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Day 15: Home Bound…

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As I’m on my plane flying back to North Carolina, I’m truly just registering how surreal of an experience these past two weeks have been.

We hopped on our boat back to Belize City this morning at 6:15 AM, marking the end of our stay at Glover’s Reef Research Station and subsequently Belize as well.

I caught one final picture of the view right before I left, in hopes of letting it become ingrained in my memory.

Last night, I returned to the dock to enjoy the sunset one last time. This dock has been one of my favorite places this entire trip, even though it’s not as extravagant nor as exotic as the coral reefs.

The boat ride back was not as fun, and the choppier waters were a lot worse than I remembered. However, it was just as surreal as the way out. We managed to spot a sea turtle, the first and only of our trip, as well!

It felt a little different when we returned to Belize City. Though I had so desperately missed AC and flushing toilets, I did suddenly start to miss the complete isolation of both Las Cuevas and Glover’s Reef.

The flight back was bittersweet, at least when we were awake. I was sad to leave Belize, but the early morning exhaustion fell over our entire crew and everyone was out cold through the flight.

Claire C and I, both from NC, had a flight that was supposed to depart at 6:10 PM, with boarding beginning at 5:30 PM. However, our flight from Belize got delayed heavily, and we ended up landing at 4:50 PM. Fortunately, our flight out of IAH ended up getting delayed, so we made it with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, our flight got delayed by almost 3 hours. We ended up departing around the same time we were expected to land, but at least this is better than us missing our flight completely.

That brings me to where I am now, finally on our flight back home, wrapping up our two week stay in Belize.

I’m already missing that dock.

Ian C

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Day 7: Sunrise to Sunset

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A small group and I started the day this morning by going right back to the bird tower to watch the sunrise. We were a bit late but caught the tail end of dawn. It was also a bit cloudy, but the clouds helped accentuate the rays that made it through. We rested and chilled there for around an hour, enjoying the cool breeze and the sun.

We then went out and collected our camera traps! Sadly, I didn’t get anything outside of our group and a couple cars.

While we collected camera traps, we ended up using our extra flagging tape as bows, ribbons, and bracelets!

To wrap up both our day and our stay at LCRS, Steve helped make a campfire where we did rose bud thorn and then just chatted. It felt a lot like all the backpacking trips I went on in high school, and was a feeling I didn’t realized I had missed.

I ended the day sitting out on the deck stargazing. The stars were still just as bright and just as pretty.

I came into Las Cuevas not knowing what to expect, but I’m sure gonna miss this place. Hopefully we’ll meet again!

Ian C

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Day 6: Belizean Circus, Belizean Monkeys

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Sadly, the birding streak has officially ended. I was woke up TWICE by the howler monkeys in the trees near the clearing: once at 2:30 AM and another at 4:00 AM. They made up for it in the morning though, as we got to see a family of five this morning.

We then got to explore a cave that was part of the Chiquibul cave system. It was huge. We only got to walk into the first chamber, but we caught a glimpse of the second which felt like double the size of the one we were in. Sadly, they didn’t allow us to take any pictures.

It was also super breezy. It felt like natures own AC. If only we had that in our rooms 😔.

After we came back, we went back out to collect our pitfall traps. A ton of people found a bunch of different species, totaling up to over 300 total invertebrates! I managed to contribute a whopping 4!! Of my four pitfall traps, I only captured an ant, a mite, a fly, and a cricket. Hopefully my camera trap is more successful…

While we were working, Dr. Solomon came in carrying a basilisk lizard (aka Jesus Christ Lizard). By some combination of physics and wizardry, this lizard is able to run right on water.

Right before dinner, we hiked to the bird tower to watch the sunset. Though the hike was steep, we made it just in time. The structure was slightly wobbly but we got up high enough to see the entire forest! The sunset was super pretty too.

Near the base of the tower, we also saw a white-tipped dove!

Walking back wasn’t as fun though. As it got dark pretty quickly and my headlamp was really dim. I even almost took a little tumble while taking a pic!

However, after many a slips, trips, and almost falls, I made it back in once piece! Now just time to do it all over again tomorrow morning for the sunrise!

Ian C

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Day 5: Please I’m a Starrrr

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Today was the second day I was able to get up to go birding! Let’s hope we can keep this streak up. This time, we got to see toucans, amazons, parrots, and more macaws!

We then began wrapping up our research project from yesterday, where we massed the weight of our leaves and calculated the average difference between. We found that the average difference between uncolonized leaves was greater than the difference between the colonized leaves. After lunch, we gave our first poster presentation! One down, many more to go.

The director of Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD) also stopped by and gave us a presentation on both the grassroots start of the organization and the differences between Belizean rangers and US rangers. We also learned a little more about the caves we’ll be exploring tomorrow, which I’m super excited for.

In the evening, we went out to examine the fungus gardens in leafcutter ant colonies, and even saw a queen!

We also went on our first night hike today! We saw some more crickets, but I did not get a picture fast enough. A katydid also flew right over my head, which sounded like a mini helicopter whir. But I did get a picture of an anole and it’s dewlap!

We also found a black orchid by the tree in the middle of the clearing, which was super pretty. It’s also the national flower of Belize.

A couple friends and our guide went back out to see if we could find some ripe breadnuts, and on our way we saw a blue morpho caterpillar.

We went stargazing as well, and made out the Big Dipper. That was about all we recognized so we started making up a couple constellations, finding a spiral and even seeing plenty of shooting stars. I never realized just how fast they move!

That’s all for today, see y’all in the caves!

Ian C

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Day 3: Into the thick of it!

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Wow. Today really felt like a marathon: an awesome, sweaty, exhausting, educational marathon. Most of the day we spent setting up camera traps. This effort involved countless machete hacks, tons of bug spray, and a lot of good laughs.

On the trails, Scott and Kory turned over a couple of logs which revealed the homes of a couple cockroaches! From my taxon ID card I think they were either Smokybrown cockroaches or Oriental cockroaches, but they ran away quickly so it was a bit difficult to tell.  I can’t believe I’m actually starting to get excited about seeing those little creatures. We also spotted a large cat paw-print on the trail, and decided to get creative by making an even larger footprint of own.

It was really awesome to see all of the micro-habitats on the rainforest floor. It seems like each and every leaf conceals a unique habitat and lifecycle of its own. I also loved noticing all of the twisting and turning vines and plants I had only seen in expensive houses before.

Tonight’s lectures were quite interesting and spotlighted orthoptera, reptiles, and the history of biogegraphic development in Central America. I learned about the jumping mechanisms of grasshoppers (something we get to see in action each day in the field/LCRS), stridulation, and the significance of orthopera in reflecting broader microclimatic conditions. It was also fascinating to hear about all of the unique species of reptiles just in the Belizian rainforest.

Tomorrow will be another big nature day and I am excited to get back out there!

-Emily

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Day 4: Crickets, Grasshoppers, Katydids and More!

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Today was the day I finally got up early to go birding! And boy was it worth the 5:30AM wake up. We got to see a bunch of parrots, hummingbirds, and even a couple woodpeckers! The morning view was also super pretty.

After breakfast, we began setting up the first of two research projects of the day, involving nitrogen pitfall traps! During our pre lab discussion, we found a live scorpion, named Sean, hiding inside one of the drawers at our desks.

Anyways, back to the pitfall traps. We set them up on trees and in the ground along a trail, and while we were setting them up, we saw this super cool bug eating another one.

We also found this super long Liana hanging from a tree, and took turns swinging on it!

In the afternoon, we started a second project, looking at Cecropia tree defenses with animals before and after they’re colonized by ants. When looking for an uncolonized tree, we found one with a new queen hiding inside it.

While looking for Cecropia, we found this super cool tarantula molt and it’s chilicerae.

Some other cool finds of the day include another dead (this time fully grown) scorpion and a spider with an egg sac!


We also found and captured a bunch of Orthoptera, including two species of katydids (angle-winged and common true), a South American lesser field cricket (I think), a spotted winged grasshopper, and three other grasshoppers that I couldn’t identify. It was a great day for Orthoptera!

Tomorrow we might have the opportunity to go on a night hike, which I’m super excited about. See y’all then!!

Ian C

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Day 3: Lights, Camera Traps, Action!

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Beginning our first full day at Las Cuevas Research Staton (LCRS), we had a scrumptious breakfast before we began our first project. We were tasked to come up with a question and design an experiment, using camera traps, to collect data to hopefully answer it. We landed on the question “How does the presence of man-made trails impact the biodiversity of vertebrates in the immediate surrounding area of LCRS?”

To test this, we set up camera traps on small, medium, and large trails/roads along with undisturbed areas. I set mine up along the LCRS Access road, on a semi-cut down tree!

We also saw a lot of new and fascinating animals today. As I was about to set up my camera trap, we heard a really loud banging noise, and it turned out to be a woodpecker!! Here’s a (blurry) video I took of it: IMG_7122

We saw a fresh track of a large cat scratch, which was really exciting and hopefully a good sign for the rest of the trip.

There was also this really beautiful blue dragonfly that kept flying around us for part of our hike.

My favorite of the day, though, was this baby scorpion that was crawling along the road. It was my first time ever seeing a wild scorpion, and as far as wild baby ones go, they’re not as scary or intimidating as I thought. That being said, we still have to worry about them crawling into our shoes and boots every time before we put them on.

That wraps up our first full day in the field—sadly without any Orthoptera. However, I’m giving my Orthoptera taxon briefing today, so we’ll still get to “see” a few. Hopefully we’ll actually get to see some in the field tomorrow. Until then!

Ian C

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Day 2: Entering the Rainforest

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Today was our first full day in Belize!! We tried starting our day at 5:00AM to go birding, but none of us could get up so we began our day at 6:15AM to get breakfast. We left Crystal Paradise Ecolodge at 8:00AM and headed towards Caracol and the Chiquibul forest.

On the road, we stopped to see a dead green vine snake in the middle of the road and a Brazilian cashew tree.

When we got to Caracol, we learned a ton about the Maya civilization, and how we can trace their history by observing their structures and gods moving from southern Mexico and Guatemala up to the Yucatán Peninsula! We also looked at a ton of their temples and palaces.

We saw a ton of really cool plants and animals too! Among my favorites include the tree of life, a baby gray fox, and Montezuma oropendola birds.

Additionally, I saw my first grasshopper of the trip! It was a medium sized gray grasshopper, which I think looks like a gray bird grasshopper, but I’m not quite sure. We saw a second one of the same species later on in the middle of a field, and tried to get it to jump! However, we were unsuccessful and nothing happened.

We ate lunch there and then began our drive to Las Cuevas Research Station, where we’ll be staying for the next six days. On our way, we saw three black howler monkeys!!

We arrived at Las Cuevas Research Station (LCRS) a couple hours later and went on a short hike exploring the Maya ruins the center is on, where I saw my first cricket too! It was a bit too high up for me to identify it, and I didn’t get a picture (😔), but it was small and brown, with darker brown coloration through the main body. But that also means I’ve seen the big three groups of my rainforest taxa! Missing locusts but I have a feeling we won’t be seeing any of those.

We wrapped our day up with dinner, and with that, our last travel day (for a week) is over! Tomorrow marks our first full day at LCRS. See you then!

Ian C

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Day 1: And We’re Off!!

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Today was our first day in Belize!!! It was our travel day, so we still haven’t fully entered the forest yet, but we will be tomorrow. I woke up at 5:30AM to make it to Rice by 6:00AM—the first of many early mornings. We flew into Belize just before noon and ate lunch at a restaurant named Cheers. They had a ton of t-shirts hung by people who’ve visited throughout the years!

There was even one from NC A&T. North Carolina proud!!

There were a ton of birds around us, and we saw a hummingbird hovering around the canopy of the trees behind the restaurant. When we walked around and explored the river next to us, we saw a bunch of iguanas jump into the river from the trees surrounding the bank. We managed to spot one that appeared to have lost a leg and another smaller, juvenile one high up in the tree!

We arrived at the Crystal Paradise Ecolodge a couple hours later and were greeted with the chirps of a bunch of cicadas, and some even landed on the sidewalks. We went down to the Macal River, where we heard more cicadas and what we believe to be a type of frog.

When we came back, I saw my first Orthoptera of the trip!! It appears to be an angled-wing katydid, which is super cool because I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen a katydid, or at least consciously recognized one before. Seeing one in person really emphasized just how leaf-like katydids can be, and I’m super excited to find more. Now just have to find some grasshoppers, crickets, and locusts to complete the collection!

After dinner, we saw what looked like some species of owl perched atop of a trunk in the middle of the forest, which was super cool. Even cooler yet was when I was walking back to our room, through the gazebo right outside our door, another bird flew inches in front of my face across and out the gazebo. From the coloring of the plumage, I think it was the same type of owl, and we think it was perched in the support beams of the roof before we disturbed it.

All in all, today was a super fun and successful day! We had a couple minor hiccups at the airport, but we got a small taste of the next two weeks and I cannot wait to go further into the forest and see more. Tomorrow’ll be full of more birding, car rides, and hikes. See you in Las Cuevas!!

Ian Chen

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Pre-Departure Blog!

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Hey y’all, my name is Ian Chen and I’m a rising sophomore at McMurtry! I plan on double majoring in Biosciences, with a concentration in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM). I’m currently writing this entry sitting at my gate, about to depart for Houston. T-15 hours!!

I’m super excited for this trip, and literally every part about it too. I will say, I am most excited for our second week, staying out by Glover’s Reef. Beyond all the wildlife we’ll see there and all the snorkeling opportunities, I’m really curious about how being so isolated is going to feel, both being so far from civilization and being completely surrounded by vast ocean. I’m also really excited to explore the cave system! I’ve visited a couple caves in Patagonia when I went backpacking there a couple years ago, and they ended up being one of my favorite parts of that trip. From what Dr. Solomon’s said, these caves sound even cooler, especially the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) cave!

To prepare for this trip, I studied my assigned taxa (Orthoptera and Groupers), prepared presentations on them and angelfish, and caught up on assigned reading and their quizzes.

Additionally, I’ve gone on a couple hikes in the state parks near me, Umstead and Jordan Lake.

I used to go backpacking quite often, but haven’t gone on a trip in a year, so I found myself a bit more worn out than I had hoped. I’m excited to embrace the challenge nonetheless!

I hope to learn a lot about this trip. I’ve always been fascinated by birds and ornithology, and have gone on numerous birding trips within North Carolina. My bird knowledge is a bit limited to NC and the continental US, so I’m hoping to learn a lot about the birds of Central America!

However, there are a couple things I’m nervous about. Like I mentioned earlier, I feel a bit out of shape and I’m a little bit worried about the physical aspects of this trip, both hiking in the jungle and swimming on the reefs. Additionally, I’ve never been snorkeling before so I’m a bit nervous about that, but I’m also really excited about all the new opportunities it unlocks.

This trip will also be my first time in the tropics and first time doing any real fieldwork (beyond BIOS 213)—both reasons to be a bit more nervous and a lot more excited about this trip. I’m hoping to gain tons of valuable field experiences, along with memories that will last a lifetime!

Ian C