Big boa in the hallway...

Hello there everyone!

Its now time for our 6th blog to be posted, time has gone by so fast and its now 6 weeks since we all set of to the Trinidadian jungle to do our projects and to get a glimpse of the amazing wild life that live in these evergreen forests. Everyday the jungle greets you with all its noises, the giant bamboo trees rumble in the wind, all the birds sing and some display with loud high pitch noises, and the constant singing of the different cicadas. The last week has been a very wet one and there have been days with constant and heavy rain and wind. Here we have all been working on our different projects which I'll now tell you a bit more about.

Cara and Susie are both working on their honours projects here in Trinidad. The projects had been carefully planned out from before we left Glasgow and they will have to hand in this project to pass their zoology degree later this year. Cara is looking at competition between the tadpoles of 2 species of frog.

Susie's project is about tics..more precisely ticks on TOADS. Ticks are parasites that attach themselves to a body, usually a warmblooded one, and then live of the blood of its victim! She's looking at how and why ticks attach themselves onto cold-blooded animals in particular toads, so she's sampling in different areas to see if there's any difference in the amount of tics on the toads that live there. Yesterday there was a surprise in store for her as there was a big box in the hallway in the morning. It turned out to be a HUGE boa constrictor that some guys had found down the road and brought up for us to have a look at it. The boa is a constrictor which means it bites its prey with its many razor sharp teeth and then strangle it to death. It was about 7 feet long .

This picture shows Susie and Dan handling the boa to see if it had any tics on it. It turned out to have about 5 on its big snakehead!.

Myself and Innes have been working on a few different projects since we came here. The first one we set up was a tadpole feeding behavior experiment where we looked at the preference of food sources in different species of tadpoles. To do this we set 9 tubs with leaves, 9 with mud, 9 with mud and leaves and 9 with only fish food and put 5 tadpoles that we had weighed first and water in each tub. After 8 days we took them all out and weighed them individually to se which group had gained most weight hence most adapted to the food source we provided. We did this with 3 different species. It was a fun project except from other frogs snakes (and puppies!) kept messing with the tubs and eating the tadpoles..hmm! ï?Š Our current projects have to do with the cute little Phyllomedusa frog also called the MONKEY frog as it lives in trees and its nesting habits.

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It lays its eggs surrounded by gel and wrapped in leaves hanging over open water so the tadpoles can just drop in the water when they are ready to hatch.

Here at Simla where we live we have 5 ponds and the monkey frogs are nesting here, but we also go to other sites and cut of the nest from the plant it hanging from to bring it back and hang it up over a tub in a piece of string. This we do to see if it makes a difference to the number of tadpoles hatching, if the nest is attached to the plant and thereby takes up oxygen from it. Were hoping to have the results in two weeks!

Other than experiments it was Innes birthday on Friday,he turned 25!! Many HAPPY BIRTHDAY WISHES...

Just before I say goodbye here's some pictures from the week that passed! Enjoy!

One of the highlights from our insect-net in the past few days

A very colourful caterpillar (which apparently turns into a rather somber moth).

Dan collecting coconuts for everybody

Next week there will be 2 blogs here from Trinidad. One of them will be an update on the climbing in the canopies from the climbing team (Dan, Sean and Gail)..! The other one will be from next week where we will, amongst other things, play environmental games with some of the kids from a summer school here. It will all be very exciting so remember to tune in!!!

Bye for now!