Greetings from Costa Rica! Today was a lovely day. Waking up is always a struggle, however, the farm fresh food that they grow in Finca La Anita makes the struggle worth it. Right after breakfast this morning, Dr. Adrian Pinto took us to "harvest" fungal gardens of various species of leaf cutter ants: Atta Cephalotes, Atta Columbica, and Acromyrmax [spelling not guaranteed to be correct, lol. :)]. Three of us, other than Dr. Pinto himself, harvested the fungal garden along with the queen; those three are Pedrum, Dan, and Amanda. Apparently if you harvest the queen of the ants, you are officially an Ant Man or an Ant Woman, which we all became, yay! I believe that we are the first group to successfully harvest an acromyrmax queen of the program. The process of harvesting involves digging sideways so the dirt is not spilled into the fungal garden chamber. Because of this, the process must be done carefully so the fungal garden is not damaged. We will use the harvested fungal gardens and ants for research later in the week. After this event, we washed off then ate lunch. After lunch we took a 30 minute tractor ride to Colonia Blanca so that we could go horseback riding, or take the alternative hike to a waterfall. The horse trail was filled with rocks and mud. Each student was filled with dread and terror (just kidding, well sort of) of falling off the horse because some of the hills were so muddy and steep it was surprising the horse was still standing. I, Pedrum, eventually got kicked in the ankle by one of these horses, but no worries because I remain uninjured, for now ;). Pablo's dog, Corleon, somehow managed to run all the way there with us, ran on the horse trail, and ran all the way back. The horse trail was filled with spectacular views of the surrounding mountain side so expect amazing photos from my fellow peers! After we got back, we took an hour and half break then continued with the ants. We transferred the ants from the field containers into a more permanent residence. We took a dinner break after transferring the ants. After a delicious meal, they all are delicious by the way, we found leaves for the ants so they could forage and eat. After this we took a look at the petri dishes from yesterday and counted the amount of microbe colonies present. After this event, we wrote/are writing the blog. I don't think I can get any further up to date than this. Now off to bed! Stay tuned for tomorrows blog update, which I'm sure will be as equally snarky as this one. From Costa Rica, with Love.

Pedrum and Kobie

To give you a taste of what we are doing and what we have done so far, we were able to upload a few pictures for you guys to view! There is more to come. We would upload them all,  but sadly the internet connection is not that fast :'(. Here is the Link!


http://www.flickr.com/photos/81929315@N04/sets/72157630471435540/