A few more photographs of the second collection period. It was a cloudy, humid morning, and the colors turned out a bit differently than last time because I know nothing about white balance. Additionally, a whole subset of photo I took where more or less ruined by the humidity – condensation had formed on my lens and made the images fuzzy. I’ve included one of those images though.
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As stated previously, the juvenile Senticolis triaspis has some wildly different markings than the adult. I doubt this individual is really an adult, since it was just under 50 cm in length, but it has lost its juvenile markings. Real adults probably look more like this.
These snakes are ill-tempered, and very aggressive. While making the catch, it lunged and struck several times at me; consequently, getting a nice photograph of it curled up proved difficult. This is the best I got…
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This wetland plant took me a while to key out, since I had never seen it’s flowers. Interestingly, I keyed it out using some guess-and-check with Google Image, and the next day I found some with flowers! The first two images are from last year, and the rest are from this year. There is a distinct change in leaf morphology once the plant has established, and to tell the two species apart in this genus, you must examine the relative density and size of the hairs covering the stems.
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The only turtle I saw my entire trip was one of the last days in Palo Verde. Here, I hold a Painted Wood Turtle Rhinoclemmys pulcherrima. The family has recently changed from Emydidae to Geomydidae and the species as been split into three distinct species - only R. pulcherrima is represented in Savage, but now Costa Rica supposedly has R. annulata and R. funerea as well. I guess I’m not positive on the identification…
I went to Catalina once again to collect flies and discovered that the wetland is extremely high and has begun to flood the road. The road is more or less a dike, with a canal of flowing water to the left in this photograph, and in this case, the canal is probably close to 2 m in depth and flows over the road a bit.
Me voy a salir de Palo Verde hoy.
After finishing another transect to monitor wetland plant species, I hung my camera and took a photograph of the two of us. The vegetation was incredibly thick – in some spots, it took nearly a minute to travel 1 meter.
