Finding snakes in the Colombian Amazon forest: A collaborative endeavor

Coevolutionary interactions between species shape the biodiversity within an ecosystem. One type of interaction that often drives biological diversification is that of predator and prey. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I study the coevolutionary process of snakes and poisonous frog prey. The summer of 2021, I visited Leticia, Colombia to collect Erythrolamprus reginae snakes species identified as poison frog predators. I invested long hours of field work to collect several tissues from snakes and frogs in Leticia. Snakes are not particularly abundant in the ecosystem, therefore, to collect the target snakes I relied on local community networks that helped me as scientific collaborators, guides and field assistants. This grant allowed me to travel to Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia for one month during the 2021 summer break. Thanks to this trip I collected preliminary data, evaluated sampling places, made local connections, and optimized ways to perform the experiments in the forest.