Abram at Las Cuevas and the Belize Zoo

I had two internships over a three-week period. My first internship was at Las Cuevas Research Station, the heart of the Chiquibul Forest Reserve and National Park. I spent most of my time assisting a team of Canadian researchers, who were doing a study on bee diversity in the Chiquibul. There are around 24,000 species of bees in the world, and many of them can be found in the tropics. Our job was to collect as many species as possible, and we did this in several ways. First we would often just walk along the road and trail, netting any bee we came across. We also set up “bee traps”, which were basically pieces of paper tacked to trees that contained certain scents. One group of bees, known as “orchid bees”, are attracted to these scents, since the males use a “complex scent palette” (or, basically, as many scents as they can get on themselves) to attract females. We would stand by these “traps” and catch any bee that flew in. Once we had collected the bees (and killed them by placing the insects into a jar with ethyl acetate) we would pin them in the lab. The pin was placed slightly to the right of the center of the thorax, and then the bee and pin were stuck into a collection box with other individuals.
My second internship was at the Belize Zoo. Here I worked primarily with the “keepers”, taking care of the animals. We started our day by preparing food. This included chopping fruit, mixing dog food and honey, killing chicks (for the raptors), and so on. We usually fed the animals simply by entering their cage and placing their plate of food inside (and taking the pervious day’s food plate out). Some animals we fed by hand through the cage, however, and, for some, we simply dumped buckets of food over the fence. We also spent much of our time cleaning out cages, changing water, washing out and refilling bathing areas, and so on. This is a picture of me feeding Wildboy. Wildboy is one of the “problem jaguars” in the back, which were brought in from the wild since they were killing livestock.