I have been photographing the birds and insects of Guatemala since I lived in Tikal at age 19. But with the advent of digital photography it became even easier. Based on studying Maya murals, decorated pottery, and ethnographic folklore, we have drawn up a comprehensive list of all sacred, edible, and utilitarian creatures which were of special interest to the Preclassic or Classic Maya of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The pages of this web site will devote our efforts to include the following Maya ethnozoological themes. The complete list is in a separate PDF.

• Insects and arachnids
• Snakes, iguanas, and lizards
• Crocodiles and caimans (alligators; Guatemala has both)
• Shellfish: freshwater and marine
• Fish: freshwater (especially catfish) and marine (especially sharks)
• Amphibians (frogs and toads) and amphibious creatures (turtles)
• Quadrupeds
• Birds
• Water birds
• Mythical birds

We are bravely launching this Maya ethnozoology web site with a photographic coverage of an initial 5 species. There are another 200 species we need to cover to be complete, but due to costs of field trips to remote jungle locations, we can realistically aspire to accomplish about 10 species per year. If we had adequate funding we could track down, and photography, and publish all 200 species in less than three years.

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Iguana at Autosafari Chapin, Photo by Jaime Leonardo, Guatemala.

Another reason for going slowly is because we have thousands of photographs to process (from the last several years of intensive photography), and also we are occupied simultaneously opening a separate FLAAR web site on Mayan ethnobotany. Our goal is to do additional photography of additional species now that we have better digital camera equipment.

So the five species that we are starting this web site with, I hope these images reveal the potential of what can result if funding becomes available to photograph and discuss the remaining circa 200 species.

Posted November 30, 2012

For years we have been on a search for documentation of what in the Popol Vuh story is romanticized mythical creation (such as a faux Sun God with golden attributes) compared with animals which are are actually zoologically correctly described in the Popol Vuh.

Let's take leaf-cutting ants. Millions of leaf-cutting ants are known for all of tropical Mesoamerica. You can see these at Tikal, Seibal, El Mirador, Yaxha, Dos Pilas (all in El Peten, Guatemala), and Copan in Honduras. But the Popol Vuh clearly and specifically states that leaf-cutting ants steal flowers from the garden of the evil Xibalba deities.

So for the last four years we have gone out into the rain forests of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Guatemala, to search for the reality. Do leaf-cutting ants really harvest flowers?

The Popol Vuh even says that some ants climb high in trees to get flowers from the tree tops. And that other ants gather flowers already fallen onto the ground? But then the ants are not "cutting" the flowers if already on the ground. Yet their zoological designation is known around the world clearly as "leaf-CUTTING" ants.

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Row of zompopos carrying the long tubular segments of Pachira aquatica flowers; the other ants carry leaves, but the long brown forms are parts of the zapoton flower, Photo by Nicholas Hellmuth, high-res digital camera.

We used a 21 megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III camera, 100mm macro lens, two different kinds of macro flash to record the zompopos. Recently the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis had an exhibit of about 20 of our high-res digital photographs of these ants.

Please return later this year and we will reveal what we found during months of field work over four years.