Day 3:
May 31
Hey! It's Kate and Ellie here, telling you about our third day in Costa Rica. We started with a delicious breakfast of fruit, eggs, and toast. Then we headed to the rainforest to harvest the fungus gardens from the leaf cutter ant colonies. We learned about the two different species of leaf cutter ants that we observed the Atta and Acromyrmex. We then washed up and got ready for lunch. Lunch was cheesy rice with heart of palm, fajita steak, plantain chips, and salad. We got into our bus for an hour drive to to the zip-lines. We had a total of 8 zip-lines that we got to do after a short steep hike up a mountain. While zip-lining we saw toucans, howler monkeys, and a three toed sloth.We drove back to town to visit the brand new butterfly center and learned about the butterfly life cycle and Silver's research experiment on caterpillars. We stopped by the local's store  to get ice cream. We walked back to get dinner which consisted of pork chops, zucchini, and salad. After dinner, we had our nightly science session. First we got our fungus gardens and moved them to a bigger container and put them in the lab. Next, we counted the bacterial colonies in the petri dishes that we made yesterday, and found the statistics based on our data. Lastly, we watched 2 videos about leaf-cutter ants.
-Costa Chicas +Zach signing off