those results to the instructors. The results were mixed—while some of the leaves did appear eaten, others actually seemed to have gained mass. We chalked this up to the leaves rehydrating in the containers, as there was also water inside for the herbivorous insects. It also seemed like the leaves from the young, uncolonized tree lost more mass, although difference was slight. This surprised me—I had assumed that, without ants to defend them, the young cecropia trees had developed some other defense mechanism. There were lots of factors we weren’t able to control for which added confounding variable, such as the species of herbivore and the age of the cecropia tree. It would also probably be better to sample more trees. We came up with a theoretical laboratory follow-up in which we grew cecropia trees and prevented one from being colonized, giving us more control over the conditions.
We also were treated with a presentation from Rafael Manzanero, the director of FCD (Friends for Conservation and Development), the organization that manages oversees Las Cuevas. He told us about the different types of work FCD does, from resource management to research to protection. He also told us about some of the challenges FCD faces, particularly since Covid.
After lunch, we had student lectures and a presentation from Yasmini Manzanero, who does cultural heritage work with FCD. She went into more detail about the history of the caves as well as the cultural and natural wonders which can be found inside. FCD works together with the Belizean Institute of Archeology to document and manage the caves, and we learned about how that relationship works as well. It really showcased another side of the work being done in this place—the work of the karst team is so fascinating,
Later the afternoon, we set out to investigate leafcutter ant fungal gardens. Basically, leafcutter ants will bring leaves back to their colony feed a fungus which they then eat. Mature colonies can have tens or hundreds of fungal garden chambers. We first went to a young leafcutter and colony, probably just over one year old, and excavated the fungal garden. We hit it pretty quickly, and we were able to pull it out intact. It had the queen right on it, along with many workers. It was too young to have any soldiers, though. After inspecting it, we moved on to a mature colony. The immature colony was in the clearing with the research station, but to find an ideal mature colony we ventured down the road a bit. We wanted one that was raised so we wouldn’t have to dig deep to find the fungal garden. The mature colony was well-defended and after only a few strokes with the shovel the soldier ants came pouring out. We had to keep stomping our boots to shake them off. Eventually, though, we uncovered the fungal garden and pulled out a sample of the fungus. It was really interesting to see nests of such radically different sizes.
We ended the day with a night hike. We did the Maya trail which goes in a loop, and we walked slow so we could see as much wildlife as possible It had been so dry that we were limited in what we were able to see, but there was still a huge diversity of insects that were super active. We also got to see two anoles and. One interesting thing we came across was some fake snakes (made of clay) being used for research purposes. By far the best part, in my opinion, was when we all turned our headlamps off and and stayed quiet for a minute to listen to the forest. It was so peaceful and the stars were beautiful! What a way to end our day.
Me and Stella
Hello again. We just got back from our night hike, and it was quite lovely. Although we didn’t see a snake, we did smell some sort of big cat where some people had heard cat sounds before, so we think there’s a puma or ocelot around. I really hope our camera traps get a picture. We also saw a few cool bugs. We found lots of moths, but it was difficult for me to identify them or get a good picture because they are moving so fast. Sadhana got a picture of a really big one, so I plan to ID it later. Another cool bug we saw was a weevil. I covered weevils in my presentation today on plant insect interactions in the tropics, so it was nice to see one out in the field.
Earlier in the day, we saw another example of an insect plant mutualism from my presentation, which is leaf cutter ants! We excavated a young mound first and found the fungal garden and the queen. This mutualism is so cool because despite leaf cutter ants being known for their ability to cut and carry leaves, these leaves are actually to feed the fungus that they maintain in their own garden of sorts. As fungivores, these leaves fungus is their source of food. The queen that we saw started her nest by taking a piece of fungus from her origin nest, initiating a mating flight, and then finding a new spot to start laying eggs for her colony. The success rate of these new colonies are low, but they can be maintained for dozens of years, like the next mound that we excavated to find the fungal garden, which was ENORMOUS. I was really nervous about how we were standing right in the midst of all these giant, angry ants with giant mandibles, but the boots did a great job at keeping us safe.
While not a mutualism, my favorite part of the day was finding a stick bug friend that hung around with us for a little bit. His names is Stella, and he seemed to enjoy crawling up and down our faces and backs.
Day 11: Lucky Charm TFBs (Sorry for Jinxing It)
Two true TFB experiences today: I woke up at 5am to join some of the group for some bird watching and peed in a test tube. Waking up was a little rough at first but it was worth it. It was super cool to see the morning mist around the fog and drink coffee while watching the Black Vultures hang out on their canopy spot. The dawn chorus was also super pretty (where all of the birds sing in the morning) and looking out into the trees while waking up was pretty peaceful. I also got some people to start throwing around a frisbee !! But I promise ultimate ishn’t my main personality trait… After breakfast, we started our next experiment – seeing the differences of arthropod abundance in the canopy versus the forest floor. One way to test this is by placing a pitfall trap with nitrogen in it and a water in the other one. How do you get the nitrogen source into the pitfall? Our pee.
For the rest of the morning before lunch we set up our 64 pitfall traps on the tree and in the forest floor. I spotted some Mistletoe Cactus (an epiphyte) too! And of course lots of Tillandsia spp., Monstera spp., and Philodendron radiatum and hederacum. As soon as we got on the trail to set up, we came across a Jumping Pit Viper and an Eyelash Viper. Apparently the manager of the station hasn’t seen on in the wild in the past 12 years and it’s insane that we were able to find one. Then after lunch, we got to excavate some Leaf Cutter Ant nests to try to find their fungal garden looking at young ones first and then old ones. While searching for the nests and prepping for the excavation we saw a Tarantula Hawk, scorpions, a Orb-Weaver Spider, and Ant Lion holes. When we looked through the young one, we were able to find the queen which was absolutely giant – she can live up to 25 years and has a bunch of eggs that she lays over time after only mating once. Two kinds of worker ants that work as a defense layer are called Majors and Soldiers. These have huge heads that have really sharp mandibles and do not hesitate to bite you and draw blood. While looking at the first of the two bigger nests, we found a rare (to find) Mexican Burrowing Toad which was SO cute and funny looking. A big highlight of the day was seeing a super happy and excited Rusty. Looking at the second of the larger nests, there was many more major and soldier ants, and a much larger fungal garden and we got to see the architecture of the nest more.
After dinner, as we got to go on an optional night hike which was definitely 100% 12/10 worth doing, I almost stopped on a Red-Rump Tarantula. I really think my clumsiness has amplified 10 fold over the past week and a half. As we walked through the trail, it really felt like we were on the set of a movie with the way our headlamp moved across the towering palms. We encountered two (!!) Morelet’s Tree Frogs which is a critically endangered species which is tragic as these guys are super cute. They even jumped on some people and we had a fun tree frog photoshoot. As we made it to the same wallow as yesterday, we saw that the same Red-Eyed Tree Frog (possibly Morelet’s as well) eggs where being preyed upon by a Northern Cat Eye snake. We actually got to watch the snake’s process of stalking the eggs slowly and taking multiple trips to get as many eggs as possible. It was super cool to be able to observe behaviors of the more nocturnal organisms and basically unlock another world.
-Sophia
Day 11: A Pee-fect Day with Snakes, Toads, and Tree Frogs
The TFBs wanted to set up an experiment to record and assess if the relative difference and abundance in change in arthropods on the canopy and the forest is influenced by nutrients. Our nutrients were… DUN DUN DUNNNN… our own pee.
We set up arthropod pitfall traps all along the Mayan Trail of Las Cuevas. We spotted a jumping viper and eyelash viper in the middle of the trail! Both are venomous and the eyelash viper is so elusive that the manager of Las Cuevas who has been here for years hasn’t even seen one!
I spotted a zombie moth (moth taken over by fungus) and several beetles. I saw two types of longhorn beetles! You can tell these beetles are long horn beetles because they have long antennas.
After lunch we learned so much about ant hills and excavated a 1 year old leaf cutter ant nest we got to see the queen ant and her wing scars!
We also got to witness major and soldier ants as they tried to protect the fungus! Their mandible were so sharp that they can slice skin! One grabbed onto my finger nail and I could feel it’s strength.
On our second escalation with a more mature ant hill, Michael plunged the shovel into the mud and found… MEXICAN BURROWING TOAD! (it was unharmed by the shovel of course).
It was absolutely adorable and it’s very rare to see them in nature this time of year (they come out later in the wet season)! It had very strong back legs for burrowing and it peed on Elena.
For our night hike, I spotted a tree frog which is hard to see during the day and it jumped onto Rusty’s face- I guess it knows that who studied the amphibian taxa!
We also got to see a snake eating tree frog eggs!!!
It’s was absolutely incredible and reminds we that we are watching and learning about how animals behave in the wild and it’s such a different experience than learning in a text book! Loving the TFB life.
Peace and love <3
~ Maegan
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.
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!
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.
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!
Today’s snake sighting total: 9 ish
Night trail snake sightings: 7
Frogs/toads: 3
We’ll meet again, Orthoptera… some sunny day
Our last day at Las Cuevas came sooner than I thought possible. It is bittersweet because it is over but I was so excited finding, identifying, and taking photos of the myriad flora and fauna in the Chiquibul forest this week. I will come back, or at least I will adventure somewhere similar before I forget what a wonderful time this has been.
Last night’s hike lit by the full moon was surreally bright and teeming with life unseen in the light of day. Nothing could prepare me (or Dr. Correa) for the size of the roaches and spiders I encountered on the trail.
Most exciting for me was the sighting of multiple Monkey Hoppers (Family: Eumsticidae). These little guys hold their legs at a strange angle to their body, and they are often wingless. Only found in the neotropics, I was so excited to finally see one in person.
Today on our trek to collect our camera traps I got lucky once again, finding a plant on the trail ROILING with lubber nymphs. The exact species of this lubber was unclear to me, but it was possibly Tropidacris cristata—comonly known as the Giant Red-Wing. Multiple stages of development were present on this plant, presenting a wonderful visual display of the life cycle of hemimetabolus insects like Orthoptera. I will be sing much fewer of these little buddies on the reef, but get ready for my reports on sponges!!!
Day 6: Insects Galore
Day 6 began by collecting pitfall traps that we set out yesterday. The traps consisted of either water or urine and we’re placed in trees and on the ground. Insects either are attracted to the traps or fall into them and then are stuck. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of our traps had caught insects in the 16-ish hours that they had been set up. We spent the morning analyzing the number of insects we caught. We looked at where they were caught and what morphospecies they were in order to determine the species richness and abundance of the samples. We then spent some time going over our data. It was difficult to determine exactly how we should summarize the data. We ended up coming up with one conclusion but completely reversing it after we talked to Adrienne and Scott. In the end, we found that insects in the canopy had a greater need for nitrogen and were more attracted to the urine traps.
In the evening we went on our first official night hike. Near the beginning of the hike we found an Acacia tree right on the trail that had two stick insects hanging off of it. The green stick insect was around a foot long and was hanging upside down with its front two legs extended above its head. The other stick insect was smaller and brown. Soon after we began observing them, the brown insect started climbing pretty quickly up the tree and away from our light.
Acacias are special because they have a mutualism with ants, like Cecropia. The ant species is different and more aggressive. The tree that we observed didn’t appear to have an active ant colony, but we didn’t look very hard for it.
We also saw a lot of spiders and roaches. We saw two tarantulas on a huge tree, which was different because all of the other tarantulas that we’ve seen have been on the ground. There were a lot of other large spiders and roaches that we would be much less likely to see during the day. It was good to be able to experience the forest at night, when so many new creatures can be seen.
Pitfall Trap Analysis + Night Hike
Happy Sunday everyone! Today’s schedule was a bit different than those of our other days here. The morning began with a short hike along the Maya trail to pick up the pitfall traps that we had set up yesterday and analyzing our data. Specifically, we examined species’ richness and abundance on the forest floor and compared those values to the canopy’s. We also investigated whether there would be greater species’ richness and abundance in the urine vials relative to the water vials in the canopy as opposed to the vials in the forest floor. Interestingly, we found that both richness and abundance were higher in the forest floor than in the canopy and that the abundance in urine was greater than in water in both locations.
Many beetle specimens were collected today (10 species and 18 specimens to be exact) from our pitfall traps! A few of the most interesting were a fairly large beetle of about 3.5 cm long with a shiny black body rimmed with red that I believe may be a female pinching beetle (Lucanus capreolus), a very small slightly shimmery dark brown or olive green color leaf beetle (perhaps either a Dogbane Beetle with scientific name Chrysochus auratus or a type of flea beetle), and a black darkling beetle with a segmented body (species possibly Alobates pennysylvanicus).
As you can see, today was a fairly light day in terms of physical activity, but I am sure we will make up for it with the night hike tonight and especially with collecting all of the camera traps tomorrow. I am excited to see what animals are in the images we’ve captured (hopefully a picture of a jaguar?!?)! Thanks for reading! 🙂
Update: We got to hear from a Ph.D. student named Lauren tonight! She’s currently a little more than halfway through an eight month study here and is using 52 pairs of camera traps to conduct research on carnivorous forest creatures. Also, the night hike along the Maya trail was super cool! We saw tarantulas and other spiders the size of our palms, a cockroach the size of a large mouse, and a coral snake among many other species!
“SNAAAKE!”
For our second to last day at Las Cuevas, we wrapped up our arthropod experiment by collecting all the pitfall traps set along the Maya trail yesterday. The majority of the day was dedicated to data analysis and the presentation of our results; there’s nothing quite like having a poster session in the middle of the rainforest.
We also spent a good part of the day discussing illegal extraction from the Chiquibul and the problems with conservation in Belize. I never fully appreciated the intricacies of conservation biology until today. The Chiquibul’s greatest threat is illegal extraction of plants and animals by Guatemalans from villages along the nearby border. Yet the issue of conservation is much greater than that of sustaining the area’s ecology and incorporates complex economic and political landscapes, as well.
Since our activities were primarily indoors, the day offered few opportunities for reptile sightings. However, I was excited at the prospect of our first night hike—the evening brings out a number of nocturnal species, transforming the Chiquibul into a completely different habitat than it is during the day. We managed to spot all kinds of creepy crawlies, including spiders the size of your face and a giant roach that emitted a sticky white substance. By the end of the hike, I had nearly given up on searching for reptiles in the leaf-litter and under fallen logs. But at the very end of the trail, we approached a sinkhole; as I peered down I heard a shout of “snaaaake!” I looked down to find the distinctive tri-color banded pattern of the Central American coral snake (Micrurus nigrocinctus) all but a foot away from my boot. The snake was small but could clearly be identified as one of the most venomous snakes found in Central America. Just goes to show that you can never stop looking.