I took a computer home from work to work on the videos. Something in my computer has died. I really only need a real computer to upload pictures from my SD Card.
Anyways, Day 3 – Costa Rica
Wednesday’s tour was call 3-in-1 = Water, Land, and Air
We ate breakfast at our hotel. Then, the tour took us to a river for a boat ride. We saw many animals. The boat driver knew where to look. We saw a sloth, a caiman, bats, birds, monkeys, and other animals. It was really fun to look for animals. On the way back, the boat went really fast.
For the land portion, we toured a “selva” which is a dense tropical rainforest. We saw Atta cephalotes which is a leaf-cutting, fungus-growing ant, with one of the most fascinating and complex social systems known to science. Colonies of this leaf-cutter ant species contain millions of individuals, making it possibly the most dominant invertebrate in Central and South America. A colony is made up of different classes of ant, known as castes, including the queen, workers, and at certain times, males and females (queens) that are capable of reproduction. Each individual within the colony carries out a specific job depending on its size and caste, in a behavior known as ‘task partitioning’. As in all ant species, individuals in the worker caste of the leaf-cutter ant are wingless, sterile females of different sizes, depending on the role played within the colony. ‘Soldiers’ act to protect the colony and are the largest in the worker caste. A nest of the leaf-cutter ant will also contain tiny ‘minima’ workers, which work inside the colony and in the fungus garden, and ‘media’ and ‘maxima’ workers, larger ants with powerful jaws, which cut and transport leaf fragments back to the nest.
We also saw blue jean frogs which have red bodies and blue legs. It was fun searching for them. I found the first one on the tour. We also saw a black and green spotted frog.
We were also looking for snakes. There are 162 species of snakes in Costa Rica. 22 of them are poisonous. The United States has 4 species that are poisonous. A tip: Larger snakes only deliver enough poison to get you away from their territory. The young, little snakes still have not developed their glands and will strike with everything they have.
For the air portion, we took a tour of the rainforest in a gondola. We didn’t see many animals, but it was neat going from the bottom of the floor to the top of the rainforest.