photos from the amazon

Hello friends!  I'm back in Quito after a month-long field trip to eastern Ecuador's Amazon.  We stayed the entire month at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station (TBS).  I saw some of the most amazing, rare things in the world, but I sadly don't have photos of most of it.  Here are some good ones I did get:

giant strangler fig tree  these parasitic trees literally strangle their host...so there's a smaller tree that used to be inside that huge one

golden orb spider

painted grasshopper

José, my favorite guide, and a spiny palm

you can't touch caterpillars in the amazon...

tree frog

a pygmy marmoset, one of 10 monkey species found at TBS

a classic emergent tree, the ceiba

the scariest of all Amazon's creatures!

toad

caterpillar

helicopter beetle

TBS canopy walkway

way up there in the canopy

beautiful moths eating minerals on the riverbank

seining for fish in the Tiputini River

ants harvesting wax bugs (that white stuff)

huge wasp building a nest right by our cabins...great

super mega bat, a fruitivorous bat

a naked man hanging from the tree!
nope, just a 3-toed sloth

anaconda

hello mr. spider monkey

another pygmy marmoset

pretty fungi

sweat bees!  crawling all over me because i was stinky

canopy tower...some great views and birds up here

black-headed parrot from the canopy tower

swamped canoe at the lake

common piping guan from the canopy tower

leaf cutter ants

champagne fungi

I followed Amy, a primatologist at TBS, for a few hours one morning.  I was supposed to help her with a playback experiment with titi monkeys: we were planning to play the calls from another troop and record the response of the troop we were following.  Unfortunately, the troop we were following responded to a nearby troop's calls before we could run the experiment.  We couldn't follow through because we would have no way of knowing if the titis were responding to our playback or the calls of the other calling troop.

titi monkeys calling that morning...that's amy recording the calls, ellen and eushavia look on

It's good to be back with my host family in Quito.  I'm trying to stay busy and active so I don't get bored.  I have one more test and a presentation, but other than that study abroad is over.