Day 7: Science and a Cooking Class - Eliot Seifrit

What a view!

Eliot making the beans.

Nice tortilla Cole.

Great Celebration

Today was our seventh day in Costa Rica and one of our last days on Pablo’s chocolate farm.  Also, today was one of our last days to finish up our projects.  Picking a question to do our research on was very difficult, but my group, the 3 A.M BEANS, finally decided on doing research on escovopsis growth in different aged atta ant colonies. The first day of our research we went into the woods to collect one fungus garden from three different ages of atta colony, young, medium, and mature.  Collecting the fungus garden was quite difficult, first you must find a tunnel in the colony that leads to the garden, then you must deal with the soldier ants while trying to extract the fungus garden.  First, we went the farthest into the woods to get the medium ages colony.  It didn’t take long to find the fungus garden but when we tried to take it out there were soldier ants everywhere, these ants can pierce through your skin and they will usually draw blood.  While we had someone trying to get the garden out, the rest of my group would flick soldier ants off their legs.  Once you get the ant off your leg or pant, if the soldier ants get a good grip, their head will stay locked on.  Dr. Pinto told us that you can use that feature as makeshift stitching to close an open wound or sow clothing back together.  On our way back to the lab we found the mature colony, this one took us a while to find a fungus garden.  One of the biggest colonies we found was a few days ago and Dr. Pinto told us that the colony was about five years old and there were around 900 fungus gardens.  When we opened the mature colony there were hundreds of soldier ants piling out and we had to work very hard to keep them off whoever was digging.  Also, on the way back we found the small colony, this colony had only one fungus garden and took all about two minutes to dig out.  My entire group forgot water, which resulted in Heath getting dehydrated and us having to carry him back to the lab.  Once we got back to the lab, we took tiny samples of the fungus garden from the bottom and placed them in four petri dishes per fungus garden.  The petri dishes have a slimy substance that is a combination of potato, dextrose (sugar), and agar (nutrients).  We checked the escovopsis after 24 hours, 48 hours, and 53 hours.  After 24 hours we saw almost no growth in any of the three colonies.  We made the mistake of not letting the containers open for a while so they can get oxygen.  The next day in the morning the entire medium colony that we collected appeared to be dead.  But, after a half an hour of the ants being exposed to oxygen, they were all back up like nothing had happened.  After all our science today we took a tractor up the street to a kitchen where we did a cooking class where we made rice, tortillas, and chicken wings.  It was good.  That was awesome.

Groups preparing for their experiments.


Digging up the ant colonies to grow escovopsis.