El Paramo

Better late than never huh. So last Friday and Saturday we had two day trips. Friday we went to Cayambe Cocoa which is a Paramo ecosystem it is higher elevation I think we were over 14,000 feet we took the bus up though so there wasn't too much huffing and puffing. Cayambe Cocoa had some really cool plants many were adapted to retain water, or had adaptations to keep them selves from freezing. Some of these adaptations include: fuzzy or furry leaves, gel stuff that works at antifreeze, and then cush plants keep all of their dead leaves inside of them for warmth. We didn't see any cool animals here but this is the llama region and I guess andean tapirs which I also sadly missed :(.

At both of the sites we did a project to compare the diversity between a non human impacted paramo ecosystem to a human impacted paramo ecosystem. We calculated alpha diversity and we created morphospecies. Which just means we got to create fun names for species that we didn't know but kind of looked like the species. My group was all girls (most groups were there are nine girls and three boys in my group), we had a plant named "Princess" and she had very nice flowery looking leaves and was very delicate, reeses peanut butter cup wrapper, lucky (clover), Cuzin it (a type of grass that is really long). In case you were wondering there was in fact more diversity in the non human impact area and had taller plants.

On Saturday we went to Antisana which was pretty much all fields. We did see some lava rock mining because a while ago Antisana burst at the seams and lava flew out of the side. Antisana also had a lot more birds . We saw a black faced Ibis which is critically endangered! We ate lunch by Lake Mica which provides all of the water for Quito. Sometimes durng the day here the lights are shut down because there isn't enough water in the dam to power the city so at certain peridos of the day the lights shut off for a few hours.

Tonight I'm heading to Otavalo so I can get up early go to the animal market and then after buy some Alpaca wear of course and then next week I'm headed to the coast! Howler monkeys here I come!!!