Inspecting Insects, Perusing Plants and Finishing Fall Break

Hello from fall break! Here's a brief run down of the past two weeks...

From Nicaragua, we went to the Texas A&M Soltis Center, a beautiful field station where we bunkered down to take our midterm exams. It's more of a rainforest than where we've spent more of our time, which brings along a more diverse array of insect living...

First, and probably most notably, we have the bullet ant! From our arrival in Costa Rica, we were warned about this oh-so-real urban (jungle?) legend of an ant. Its bite scores a perfect 10 on the pain scale. While it isn't poisonous, it's been known to make people's vision go red from pain. With this kind of warning, I've naturally wanted to see one to know what it's all about. How large and in charge could it actually be?

Sometimes when I've seen a slightly larger ant, I've wondered, is this a bullet ant? No. No it is not. As I learned at the Soltis Center, after seeing my first bullet ant on a friend's cabin,  bullet ants are very spottable. You can pick one out a mile away--err, maybe 20 feet away...but still. Think about your normal ant. It would be a minute speck of nothingness from 20 feet away. Even for you 20/20 eyed guys out there. The bullet ant would be just as visible, and comparable in size to that giant E on the eye chart. 

A bit difficult to photograph due to its restless movement, the bullet ant cordially visited us in the classroom and hallway! 

There were a bunch of other neat insect that had tactful camouflage adaptations...

In addition to having an array of insects, the center had a bountiful population of plants, which was perfect in studying for our Ethnobiology exam! For the test we had to be able to identify the plant families of some plants we had studied...so around the station we walked practicing our naming skills. It became so second nature to name the nature that I'm still subconsciously doing it on fall break. 

A personal favorite: Melastomataceae! 

After taking our Ethnobio and Tropical Medicine midterms and turning in our research proposals for our final projects, it was time for fall break! From Soltis, to San José we went, and then 13 of us came to Manuel Antonio where we've rented a Jungle Villa for the past week. It's a beautiful house with a pool, that (as the name suggests) is in a jungle-y environment...which means we sometimes get visits from our long-lost relatives...

Monkeys come and hop on the table and chairs sometimes.

While in the jungle, we're not too far from the beach and a beautiful national park, which we've been exploring!

View from a lookout point in the park

Yesterday, tired of hanging out at the beach, I decided to do some hanging around waterfalls...!

We went rappelling down waterfalls about an hour from where we've been staying! Going down a 180 foot waterfall involves a cascading series of events, where you first sit back in your harness and let some rope go to descend. You lose your footing a bit, but regain it as the rapidly moving rapids of waterfall water floods onto your head. You continue readjusting footing, squinting and loosening your right hand's grip on the rope to continue lowering yourself down.  Part of the way down, you notice a beautiful rainbow forming in the mist and newly-found sunny streams of light to your right. 180 feet later, you're not quite sure how much time has past or how many gallons of water has flowed onto your head, but you look up in disbelief of both what you just came down, but also of the other beautiful mini (well they might still be large...everything's relative) waterfalls in the area!

Tomorrow we head back to San José, where I will reunite with my host mama for the week!