Eli's+Journal

=Journal of studies at Rocky Hill= This is my journal

October 1st 2008 __Jounrnal Entry #1__ Rocky hill is to the north east of the Punahou campus, there is a main part to the hill where there is a lot of evidence of people previously going there for trips or for studying, there is a lot of garbage and dead plants. We explored more this morning to see if there were any other kinds of animals or plants that we had missed before, we saw some Cardinal birds, a few bees and some strange kind of purple flower that we had missed before. There are also a lot cacti and some kind of fern pod, lava rocks, small purple flowers, a lot of garbage and dirt. Turns out that the strange type of purple flower we saw was whole cluster a Night Blooming Cereus' unfortunately we did not see it when it was in bloom as (hence the name) they only bloom at night. There are lots of black bees they seem to come during the day time to pollinate the flowers, which is strange because they only bloom at night a couple of stray butterflies that wander in from outer habitats, and ants that have nets in the dirt under the ground. We explored further into the hill and realized that there was another secret path off to the East, so we followed that into a small cavern that had four walls but with an open roof, cacti had grown along the walls of the outside and brambles had grown around the entrance so it was hard to get in at first, but there was a sort of ladder/stairway that helped you walk into the cove (so other people have been there before). We saw some geckos hiding in a corner but they were only there to eat the ants and the cockroaches. We went to see if the Night Blooming Cereus would be in bloom early in the morning, but when we went up and looked around none of the plants were in bloom since there was a slightly hazy light coming from the ocean. It seems that the Night Blooming Cereus' only bloom when it is pitch black.

__Niches__ We saw that the ant’s nest was in the man made stone block, or in the walls of the open roofed cavern. They seem to feed off the leaves and stuff that are growing on the walls as i saw some taking a leaf 5 times their size across the floor. The cardinals have a nest somewhere in the trees but we have yet to discover where. The ants are just regular black ants approximately 10 millimeters in size and can bite quite hard. There are two types of gecko, some strange kind that I haven't discovered the name of yet but they are bright green most of the time but seem to change color. The other kind is a regular gecko, with a grayish greenish color. The bees come a lot and they need flowers to pollinate, but the only kind of flower that we have seen up there has been the Night Blooming Cereus so the bees must be the ones that pollinate the flowers at night, but since we come in the morning we can never see the flowers in bloom and unfortunately we cannot follow the bees back to their nest to study them, we are hoping to get these observations the next time we go up there at night. We went back later and saw that in the cavern to the East there are alot of Snails most of them were dead probably because they were killed by the ants as we saw hundreds of them crawling all over their bodies. When the ants came out to eat the snails then the geckos also came out to eat the ants, they scuttled around in the corners of the cavern searching for ants and slightly bigger bugs. I put a brownie on one of the leaves out side of the cavern see what it would attract over time, within 10 minutes over 50 cockroaches had swarmed over that leaf and totally devoured the brownie. The geckos then had a feeding frenzy as they jumped the cockroaches and ate a lot of them. The whole of Rocky hill is one big cockroach nest they live in the bushes and either come out at night/afternoon or if you put bait near their habitat. The Cardinals feed on the geckos when they come out to hunt for bugs or they feast on small seeds that have dropped off the Night Blooming Cereus or the Dragon Fruit, which turned out to be the flower that comes from this species of Night Blooming Cerus's.

__Journal Entry #2__ My assigned role is about the Rocky Hill ecological niche is the ants and the insect life on Rocky Hill. The ants have nests all around Rocky Hill but their main nest seems to be in a man made stone slab that is right at the top of Rocky Hill looking over the whole School and Manoa, you can even see the ocean from there. The ants escape from the stone slab through the cracks in its surface, they come out all the time and swarm all over the hill to find food and leaves to bring back to the nest (probably for the Queen and the soldier ants). They were seen eating the corpse of a dead gecko, hundreds of ants were swarming over the freshly dead corpse, when we went back the next day, all that was left were a couple of Bones. The gecko is the ants main predator, when they come out during the day time the geckos pounce and eat as many ants as they can, they then retreat to their niche (either their habitat is in the trees and weeds that go down to the school from Rocky Hill, or it is also in the dirt and underneath the stone slab which the Ants nest lies in). The ants also live in the secret cavern off to the east, the walls of the cavern are made out of dirt and rock so the ants have made many nests in the cracks of there and are swarming all over the place. The ants do not eat much seeds or leaves here as there are not many in this habitat, but they do eat the snails that live in the corners and floors of the cavern, they come when it is raining or it has been raining because they like the moistness. The other insects that live in that niche are the bees, they pollinate the Night Blooming Cereus’s and they have a nest somewhere up in the trees but imp not totally sure where about, they are regular honey bees they pollinate the flowers for nectar to make honey. They have bright colors, yellow and black so they can blend in with all the bright flowers and it is harder for them to be spotted and eaten by some sort of predator, most likely one of the Cardinal birds. The bees (like all bees) have a stinger in its butt for protection, but it only has one sting and it usually dies after using it.

__Niche__ Some of the environmental factors that make heritable variation, or natural selection, are the predators that hunt the prey, like the Cardinals hunt the geckos, so the geckos that have been living in the dirt turned their skin a brownish/ beige color so they are harder to see from the air, and also the geckos that live in the weeds and bushes that surround Rocky Hill are bright green and are the same color as all the leaves they live in and where their niche is. They adapt over time to what predator hunts them, and how they can use natural selection to their advantage as well as using their surroundings to their advantage as well. The black ants have adapted them selves to defend from the geckos as they have small stingers on their heads, they can move very fast and they are very good at slipping through the cracks in the ground and escaping through the stone slab or the walls of the cavern. They are hard to get to, and the only way that the geckos are able to eat the ants is because they come out in great numbers when they have a tasty treat they can smell, like a cookie or a brownie, or there is a dead carcass that is useful to bring back to the nest and to the Queen. The snails have a brown pattern on their back shell that looks a lot like the leaves they make their nest’s in, they must’ve used this as an advantage to not being seen by predators and they seem to blend in with the environment, the only thing that would give them away to any predators would be the slug slime they leave when they move, as it trails behind them leaving a shiny path of slime and grease, which is easily reflective in the dark for animals and people to see. The Night Blooming Cereus’s are not incredibly colorful, they have some color but they are not as spectacular as some of the flowers that are in Hawaii, so they have a plant they grow called dragon fruit which is very bright and pink and attracts bees to pollinate it, this helps its reproductive abilities as the bees are able to see it more then the regular Night Blooming Cereus’s and they are more attracted to it and that helps it become pollinated and reproduce seeds.

__Journal Entry #3__ Since it has been raining a lot recently the Hill is a lot more slippery, and the red dirt hes formed some sort of paste that sticks to your feet, its a lot more humid up there and feels very dirty for some reason,the ants are out and about more than usual and there seems to be a new kind of species that came during the rain, maybe they used it to their advantage to become the dominant ant/insect in that area. I saw the usual amount of geckos running around in the dirt and eating the new kind of bigger, redder ants. I found a small nest of geckos in the trees by the small cove with the open roof, but there were only four geckos hiding in the trees i am not sure whether it was actually the nest or they were just mating or hunting for food. There were a lot more cockroaches than before they seemed to have come out during the rainstorm, and also some people had been up there and left a half eaten packet of chips up there and there were hundreds of roaches swarming all over it. The Cardinals were back from their nest, they had been feasting on cockroaches when i arrived. It seems that all the animals affect each other, like when there is a storm and the ground gets wet, and then the ants come out of their home to fix up the pathways leading into their cavern, then also the geckos come out as well to feast on the ants and cockroaches that had come out because of the rain, and they have their meal. Then the birds come and feast upon the geckos, they come out as well because they use the broken off branches for their nests and the wet leaves. They also seem to like scavenging in empty packets for food, and eating some of the Night Blooming Ceresus's fruit, the Dragon Fruit that is the reason why it attracts bees to pollinate it.So in all, one thing in a small niche affects the other, take one factor out then everything would fall. Add something else and it all might get better, but there is no knowing of what the outcome might be.

__Niche entry # 3__

__Journal Entry #4__ I went back to Rocky Hill this past week and tried out my experiment, my experiment was, and do the sizes and color of ants change with their niche? So I went back to Rocky Hill to take a final look at my ants and saw that they had not changed, there were more of them out at the time but that was only because they were attacking a carcass of a dead gecko at the time. There were fewer Birds flying around but plenty of roaches scuttling all over the place. Everything up there was pretty much the same, the bees were out pollinating and the geckos were running around trying to eat the cockroaches and ants. So to test my experiment I went to other sites that had ants in them, like my house, and the trail to the pillboxes in Lanikai, and also the soccer field. I noticed that the ants in Rocky Hill were approximately 10mm long and 3mm wide, whilst the ants in my house were 14mm long and 6mm wide. They were quite a bit bigger than the black ants at rock hill, I tried to think of why this was and came to a conclusion that it’s the diet of the ant that makes it a various size. My house is full of snacks and food all over the ground so they get plenty of food all the time, whilst the ants by Rocky Hill actually have to work for their food and its harder for them to come by large amounts of candy and wrappers. Next I went to the lower soccer field and tried to find ants on the baseball dirt, turns out the whole thing is infested with ants, so don't go sit there, the ants down there were approximately the same size as the ones in my house(15mm/5mm). I found this strange because not many people go down to the lower field with food and drink that the ants could scavenge off and steal. It then occurred to me that size might just be about what the ants eat, it could be because of the type of dirt it lives in, if it has different kinds of nutrients in it that are more healthier for the ants or it is just easier to burrow in and dig so they have more energy to go and fund food somewhere else. I then went to the pillboxes in Lanikai which people come to all the time and has a type of soil just like the kind at Rocky Hill, I didn't expect the ants to be any different in size and shape than the ones in Rocky hill and I was right, they were almost exactly the same. It seems that the niche matters everything to the ant, it can make the ant big or small, thin or wide. Its totally up to the kind of food that is at the niche, what kind of nutrients are in the soil, and how easy it is to burrow nests and colonies into the ground to make a ant civilization.

__Niche entry #4__ __Night Blooming Cereus-__ **Family:** //Cactaceae // **Genus:** //Hylocereus //
 * Domain:** //Eukaryota //
 * Kingdom:** //Plantae //
 * Subkingdom:** //Viridaeplantae //
 * Phylum:** //Tracheophyta //
 * Subphylum:** //Euphyllophytina //
 * Infraphylum:** //Radiatopses //
 * Class:** //Magnoliopsida //
 * Subclass:** //Caryophyllidae //
 * Superorder:** //Caryophyllanae //
 * Order:** //Caryophyllales //
 * Suborder:** //Portulacineae //
 * Subfamily:** //Cactoideae //
 * Tribe:** //Hylocereeae //

__Cockroach-__ Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Arthropoda Class: Insecta Order: Dictyoptera Family: Blattidae Species: Periplaneta americana

__Bee__-
 * Kingdom:** Animalia
 * Phylum:** Arthropoda
 * Class:** Insecta
 * Order:** Hymenoptera
 * Family:** Apidae
 * Genus:** //Apis//
 * Species:** //mellifera//

__Gecko-__
 * Kingdom- Animalia
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Phylum -Chordata
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Subphylum - Vertebrata
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Class - Reptilia
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Order -Squamata
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Suborder- Sauria
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Family- Gekkonidae
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Subfamily- Gekkoninae
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Genus- //__Phelsuma__//

__Ant__-

Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Arthropoda Class: Insecta Order: Hymenoptera Family: Formicidae Genus: Solenopsis Species: invicta