Costa Rica Day 4 Afternoon

Mrs. Formisano has already detailed our morning activities, but the afternoon and evening were just as action-packed! After lunch, which consisted of delicious pasta and garlic bread, the students were given roughly an hour of free time until 2 PM. Many students chose to walk to the "mall" in the village about a half mile away to buy candies, soda, and snacks. Then it was right back to science! We were arranged into new groups based on our research interests - the general categories were frogs and ants. We spent roughly 2 hours developing our hypothesis, prediction, and experimental design as a group. After a quick coffee break accompanied by a sweet pastry to refuel, we continued refining and revising our final experimental designs by creating a PowerPoint to present to the students, teachers, and scientists later that evening. We enjoyed dinner at 6 PM that included beef, potatoes, vegetables, greens, and a dessert that was similar to cheesecake. Then BACK TO SCIENCE! It was now time to present the research plans to the group. Between 7:30 and 10 PM each of the 8 groups presented their separate research projects, all of which addressed different questions regarding leaf-cutter ants, frogs, insects, and bacteria or fungus. The projects are highly interesting and ambitious, and you will be hearing more about them in the future. No spoilers!

Here is Pinto showing us the schedule for the day - stations in the morning, experiment design in the afternoon, and presentations at night.

 Happy students walking back from the mall during free time after lunch with snacks in hand!

We apologize for not having pictures of the afternoon and evening work - we were too busy sciencing! More pictures tomorrow!

Shelby Hammonds and Michaela Reinhart

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Learning about true scientific research before designing our own research projects

Working on microbes and disease portions of their science packets.

"Fanta Four" research team

"Team Joey Stickler"

Not a bad classroom, no?

We can tell you the Family and whether this is a frog or a toad. . . . .

Church

This is a photo of the Catholic Church is La Anita.  Simple and beautiful!

Delicious Food!

The food here is amazing!  It is very fresh.  Most of it is grown right here at Finca La Anita. 

This is a photo of the queen of a young ant colony of the species Atta Cepholotes.  This was found by Professor Pinto who dug it up in front of the students to teach them how to find the queen of an Atta colony.  Each colony only has one queen.  This particular queen was part of a relatively new ant colony.  As you can see, the queen was found in her fungus garden.  The queens of new ant colonies are easier to find because young ant colonies have few chambers.  The older ant colonies can have up to 500 chambers with 5 million ants.  Finding the queen in these chambers is very difficult as you can imagine.  After students watched Professor Pinto extract the queen of a young ant colony, they got in groups, and found other ant colonies.  Each group searched for a queen and most students were able to find a queen.  Some students were unable to find the queen because her colony was too big. 

 Students took a jungle hike to find frogs.  The students were accompanied by a graduate student named Juan.  Juan knows so much about frogs.  He told us the names of the various species of frogs we found as well as the special features that distinguish each species.  The frog above is a bullfrog.  This species is very calm and friendly.  It will let you pet it without jumping away. 

This is called a True Frog.  It lives near ponds.  It's head is bright green as you can see. 

 Students crossed this bridge to find leaf cutter ant colonies. Bats and other creatures were seen under this bridge.

 Students are extracting the fungus garden from a chamber created by the leaf cutter ants.  Students searched the fungus garden for the queen.  She lives on the top of the garden.

 Leaf cutter ants are bringing leaves from a tree to bring to their colony in order to grow fungus that they will eat.

 Students taking a ride on a tractor to get to a the trail head from which they will embark on the longest two mile hike of their lives. 

The hike ends with a nice cool swim.  Students jumped off a rock into a deep pool of water.  The hike to the river was two miles down a very steep hill.  The way back up the hill was much harder than the way down.  We were all very tired when we arrived back at Finca La Anita.