Today we concluded both our pee pitfall experiment and the camera trap experiment! This morning we made a short hike through the Maya trail, and collected each of our pitfall traps filled with urine and unlucky arthropods. Along the way I spotted some cool looking harvestmen climbing along a sharp give-and-take palm! We also saw some really cool examples of moths that were killed by the “zombie” fungus Ophiocordyceps which takes control of the nervous system of its victims. These moths were in various stages of decay so it was like we were seeing the process itself, which was super cool!
Once back in the lab, we sorted our pee pitfalls and removed all of our captured arthropods to tally which traps had the most visitors. We found that in general, the arthropods were more often found in the nutrient rich pee, and there were many more arthropods found on the forest floor than the canopy. But the canopy arthropods actually had more guests in the water tubes, but the sample size for this area was very small. I actually did fish out a few harvestmen and a small spider during our data collection, so I did get some arachnids in there! Check out our title for the poster aka our most despicable pun yet (Urine for a Treet).
Some of the students went out to go collect all of the camera traps we had placed on our first day in the rainforest, and during this spotted a really cool spider, I wish I had been there! I have tried my hardest to identify this fuzzy guy just from the awesome picture Elena sent me, but still no luck. Its leg morphology points to it being some kind of ground-dwelling spider rather than orb-weaving. The coloration, leg shape, and fang placement resembles that of both huntsman and wolf spiders, but none of the spiders I’ve researched in this area have such distinctive fuzzy legs. What a cool little mystery! Fun fact, the “hair” on spiders legs are actually called setae and can be used for grip when moving around, sensing chemicals, and so many other cool things!
