Some of the bamboo in the high elevation habitat at Cerro de La Muerte.
Bamboo of Páramo habitat
Tag Archives: Costa Rica
Net-casting deinopid spider
Clean lab at Las Cruces
Baby Hemidactylus
Hemidactylus frenatus
Red Mangrove Expansion
The Red Mangrove, Rhizophora mangle, reaches the ends of its ranged near Cape Coral, Florida, as did the black mangrove. However, climate change has allowed for mangrove range expansion, likely due to a decrease in the frequency of extreme cold events per year (Cavanaugh 2013 PNAS).
Having seen Costa Rican red mangrove, and those at 4-mile Cove pictured here, the lack of cold tolerance in the trees is clear: the Costa Rican mangroves stand much taller and have a lower stem density (# of trees per area) than those in Florida, because of periodic (on the order of decades) frosts or cold events that wipe most of the trees out in Florida.
Mangrove fern
I think this is a salt-tolerant mangrove fern, Acrostichum aureum, inhabiting the understory of mangroves in southern Florida’s 4-mile Cove Ecological Preserve.
I’ve also seen this species in Costa Rica, where it lines some of the banks at the mouth of Rio Sierpe, and has colonized some wetlands in Guana Caste.
Sleeping Anoles
Jessie Knowlton, one of the mentors of NAPIRE, had a keen eye for sleeping Norops polylepis.
We’ll go with one more katydid…
Another katydid (tettigoniidae)… perhaps the last of a little while. We discovered this individual resting in this position; I wonder if it’s listening for calls?
Another tettigoniid
At least I think this is another long-horned orthopteran. There are several families in the tropics of Orthopterans that I don’t know, so it could be something entirely different. This individual has a short-horned grasshopper appearance (Acrididae), but extremely long antennae, which is a characteristic of the tettigonids (i.e., katydids). The tympana location differs between the two families too: it should be on the tibia of the fore-legs in tettigonids as seen here.
Juvenile katydid
Juvenile female leaf-mimicking katydid (Tettigoniidae). Females have the large, sword-like, ovipositor at the end of their abdomen, and adults have full wings that cover the entire body.
I also ran into this, which I took in another part of Costa Rica a few years ago.
