In Mount Totumas Cloud Forest Resort, visitors come for the remote wilderness experience and explore both the many trails surrounding the lodge and their wide variety of coffee that’s meticulously grown and harvested on site. For student’s of Antioch College, this opportunity is extended to us, and the student’s are tasked with working closely on the coffee production to ensure a good harvest and a wonderful co-op experience.
My experience at Mount Totumas was different. It was low season, so there was no coffee production for me to help with, and I was connected with Andrew Quitmeyer, a professor from Wild Labs who is currently working in Gamboa in Panama. I was connected with him by chance when my academic advisor Kim Landsbergen met him by chance at BeetlePalooza and noticed that he had been to Mount Totumas previously because of the tee he was wearing. It was offered that I could participate in his Mothbox project, one where I would have to set up a digital imaging device for the purpose of capturing snap shots of moths and I agreed wholeheartedly.
Though I finally had a specific goal for my co-op, I still needed to work at Mount Totumas in my own time, and I did so by working various jobs around the mountain. Most of my morning and afternoon was spent in the greenhouse. The first thing I learned to do here was to trim and separate strawberry plants and repot the pups in fresh soil. I learned how to group lettuce starts together in the same pot and water them afterwards, and to water all the plants that needed them daily or every other day. Since the day was humid most of the time, most of the plants retained water very easily.
Late afternoons and evenings were for setting up the mothboxes. The boxes would be set up in areas with open space, since the device needed enough of it to get a good beam of LED lights out to attract the moths. Then depending on the battery charge, the mothbox could be left anywhere from two to four days, after some proper documentation of course, such as coordinates, box ID and more. After a few days the box would be retrieved and set aside to charge, while the images in the USB would be uploaded to a google drive and categorized using this file name sequence: Location_Area_Mothbox ID_Year-Month-Date. These images would be used to help an AI develop its identification system, to better understand which moths we were working with.
I very much appreciated and enjoyed the opportunity to work with Andrew Quitmeyer and the Mothbox project, I had been looking for a specific interest during my time at Antioch College and now I’m drawn ever closer to Environmental Sciences, and many opportunities that revolve around field research. I want to be out in the field, and I want to do what I can to make sure that I learn everything I can, and be able to share that knowledge with the rest of the world.
