Costa Rica 2023

  Hello!  Today we left Finca La Anita and headed to our next adventure!  We stopped about half way to the  Guanacaste Province to buy snacks for our next two days.  It was about a three hour trip to our hotel.  We checked in, had lunch and enjoyed some pool time/air conditioned room time.  Later in the afternoon, we headed down to the beach where we had a lesson about the local turtle rescue.  We were very lucky and some turtles hatched about twenty minutes before we arrived!  Tonight we are doing an night beach walk where we will be patrolling for turtles!   Last photo in front of our cabin at Finca La Anita! Group photo with Pablo and Anna our hosts at Finca La Anita. Our new home for 2 days:  Tatanka Turtle Rescue: Nest of turtles hatch here! Getting instructions on how to find, approach and dig a turtle nest. Practicing digging turtle nests. Baby Olive Ridley turtles!! Turtle release!

Hola friends and families! As you heard from the blog yesterday, we finished our big experiments! We then presented today in front of the big group after a quick pep talk from Dr. Pinto. We were all pretty stressed earlier but after a lot of hard work and determination we all finished. We all learned so much from this experience (both about science, ourselves, and each other) and look forward to sharing it all with you guys when we get home. To finish out our last full day at Finca la Anita, we had an amazing lunch of fish, garlic mashed potatoes, and fresh salad. Then we had a couple hours of down time to pack up for our move to the beach tomorrow! Tonight we will go to a Costa Rican Cooking class. Until Tomorrow! Boarding the bus to the lab for the last time. Group Photo at the lab Another group photo at the lab The Tree-Huggers Presenting (Amelia and Kenya) Las Tortugas Presenting (Kally) Las Hormigas Presenting (Abby and Isabelle) The hawksbills presenting (Adian) Golden Orb Weaver

Today was a full science day!  We continued to work on our projects and presentations.   We will have a full report on how our presentations went tomorrow! Separating ants from gardens to use in trials.   Looking at gram stains and taking data. Analyzing data.                                                             Counting microbe colonies. Happy Birthday Kally!                                    Rhinoceros Beetle  ( Dynastes   hercules septentrionalis) found just outside of the lab Our driver Wilbur :)

  Hello from our Verona family! We are having a blast, with 6 days down and 4 to go. We hiked up a treacherous path in the rainforest to get to the single most beautiful waterfall ever. After the waterfall, we had lasagna for lunch and proceeded to spend the afternoon in the lab. We are very excited to finish up our projects! Tomorrow is our last day of science, and on day 8 we will present.  Los Tortugas: Today our group ran tests for our positive and negative controls. This process involved separating 45 ants and 2 grams of fungi garden for each ant colony and for every trial. We tracked qualitative and quantitive data every 5 minutes as we observed each trial. We also started on our final presentation. We made a lot of progress today and will be doing even more trials and work on our presentation tomorrow. The Hawksbills: Today our group finished all of our preliminary trials and moved on to collecting our final data. First we had some ants fighting one on one in petri dishes the sa