I woke up bright and early at 6:15 again, as I’ve taken to for every day of this trip. After spotting a chachalaca and more oropendolas, we had a breakfast of eggs, fryjacks, and beans. After that, Scott gave us our briefing for the day over hurricane gaps and their affect on the abundance of pioneer species if trees that fall have new growth or not. After deciding as a group that we would try to compare the growth of pioneer species on new growth trees vs dead trees, we headed out on the shortcut trail. After an hour of looking at the hurricane gap, we decided that our question was almost impossible to answer so we decided to compare richness in gap areas and nongap areas instead.

We went down the gap and took five samples and then took five more samples in nongap areas on the rest of the shortcut path and the bird trail. For the samples we threw a quadrant of four white pipes and collected all the leaves in the quadrant. Along the way we spotted a hooded basilisk, two Florida bark scorpions (one with babies on her back) and a few species of harvestmen that I had couldn’t identify but were cool. We came back to the station and had a nice fried rice lunch. We headed to the lab and began working on a poster to present our data. We sorted the leaves into morphospecies and drew up the poster before presenting to Scott.

After a short break, we headed to the classroom for lectures. Sam presented on bees and Jessica presented on amphibians before I presented on auditory and visual communication. At one point during this talk, Adrienne threw her notebook at me after implying that she and Scott were old for not knowing the ultimate sexy song, “Careless Whisper”. So all in all, lectures went well.

After dinner, we went on our first night hike to the frog pond and the Mayan Trail, which Pedro joined us on. We saw many cockroaches, white-lipped turtles, wolf spiders, a baby red-backed coffee snake. We turned off all our lights and stayed quiet for a few minutes to see and hear what the rainforest truly is at night, which lasted like five seconds until I put my flashlight under my light blue water bottle so that Elena and I could have a forest rave. We came back and looked at the stars and saw a large wolf spider with an egg sac under the cedar tree. We all showered and worked on our notebooks until we all headed to bed.

Arachnids spotted: harvestmen along every trail-unidentified species but had a very ovular body and differing body lengths; 2 Florida bark scorpions on a log near hurricane gap, one with babies on her back; Many different types of wolf spiders on all trails-notably large one with egg sac underneath cedar tree near dorms. Also, a large one with a yellow abdomen on a leaf in the Monkey Trail; A few furry green spiders with striped legs on tree trunks along all trails- unidentified but had ovular webs

All of these were expected but I was unable to identify a lot of the species and occasionally not even the family so I’ll have to find out more when we have internet.