Again, while photographing plants for a personal identification guide, I noticed there is much more going on in the photograph than plant identification.
I wonder what these flies are doing on this Echinodorus paniculatus flower. There is a pair for each petal; are they a breeding pair? If so, will they lay eggs and form a gull or otherwise use the Echinodorus has habitat/food? Are they simply attracted to the white?
By the way, the crocodile we captured was not docile.
A feeding ctenosaur.
In one day, I was able to observe a pair of mating parrot snakes and a parrot snake preying on Lithobates (Rana) forreri. As a disclaimer, the frog was tossed toward the snake out of curiosity by another student here, Paul, so it wasn’t a ‘real’ predation event. Mahmood, however, suggested that this species of snake hunts for frogs, such as L. forreri, in the leaf litter during the day, while the frogs are inactive.
 |
 |
After completing a fence to keep out the damn cows, Boa and I discovered that a 2-m crocodile had come to investigate. The water is still very shallow, so it didn’t make an attempt to get away… that is, until we decided to strap a rope around it’s jaw and wrangle it to the shore.
Charles is shown stringing the crocodile’s jaw and Paul is the other individual celebrating the catch.
What could be controlling the patchiness of tadpole density in the wetland? There are areas, such as those pictured below, where tadpole congregate in large numbers and appear to move about as a school. In a couple of cases, I notice one or two dead tadpoles being cannibalized in the mass, but here there was no obvious food source that had attracted them. In the surrounding area (maybe within a 5 m radius), there were very few tadpoles; 2-3 per sqaure meter.
On a related note, how can I measure tadpole density?
Finally, some decent images of the Central American Coral Snake!
|
|
|
The bronze-backed climbing skink is in a pretty cool sounding genus: Mabuya. Incidently, it appears to be one of the only genera that has remained stable since Savage’s 2002 Herps of CR book. Many other genera have changed since and are published in Savage and Bolanos 2009 Zootaxa.
There seem to be too many plants and animals for me to memorize and learn. I lack knowledge of entire groups of organisms – from what they are, to their ecological roles. I won’t even mention organisms in Domains, such as Eubacteria (although I just mentioned it…), but insects and plants are phenomenally diverse, even in Ohio, and I am overwhelmed with it… I need more time – well, that, and a bit of patience to actually look at the insects and plants. Little by little, I’m getting it, but in the mean time, I watch butterflies mate.
 |
 |
 |
 |
95 degrees is both hot for me and hot for this tiger-heron. The heron sat, perched and panting on a log for several minutes, seemingly too hot to fly off.
