Alex José Yoder

Finally some pictures of the newest addition to our Santa Rosita team. I'd have posted a couple before, but he's generally in the house where the lighting is incredibly bad. The other evening, however, we were up the river under the natural light of the sky and I was able to get a few photos.

The Bulliest Bull Ever

So I was up on the hill meditating the other day, when suddenly behind me I heard a great bellow. I turned and saw there the biggest baddest bulliest brahma bull I've ever seen. Unfortunantly with these photos one is not alltogether able to capture the extreme size of this guy. My head just might top the crest of his hump.

But amazingly, these guys are quite docil. He just batted his sweet eyelashes at me and wandered on his merry way!

The Great Maraposa

I never saw anything As beautiful
As a fly
With Butter.

The Generator of the Lights

This, my friends, the machine that generates all the electricity for our house in Santa Rosita. It runs from dusk until about 9:00 when we go to bed or pretend to.

It's an old diesel one stroke beast, that's quite fuel efficient. Lovely lovely lovely. Except we change oil in it every 150 hours which rolls around a bit too often.

The Coolest Click Beetle Ever

Normal click beetles are fun. Abnormal ones are even cooler. But click beetles with eyes that turn on like a lightning bug when it is active and turn off when the bug is inactive?

Now that's cool!

Of course, these aren't actually the eyes.

Leaf Cutter Ants

Walk any distance through a Central American jungle and you're sure to stumble upon a nest of leaf cutter ants. It's probably a good thing that only 2.5% of ant queens successful set up a colony, or else there would be no leaves for them to cut.

These amazing ants are actually farmers. Despite what is commonly believed, these ants don't eat the leaves they cut, but bring them back to their colony where they make compost with the leaves. In this compost the ants grow a special fungus that they eat for their food.

Each colony is set up with a sort of cast system. The queen, of course, lays the eggs. Then there are some really, really big guys that sit around drinking a fermented fungus brew until some big lugger like me comes digging around their nest, in which case they crawl out and pinch their huge squeezers at you (I didn't get a picture of this because I was running).

Then there are some medium sized ants with scissor mouths that actually do the leaf cutting and leaf cutting. Often riding along with them on the leaves are even smaller ants who help protect the busy cutter from flies that try to lay eggs on them.


The first thing you'll probably see when you get close to an ant cutter colony is this:


If you follow the trail (where the leaves are heading) you'll eventually come to the colony which looks like some sort of sprawling nuclear factory:




These guys carry amazing loads:



Notice the small ant clinging to the leaf that the larger ant is carrying. Want a free ride? Hop on!:

Jurassic Park

As most of you probably don't know, Santa Rosita is part of National Park of Guatemala. Well, technically it isn't, but everything on our side of the river is being treated the same now and if you'd go up the road just a couple of kilos you'd officially enter the park.

Turns out, there's a lot more Jurassic here than one would ever guess !

Chomp!!


Grrr!



The set-up


The big guy is probably around twenty inches long from head to tip of tail.

that's all!