Back into the forest.

Today we returned to the forest to collect figs. I'll explain more about all the cool mutualistic and parasitic interactions that occur within the tiny microcosm of the fig once we've talked to the fig expert, but today I'll tell you about the forest. It was really nice to be back in the forest just walking, talking, and looking around. The first fun find was a large frog. It camouflaged pretty well with the leaf litter and I almost stepped on it, but noticed it just in time! Lauren, a classmate with a particular penchant for frogs, caught it, though only after a few tries--it jumped fast and far.

Frog! Doesn't it have a content smirk on it's face?

We also saw the coolest ant trail ever. The first interesting thing was that there was a trail where the ants were carrying small pink flowers, and there was a trail where the ants were carrying leaves, but they merged and split a couple of times.

Flower-carrying ants merge into leaf-carrying traffic.

So that was cool, but what was really impressive was the length and complexity of the trail. It started on one side of the path, with the flowers and leaves coming from separate sources up the side of the embankment. Then they merged, crossed the path, went up a tree...

...across and down a liana, across a log over a small creek--where they were joined by more leaf-carrying ants, and out of sight. The mixture of flowers and leaves made it just that much more spectacular and pretty to watch, as splotches of pink and green trickled down their trail.

As I mentioned, the goal of the walk was to collect figs, and we found some on the walk out. The walk back was pretty fast as we had seen everything along the path already. At one point, however, we noticed several figs falling from the sky. Literally. Looking up, we saw at least five howler monkeys in the fig tree above us. At first we thought they were throwing the figs at us, but they weren't vocalizing at all. It turned out that they were just having a morning snack, and some of the figs were falling as they ate.