A monster Erotylid beetle lumbers about.
Tag Archives: Animals
Unknown Leptodactylid
My herp count did not include amphibians or reptiles that I wasn’t completely certain on their identification (or at least, fairly certain), like this Leptodactylid (rain frog). It’s certainly a different species from those that were included in the count, but I can’t provide a definite identification, and therefore I cannot enter it in my herp database.
The perch this frog is using in a small leaf’s petiole, just to give some scale.
Campus sloth
 |
 |
I didn’t shoot the greatest photographs, but I wanted to share some photos of a sloth on the Universidad de Costa Rica-San Pedro campus. In the bosquito (small forest) surrounding a stream that runs though the center of the campus, there is a large diversity of wildlife, including sloths, momots, and various parrots. It was incredible to see these kinds of animals, living wild, on a college campus in the center of a dense city.
This sloth had ventured away from the bosquito to feed on a tree outside the biology department. As I was studying an aquatic invertebrate collection in a lab, I noticed a group of people looking up into the tree outside the windows. I eventually ventured out to see and discovered this sloth, but it was a bit to late in the day and dark to get decent photographs with my relatively slow (high f-stop) telephoto lens.
No leaves
No artificial leaves ever made it to the end of our 30-m release, where the seine was set for their capture. This is an interesting find, since litter biomass is relatively low in the stream itself; where is it going? Are tadpoles, which do appear to be abundant, processing litter?
Two-headed, aposematic caterpillar
There’s all kinds of potential predation-defense mechanisms going on here.
Yet another
Another unknown fly found in the wet, pre-montane forests of the Alberto Brenes Biological Reserve.
Desmognathus fuscus
Now I have to begin the Ohio herp photographs.
 |
 |
Desmognathus eggs
These eggs were discovered with the mother Mountain Dusky Salamander watching over them. You can see the larva wrapped around their yolks.
Plethodon glutinosus
During the last Vertebrate Zoology field trip, we encountered Plethodon glutinosus. Unfortunately, its tail partly fell off during capture. A beautiful catch though!
 |
 |
Another fly!
This was the desktop background of my lab computer for well over year, so folks have probably seen it. It looked much better on my 19” LCD screen than it did on that computer, so I’d figure I’d post it.
It turns out though, that’s it’s another fly, which I always assumed was a Tipulidae. I’m not sure if they have painted wings though, and it’s much more fun to post it here than look it up on Wikipedia.