Felling a Tree (aka "Palm Dissection")

Today we cut down a palm tree. Officially it was a "palm dissection", but it basically consisted of felling a tree and chopping it into pieces with an axe and machetes. The point of the excursion was to study Chagas disease. The vector, the Chinche (Rhodnius pallescens), which carries the disease-causing protist (of the genus Trypanosoma), often lives in a particular species of palm (Attalea butyracea). Five trees, including this one, had been baited the day before to see if there were Chinches, but there weren't.

Checking the baited trees.

So we wandered for a bit until we found this tree...

The trunk was probably about 10m, and the palm
branches added another 4m or so.

First we (that is the men from Gorgas and one of our TA's) hacked through to it.

Our TA wielding a machete...

Then one of the men from the Gorgas institute cut down...

and we examined it for Chinches and other animals...

Whip scorpion

The most exciting find was a gecko.

Next to the tree there was also an interesting skull.