6/20/2012 (recorded 6/22) Long part of 2 day-long day. Down at 330, Up at 5:30 for canopy tower visit. Saw blue cotinga.   All girls were super tired. They left to go sleep. I stayed in jungle for work. More army ants. Found em, experimented with them. They were raiding leaf cutters. Pipeline road serves…

Bullet Ants With Marc Seid’s original plan of lifting a bullet-ant infected log into a container, and having several spotters, we successfully managed to collect and entire colony of Bullet ants! There were some hairy moments but we ended up with a full colony, queen and all! Once we had them though, it was sort…

6/17/2012| ————– First morning  with official housing again! No longer homeless! Down 3:50 Up 9:00 Huge breakfast, work on robotic woodpecker. More random difficulties in making a portable servo motor behave like a woodpecker than I would have thought. Pays off though. The Azteca ants respond like crazy! [Update Peter actually published some science about…

One of the biggest stressors faced by the Technojunglier is losing equipment. I find that 90% of things I lose actually stay with me in some form. Usually they are just hidden in nooks or lost in areas of quick decision placement (like when rain strikes). It can be interesting when a seemingly innocuous peripheral…

Did ant-based morse code today. Example image targeting just the green leaves from the video. Ended up being a far more interesting project than I had thought it would be. At first, merely considered it a rote exercise in one of the most basic digitally augmented interactions I could place in the field. Servo with…

6/11/2012| ————- Stephen Pratt arrived today. Just as super nice and helpful as always! Bought and brought me waterproof boots and got Peter some extra collection vials and SD Cards.  Right now, they are out dealing with headquarters in Panama City. I’m out all day in the field.   Last Saturday| —————— went with Ummat…

6/8/2012| ————   Went to field with the bat girls along pipeline road. First time out here in the evening. They were disappointed. The intense rain is maybe keeping the bats in hiding. Caught about 8 bats in the evening, all AJ’s and some other species name that starts with a soft C? Both are…

6/8/2012 Up early. Getting up early isn’t hard out here. There is no, “uuuhhhhggggg, what time is it”-sort of feeling, more of just an urgent realization that the sun is up, and that lots of things in the jungle will only be visible for 12 more hours. Ate Kristina’s weird mutant carrot cake for breakfast.…