Coming up with my conservation experiment was a test all on its own. Deciding on a question, figuring out variables, and executing the whole plan is much easier said than done. Being here for only 4 weeks, time has also been another stress factor. The most difficult part, in my opinion, was coming up with a question. Even though I have heard this being said over and over again, it truly does come down to “What is your question?”. Every part of your project centers around what you are trying to ask and sometimes I have gotten so caught up with methodology that I forget to think back and remember what my focus was.

After multiple trial and errors and an infinite amount of assistance from Professor Shier and my TA Rachel, Tinh and I were finally able to come up with a project! We are focusing on group size and the effects they have on the activity of leaf-cutter ant trials. The reason we decided on this topic is because we realize that as ecotourism increases, more and more people will be traveling the trails of natural reserves. Although this is a positive change, the effects of different size groups walking through trails are still unknown.

In order to try and figure out if there are any effects, we will be conducting “walk-through” trials where we simulate different group sizes on different leaf-cutter ant trials and seeing how the activity changes after 30 and 60 minutes.

So far, we have picked out the 10 different colonies we will be testing and ran 20 successful trials. Within the next 3 days, we should be done with this part of the project and hope to move on to the second part of our experiment. In the second part, we will use the baseline information we collected from the first experiment and using it to compare how the frequency of visitation by these different group sizes affect the activity of the trails. With only 9 days left here at Refugio Bartola, pressure is on to get as much data as possible, definitely crunch time!