Tag Archives: Animals

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Long-whiskered catfish and Pencil catfish

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Two catfish are distributed throughout Las Cruces streams. The long-whiskered catfish (Rhamdia rogersi) is present in Río Java and several small streams, including Quebrada Culvert and the upstream Quebrada Culebra. The other,  the Pencil Catfish (Trichomycterus striatus), I have only caught in Río Java.

Here, minnow traps were used to collect crabs and both species of catfish were caught as by-catch.

Additionally, while we collected the pencil catfish in 2013 and subsequent years, it doesn’t look like I ever published any images—so here are a few old images of Trichomycterus.

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Stream-side spiders at Las Cruces

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Two common, stream-side spiders at Las Cruces. Trechalea extensa is large and hangs out on boulders, dangling it’s fore-legs in the water at night to potentially attract prey, such as small fish. Patricia Esquete’s student’s, Neola and now Macy, have been studying their ecology the past couple of years.

The other spider, probably a nursery web spider (Pisauridae) like this one from Palo Verde,  creates a silken tether on a branch and dangles from it, skating on the moving stream surface and likely capturing floating prey as it moves downstream.

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Common basilisk

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Macy, an REU student this summer (not pictured), discovered a large male Common Basilisk (Basiliscus basiliscus – aka Jesus Christ Lizard) under a rock while surveying for spiders. They get their name from “running” on water to escape, but this individual seemed to be too cold and wedged in hiding. I pulled it from the rock and we took some photos—only Juliet, my student, and another research mentor, Patricia, braved holding it.

 

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Short horned lizard

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We discovered a few Short Horned Lizards, Phrynosoma douglassi, on Mormon Mountian south of Flagstaff, Arizona (my best guess at the identification) while hiking around.

Many Phrynosoma are capable of squirting blood from their eyes—a defensive mechanism that deters predators, such as small dogs and cats, from killing the lizards in a substantial percentage of encounters, according to a discussion with George Middendorf I had after meeting him in a diversity workshop at Las Cruces Biological Station. George has quantitatively characterized and reviewed the gruesome squirting!

While I didn’t get a chance to observe the squirting, and I didn’t provoke the animals with that purpose, they also flatten out quite a bit when handled!