Day 6

 

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 same way we had them fight in the preliminary trials. Then, at night, we walked out to a couple of the foraging trails of the leaf cutter ants and dropped a couple of ants from different colonies into the trail and collected data. Tomorrow we will be doing more trials and going back out to the foraging trails and other colonies.

Tree-huggers: Today we diluted all of our soil samples with saline solution and put them into vials, which we then used to swab onto our petri dishes. we started on our presentations and made a lot of progress with the theme and edited our hypothesis and prediction. Then we observed the escopovis bacteria and wrote down the observations in our notebook. we got a little ahead so we are in a good position for tomorrow.

Las Hormigas: Today we started off by checking our bacteria growth from yesterday, and from there began to isolate different types of the bacteria to stain and identify. After a lot of mistakes and help from Miguel (our superhero) we were able to isolate the needed bacteria to perform the rest of our testing. Next we took the sheep ants we collected yesterday and created a solution that we will use to treat the bacteria. Finally we performed 4 treatments, diluted, and plated all of these treatments.  

Missing you family! Remember that we love you, we miss you, and that we are all doing very well. 

Until next time, 
Your Verona crew 








                                        Isabelle and Abby's group looking at their culture plates
                                               Amelia and Kally's group starting their slideshow.

                                                    Aidan's group working with Dr. Pinto.

                                                            Kenya working with her group.

    
                                                        Kally selecting ants from their colony.


                                        Isabelle with the special ant juice (saline and crushed ants)
                                                                            Waterfall!


                                                            Tractor ride to the waterfall!


                                                    



                                                                        Fresh lychee

                                                    



                                          




Comments

  1. AnonymousJuly 27, 2023 at 10:37 PM

    Incredible experience!!
    Learn all you can! 👍🏼 presentations, tomorrow!
    Loving Amelia’s ‘waterfall smile’!
    Proud of you! ❤️G&GL

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeff SehmerJuly 28, 2023 at 8:17 AM

    Wow… looks like an awesome hike with a great reward at the waterfall! Glad to see all of you making progress on your different exciting projects. Can’t wait to hear how the presentations go.

    Abby - we had the plumber out yesterday to find out where the leak was. Several expensive repairs later, we identified a crack in the tub upstairs…so there will be some changes when you get home!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJuly 28, 2023 at 8:42 AM

    Happy Birthday Kally! (On Friday) Love you 🥰 XO

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJuly 28, 2023 at 9:28 AM

    Looks like a great trip. I am Isabelle’s grandma and love the pictures

    ReplyDelete
  5. Paul LanzJuly 28, 2023 at 6:44 PM

    Looks like an amazing time today, especially with the waterfall hike and swim! Isabelle, Koko says hi!

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJuly 28, 2023 at 6:52 PM

    Isabelle, your dad forwards me each day’s blog so I can read what you and your classmates are doing. I enjoy seeing all your smiles because that tells us you’re having a good time. The waterfall pictures were great today. I bet you guys all had fun. I am Isabelle’s Aunt Sue, and have really enjoyed hearing about all your testing and experiments and presentations not to mention the gorgeous scenery. Love you Isabelle!

    ReplyDelete

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