Costa Rica 2019

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Saturday, August 3rd

Today started as a typical day at Finca La Anita: up by 7am, eggs and juice for breakfast, and a morning meeting. The rest of the day was bursting with activity! After the short meeting, we split up to divide and conquer the day (and make it easier on the adults).

After we split up, my group went for a relaxing horseback ride through the mountains and we took a winding nature trail. We even went through a stream, twice! If it wasn't for the fog, we would've seen the Nicaraguan River.

Getting ready to ride horses.

After the refreshing ride, we were able to help the community. At the mariposario, we planted lantana (milkweed), excavated ant colonies and weeded the gardens around the mariposario.

Searching for milkweed

Successful extraction of invading Atta colony from mariposario.

After a long day out in the town, we were STARVING and ready to learn how to make local cuisine. Thankfully, a local restaurant was kind enough to let us in the kitchen!

Heading out to the local restaurant on our tractor.

Preparing gourmet salads.

Buttering the pan for our veggies.

Enjoying our meal, and each other's company

After that delicious meal, we had a short walk to a light trap, where a wide array of insects were on display.

Insect light trap.

One of the many months at the light trap.

Friday, August 2, 2019

Friday, August 2

We started our day with one of our favorite breakfasts yet. Pancakes with cacao nibs straight from the farm! Today was a big science day for each lab team. In our first session, we did an experiment to determine where in the leaf cutter ant colony the most escovopsis (toxic fungus to leaf cutters) was present. We used potato dextrose agar to grow the fungus so we could answer this experimental question. Next, we began to brainstorm our main research topics for the trip! As individuals, we came up with a variety of questions that could apply to the scientific method that are attainable at Finca La Anita with our time constraints. Then as a group, we decided on our favorite topic to research and began designing our experiments. We researched topics about what types of leaves the leaf cutter ants prefer to consume, behaviors with foreign larvae, and pH levels in their environment. Putting it all together, we made proposal presentations in each group that we will follow to produce results. Dr. Pinto and our peers gave us some helpful feedback during each presentation. Hopefully we will make some cool discoveries!🐜

Outline of our tasks for the day

Group Purple Rain working on their experiment.

Extracting fungus for the agar dishes.

Group Pan working on their experiment.

Jamie working with the petri plates.

Carson sterilizing forceps to extract fungus, avoiding cross-contamination

Labeling petri plates

Moving fungus garden to petri plates for experimentation.

Planning the Google Slides presentation

Group Purple Rain presenting initial research idea for feedback.

Group Pan presenting initial research idea for feedback.

Group Nature SCAN presenting initial research idea for feedback.

Tree frog! (found napping at the finca)

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Thursday 8/1/19

Today we started our leaf cutter ant research. We learned how to properly dig into a leaf cutter ant colony, find the fungus chamber and extract the fungus. We were able to dig and extract a colony ourselves! Each lab group was able to extract a small, young colony from the rainforest floor and bring it back to research. Every group was very lucky and was able to retrieve the queen from each nest they extracted. We had a scrumptious lunch of spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce and homemade garlic bread. The highlight of our day was the trip to Canopy Zip Lining!! We took a steep hike to the top of the course and made our way down on many different ropes. For some of us, this was our first time and we could finally check it off our bucket list. :) On the way back, we stopped at Mariposario Butterfly Conservancy. The room of butterflies was amazing and our favorite kind was the blue Morpho. At the end we stopped at a couple of local gift shops where we could buy jewelry and snacks before we came back to Finca La Anita. We ate dinner and continued our research into the evening.

Success! Fungus garden and queen

Ant Fungus 🙌

"Let's get this pan" team digging out their ant fungus

Fungus garden and queen successfully extracted

Adrian explaining the mandibles of a soldier ant and how strong/sharp they are. Ouch!

Sterilizing the spoon for fungus garden extraction.

Carefully digging to find the chamber with the fungus garden.

Zip lining adventure begins!

Zip lining!

Entrance to the Mariposario

Dr. Pinto giving a tour of the Mariposario

Blue Morpho

Blue Morpho Butterfly enjoying a snack

Checking our experiments from yesterday.

Completing bacterial counts.

Nutrient Agar plates with our bacterial samples.

Checking the growth on our bacterial plates.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Wednesday, July 31

Today was our first full day at Finca La Anita! Finca La Anita is right near the volcano Miravalles deep in the rainforest. It is very remote and beautiful with tons of different wildlife, nature, and scenic views. Our first breakfast here was a fan favorite, with some of the best scrambled eggs we have ever had and toast with marmalade and cacao nibs. All the food is either grown right on the farm or from the nearby village so everything is extremely fresh. The owner Pablo gave us a tour of the cacao farm and we learned about the growing, processing, and marketing of the chocolate. We tried an original hot chocolate recipe from Marie Antoinette, a better version of Nutella made with butter rather than the processed stuff at the store, and different percentages of pure dark chocolate with various spices. The drink was our favorite :) At the end of the tour, Pablo prepared us a heart-of-palm salad straight from a young palm tree with a machete. It was so fresh and delicious!! For the science portion of the day we started an experiment to find the location with the most bacteria on the farm in our randomly assigned research groups. We took samples from the pond, compost area, and even the public toilet handles. Hopefully we will see some interesting results tomorrow!