Oh yes nen! Many many interesting plants. So much indigenous knowledge too, really amazing how resourceful the people are.. like the Cohune palm, the inner core is food, oils, thatched roof shelter from fronds.. fibers etc.
One cool thing I observed too while down there was the use of extracts of Madre de Cacao or
Gliricidia sepium as a natural pesticide/fungicide. I believe just a cold water soak was performed and this would be sprayed over crops like kidney beans or cacao. Cacao often grows in close association with this legume.
A quick wikipedia on it just now returned some cool info.
"G. sepium is also used for its medicinal and insect repellent properties. Farmers in Latin America often wash their livestock with a paste made of crushed G. sepium leaves to ward off torsalos. In the Philippines, the extract obtained from its leaves is used to remove external parasites.[2]
According to World Agroforestry Centre, this species is becoming an important part of farming practices in Africa. G. sepium has a combination of desirable properties. Because it fixes nitrogen in the soil, it boosts crop yields significantly without the expense of chemical fertilizers. In addition, it is tolerable of being cut back to crop height year after year. The trees go into a dormant state when they are cut back, so the root system is not competing straight away for the nutrients, and the crop is free to become established. The trees only really start to come out out of the dormant phase when the crop is already tall.[6] "
Anyhow, their were also seemingly innumerable Mimosas/Acacias about that left me dizzied after a while. I am quite sure tenuiflora was around but I arrived at the tail end of their flowering period and never spotted the flower spikes, and the pods I found were generally too large. I took some notes and did some drawings one day out and about, did some research with very patchy internet and figured that one of the species was certainly Mimosa pigra, with some pudica around and glomerosa. No experiments performed unfortunately haha. And really not enough pictures!! I'm not sure why I didn't take more. I'll post what I have of a few plants and some more wildlife.
First is a shot of the prolific A.cornigera. I'm not sure if it was mentioned elsewhere here, but I read that the root and ants are used to slow the progression of a snake bite. An herbalism doctrine underlies this remedy apparently that suggests that because the thorns look like snake fangs, the plant should be useful in healing it.
Second a cacao pod about to be cracked open.
Third a fern that covered the upper altitudes of Cockscomb that I really liked.
A purple fan coral found on the beach.
A cool shot of a tree that I've embarassingly forgot the name of.
Leaf cutter ants.
cave paintings attached the following image(s):
acornigera.jpg
(169kb) downloaded 91 time(s). cacao.jpg
(278kb) downloaded 90 time(s). tigerfernp.jpg
(116kb) downloaded 89 time(s). coral.jpg
(93kb) downloaded 89 time(s). belizebeauty.jpg
(144kb) downloaded 89 time(s). leafcutter.jpg
(144kb) downloaded 89 time(s).Living to Give