As professors, one of the biggest challenges we face is finding projects for undergraduate students that will convey the thrill of scientific inquiry with the practical side of semester class structure. In many cases there just is not time to conceive of, implement, and complete a project in the 10 or 15 weeks the class will run. Field courses, like the one I co-teach in Belize are even more restricted time-wise. We get a total of 14 days in Belize and much of that is spent visiting sites and listening to lectures. We spend the majority of the time at the rainforest site, BFREE, but with all the activities we do, we only end up with four days to take data on our research projects. What to do? We work on short projects that garner a lot of data quickly, that are doable close to the bunkhouse and dining hall, and are scientifically alluring. It has taken some finessing and trial-and-error to find projects that will work. Fortunately, technology helped out! We discovered that with our bat detectors, we could get estimates of bat activity levels between two habitats at the same time. We also have set up camera traps to develop an idea of what terrestrial mammals are present in the area.While the camera traps are fun, they don’t yield rigorous data; we can only tell what species we “capture,” and that will not be an exhaustive survey. Nor can we tell anything about population size only using four cameras. We have also attempted to set up “traps” with peanuts circled by non-toxic florescent powder. This setup would hopefully allow us to estimate the rate of seed predation, and coupled with camera traps, determine what species are eating seeds. However, most of our set-ups never lost any peanuts and the one where the peanuts disappeared every night did not get any pictures. We aren’t sure if whoever was taking the peanuts was too small to set off the trigger on the camera trap (like a little spiny rat) or the equipment failed for another reason. Well, there’s downside of technology! However, we did get one extraordinary photo of a jaguar walking past one of our camera traps. This photo tells us a few things: it’s a male, and it is not the same jaguar that we “captured” last year (compare the spots on the photos), it was within ¼ mile of the bunkhouse, so students should be cautious during bathroom trips, and it looks healthy. With more cameras, we could potentially get an idea of how many others are out there, but that is for another time.

On the other hand our bat project worked really well. After the first night of collecting data at dusk by standing with bat detectors in one hand and swatting at the continual blitzkrieg of mosquitoes with the other, one of the students had a brainstorm that we could set up a couple of open-screened tents and sit inside. This plan actually worked well and our suffering was greatly diminished! And without a loss of data, that is, the screening did not seem to interfere with what we could pick up with our ultrasonic bat detectors. We had one tent set up in the middle of a clear-cut area (actually the helipad mowed and maintained for emergencies) and one tent set up along the edge of the forest. The hypothesis we tested was whether there is a difference in bat activity between the two habitats. One would expect that bats would forage in areas where they can maximize their energy intake while at the same time staying safe. We thought that bats would forage more along the forest edge because that would give them some cover from night flying predators (owls maybe), and this is the pattern we find in our home state of Delaware. But in Belize, at least in our little microcosm of the rainforest at BFREE, we found more bats foraging in the wide-open area. We were able to see this result in just the four nights of data collection and not only did we get usable data from this mini-project, and set the stage for future student research projects, but it was an excellent introduction for students in how to conceive and implement a scientific inquiry.

One of the projects we tried last year that DIDN’T work well was, unfortunately, our dung beetle projects. We had hoped to examine species diversity in different habitats and also to look at dung burial patterns. Well, one of the reasons it did not work was lack of good bait. We used horse dung and any good dung beetle biologist working in the Neotropics will tell you that horse dung is not particularly attractive to dung beetles. Hmmm, so what is attractive? Again, as any good dung beetle biologist will tell you, primate dung is very attractive; actually the human variety has been shown to be the MOST attractive (brings in the most species to traps). Folks just plain got squeamish about contributing to this scientific effort. Somehow, research on bats is more appealing to undergraduate college students! So, we go with where the interest is highest and we can actually get data fast.

I teach a course with a colleague every winter break called “Tropical Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Conservation”. This course takes students to the wonderful country of Belize in Central America. We are based at the BFREE site (for Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education) near the Bladen Nature Reserve in Southern Belize. In addition to lectures, field outings, and hands-on demonstrations, the students all participate in research projects. I discuss one of those projects–our traps for dung beetles–in the science diaries.

Another student project involved using camera traps to determine what kind of animal activity was in certain locations around the reserve. These cameras use motion and heat detectors to trigger the shutter. You set them up in a likely spot, set the trigger, wait for a day or so, and Voila! photos of animals you would not normally be able to see. Except, it was not quite that easy. Our biggest problem with these digital cameras was figuring out the instructions, which had to have been written by folks from Mars. That took four people about four solid hours of aggravation. Also, because there was no way to download the pictures (the camera trap had no screen), we had to wait until we were back in the states to see what was in the pictures. We had several hundred shots of nothing but “blanks” – that is, camera shots with no animal pictured, often triggered by insects or rain. Then, to our surprise, there was the shot of our male jaguar! A cat clearly on a mission! Camera traps, so called because you “catch” an image of the animal, are used for mammal surveys, especially with animals that can be individually identified from markings, like our jaguar. Once set up, they can be used to count the number of “recaptures” (those animals that appear more than once in photos), and the population size can be estimated from a ratio of the number of “recaptures” to “total captures”.

The other animal that we “captured” on camera was a low flying bat! The camera was only about three feet off the ground, and most cameras take several seconds to trigger the shutter once the infrared beam is broken. Our camera, on the other hand, triggers almost immediately, so even a fast flying object can be captured. It was still a very lucky shot!

For more about jaguars, visit: http://savethejaguar.com/jag-index

For more about bats: http://www.batcon.org/home/default.asp

Many people wonder what biologists do, especially those biologists not working in the medical fields. As an ecologist, I try to explain by saying that I work on the interconnectedness of living things. But how actually do I do that? As biologists, we are encouraged to examine the world through questions, as in “what is the question you are trying to answer?” That question could be how a theoretical construct fits the empirical data or something as simple as: “What is the use of a dung beetle, anyway?” Despite this urging from fellow scientists to frame our research around a specific question, most of use get into a line of questioning because we just plain LIKE the animals (or plants!). One of my problems is that I like so many different animals. I see an animal and I think, “Gee, it would be cool to work on frogs!” However, there is only so much time, so I have narrowed down my animals of choice to those that disperse seeds, mostly monkeys and dung beetles. Monkeys obviously disperse seeds through endozoochory, a fancy name for swallowing a seed whole and passing it out later with poo. But how do dung beetles disperse seeds? By finding the monkey dung and burying it, thus taking seeds along with it! The dung beetles aren’t interested in seeds, but they need to bury the poo fast to keep it for themselves, and they usually don’t take the time to remove the seeds. Thus, seeds get “planted” underground, safe from seed-chomping rodents and nasty fungi. So, I study the way that monkeys and dung beetles interact and help to move seeds around and regenerate the tropical rainforest. And I ask these questions: How do monkeys and dung beetles in a particular area contribute to forest regeneration? What is the impact of certain monkey species on seeds? What can we do to preserve this important interaction and the animals involved?

But, I have other responsibilities than just working on my monkeys and dung beetles. As a university professor, I teach, I contribute to the university community through service, and most importantly, I also have students that work on research projects and only some of those students can work on monkeys or dung beetles. Some of the other projects I work on with my students include: feral horses as seed dispersers on barrier islands (think Misty of Chincoteague!) and bat activity patterns on farm-woodland interfaces.

Over the summer, I will be posting notes to this blog about many of these projects.