Nicaragua Part 1

Some of you may be wondering if I even went to Nicaragua... and where the pictures of my trip are. Well, I finally got around to picking some pictures out to share. The vast majority of the pictures I took were of bugs, lizards, snakes, or frogs so I have included some of those, I also added some of me and Kevin (another grad student who works with me). Allow me to describe why I chose to add some of these pictures. The first half of the trip we were in the dry forest in a small reserve called Domatilla. This first picture is of the inside of our room, notice how small the beds were, Kevin's head and feet hung off the end. The rooms were furnished with mosquito nets, a bed with some kind of cloth filled mattress, a bathroom in the corner with a pipe coming in for the shower, and a bucket filled with sawdust with a toilet seat on it. We were grateful for the mosquito nets because there were termites nesting in the roof and the winged ones would fly out at night, covering our mosquito nets. We tucked the mosquito nets under the mattress because there were all sorts of animals crawling around the floor at night, toads, geckos, army ants, spiders, scorpions, and snakes. The windows all had screens but as you can see behind me, the gaps in the wall boards were more than an inch wide, so the window screens were useless.
The second and third pictures are of some critters we encountered in Domatilla. Kevin almost stepped on the rattle snake while we were walking down a dirt road, I saw it and only managed to say "look out, look out!" He began to "look out" around the trees and up in the sky. He came so close to stepping on the snake that I saw it strike the bottom of his boot. It was just a baby snake so the rattle didn't make enough noise for him to hear it. The third picture is of a "banana spider" I guess they are VERY poisonous. This one dropped down a web line out of the trees directly in front of us while we were walking to the black light at night. If I hadn't been looking up it may have dropped right on Kevin, who was in front of me.

Even though we were in the Dry forest, it rained quite a bit. One day it rained non stop, they told us that it was a hurricane, which was weird because there was no wind. Excuse the fuzzy picture but it was the only way I could capture the amount of rain that was falling. The next picture is what the dry forest looked like, when it wasn't raining, it was nice, we even found some cactus.

We were sent to Nicaragua by a retired professor who studies flies. Kevin and I are both currently studying velvet ants, we found quite a few in Domatilla, here is one pictured below. Also this is one of the snakes we found in our room one night.

So I don't bore anybody, I will stop my post here and continue another time with the second half of my trip.