Only two more weeks in the Costa Rican rainforest… Time flies by so fast! The experiences have been incredible and we have all learned so much, but there also comes a point when you no longer want to be one with certain creatures in the rainforest, particularly the bugs. I’ve never really been one to totally freak out at bugs, but now, especially when the bugs try to invade our sleeping space, is when I have to draw a line and can no longer quite live in harmony with them.
For the first few weeks, I only ever encountered one to a few bugs at a time in our sleeping quarters. That changed on our last night at the Soltis Center. It was a casual evening and we were all getting ready for bed, when we started to notice a few winged bugs around different areas of the room. It wasn’t many at first, but groups of 4 to 7 are too many to try and shoo outside of the room. We soon find out that they are just winged termites. More continue to appear, mostly near one of our screened doors in our room. Finally, someone looked outside of the screen door to find hundreds of winged termites, probably just hatched in a huge r-selection type of birthing event. Sure, they are harmless and you could even eat them to survive in the wild for a few days, but when you look at them in that large of a quantity, and they are all trying to sneak through a crack in the screen door, this changes things. So needless to say, we all collectively freaked out at the 50+ termites flying around our room and, unfortunately, they all had to go.
After that experience, we all joke about other things swarming our room at our new location that we arrived at today (which, fun fact, is less than 10 km away from Panama), because bugs happen everywhere in this country. I have become more spooked by bugs at quite an inconvenient time- right before the start of our independent research projects.
As a recap, my original project idea was to look at the percent occupancy of Azteca ants in Cecropia trees. Now, I have a partner to work with who will bring in the extra variable of Sloths and Anteaters (which are in the same family) and the role those two mammals play in the existing mutual Cecropia-Azteca relationship. A large part of our project will be determining whether ants occupy each Cecropia or not, which could potentially require prodding each tree to elicit ant response. So yeah, basically we will be making the ants mad enough to see them, but also making sure they can’t actually come at us and attack us while doing so. Yikes, more potentially not fun interactions with bugs. However, even with that slight fear I now have instilled in me thanks to all the termites and bugs before them, the possibilities of our results makes me very excited about this very short-term study we will be conducting in the coming two weeks. Data collection begins tomorrow, so next time I will dive more into the juicy details surrounding this scientific research!