12/12/19 Thurs.  Today my team (Jacob and Alwin) and I hiked again on the water trail probably close to 5 miles and sampled our stream at a different site and habitat.  One of the program coordinators Scott Walter joined us through the morning and helped with the sampling.  He taught us some ethnobotanical things like what we could eat in the forest.  Jacob tried an unripe red banana which smelled like cucumbers and apparently didn’t taste too good.  We all tried the stem of a palm like plant and that tasted pretty good.  It tasted sort of like a moist white carrot.  Scott said he learned how to Id stream macroinvertebrates from us and is thinking about how to use it in some of his courses.  Now he knows how much fun it is and how they can be indicators of water quality.  At lunch on the trail a Blue Morpho butterfly came to visit us again and sat on a leaf right next to us.  He stayed there long enough for me to get some good pictures.  I forgot my walking stick there and when Alwin went back to get it the Blue Morpho butterfly was sitting on the same big leaf on the ground that I had been sitting on.  The guys are getting very efficient with the sampling and we made good time today getting back early afternoon.  We still did our ice cream run when we got back which is now our field day tradition.   This evening we got to hear a bat researcher named Glorianna Chaverri talk about bats and we got to see two bats up close.  Mandy Guinn another Faculty Mentor here held one and is a bat researcher too.