I found a female with attached spermatophores, but failed to take a photograph. Here’s a male… still beautiful.
Tag Archives: Arthropods
Cicada
An awesome shrimp
In Río Hitoy, there is a peculiar shrimp. It seems to inhabit cobble-dominated, high current velocity, areas of the river. I don’t know what it is or what it does, but it’s chelae are modified into large, hook-like structures.
UPDATE: I found a paper describing shrimp found in Boca Del Toro, Panama, which is pretty close to Hitoy. I had asked a friend, Bernald, which family of tropical shrimp may not have chelae (pinchers), and he suggested Atyidae. The paper describes Atyids, including Atya scabra, which is widely distributed (Aftrica to Panama) and looks similar to this species… so, we’ll call it Atya scabra…
Some large, stream-side, spiders
I don’t know much about spiders; maybe Boa can get an ID for me…
Raising scorpions
| One of Boa’s many projects is to raise field-collected Centruroides sp. and create a large terrarium at this house, where he can shine a black light on them (chemicals in scorpion exoskeletons fluoresce under UV light) and wow some tourists. He’s had two successfully reproducing females. Here’s the latest batch; all of the babies are still attached to the mother. The juveniles of the other (not pictured) have begun to explore on their own. |  |
Tarantula
Someone asked if I saw large spiders in Palo Verde the other day. Yes. I did.
The were a fair number of them emerging from burrows during one week, presumably because it was breeding time. I found 3 individuals in the lab one morning, one of which had decided to rest on the light switch.
There were two distinct species (unless they were actually different sexes); pictured here was the larger one. Paul decided to pit them together one night and the larger of the two killed and deflated the smaller.
Captured prey
A pitcher plant captures its prey.