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. 

Costa Rica Day 3

May 30, 2016
This morning, we dug out our first ant colonies. We collected the fungi, and latter took them back to the lab to study them. I would post a picture but the internet is too slow. We also saw a huge ant colony of over five million ants.
After lunch, we went on a hike to a river where we swam for about an hour. The hike back was very exhausting. Most of us went back to our cabins and relaxed until we had to eat dinner.
After dinner, we analyzed our results from our experiment yesterday. We used some statistical tests to determine if our data supported a hypothesis. Then, we went on a frog hunt with Juan, where we caught ten frogs.

29 May 2016: Costa Rica Day 2

Our second day started a lot later than our first for most of us. Some of us decided to go on an early morning hike, while others (including myself) decided to sleep in, as to counteract the long day we had yesterday. At 7:30, we had breakfast together, and then departed for free time. After our free time, we enjoyed a chocolate tasting, full of products produced here at Finca La Anita.

After our chocolate tasting, we went on a tour of the farm. Pablo taught us many things during that tour, but two stood out to me:

1)    Bananas and plantains do not grow on trees, but on plants.

2)    Pure chocolate is much better than the diluted stuff we have in the US.

We enjoyed some more free time after lunch, and then went on a trek to the local village, where we enjoyed some homemade ice cream and treats from the “mall” while learning about Costa Rican culture.

After we returned, we went to our first class, where our scientific research began with an experiment on microbes. I hope you are on the edge of your seats, as we are excited to share our results with you!

Overall, we had an interesting second day here in Costa Rica. Tune in tomorrow to see how the adventure unfolds!