hello!

Less rain this week, but the river is still high and Lago trail is still flooded up to my chest.  But other trails are drying out, so the majority of the forest is accessible

I did a lot more exploring in the forest this week.  Yesterday morning, I went on a 10 km hike with Eushavia, Joe, and Richard.  It took us just under five hours; we walked fairly quickly, because we went without a guide.  If you go with a guide, it often happens that you walk only a kilometer in a few hours.  We wanted to go at a faster pace, and didn’t mind skimping on animal sightings.  But we walked right into a large group of wooly monkeys! They were very threatened by our presence, stared us down, and started to move around which caused large branches to fall from the canopy.  There were a few tree falls that interrupted the clear path of the trail, but since we had four people, it was easy enough to send three ahead to find the trail, and leave one on the known trail to ensure we wouldn’t get turned around.

I’ve also been collecting data on the leaf cutter ant colony near the lake.  I went there at night with my partner Amelia a few days ago.  The walk to the colony is 2.6 km, and we can make it in under an hour.  The colony is a few hundred meters off the trail, and you can usually just follow the ant highway to their lair, which is a few square meters and over 17 years old.  We had big plans for the data collection, but it turned out that the ants were crawling along much faster than we anticipated, so we had to re-structure our methods and make do.  One of us would watch the ant highway for 1 minute intervals and count how many foraging ants (ants carrying leaves) would pass a certain point.  We also counted how many foraging ants were carrying hitchhikers (little ants that ride on the foraged leaves).  The other person would tally how many times the observer said “leaf” (indicating a foraging ant) or “hitch” (a foraging ant with a hitchhiker).  So far, the data is looking good, but we still have some more collection to do in the morning and at midday.

This morning, I went out to the lake again with Amelia to collect some data on the leafcutters.  We left camp at 4:30 AM (oooph) and worked until 1 PM.  It was a long day, but we got a lot of good work in.  We even went for a little paddle on the lake, and I got to see the big fish that lives there!  By the time noon rolled around, I was covered in sweat bees, who were just munching away on the nasty smelly bits in my shirt.  Yummy!

Just 10 more days here!