Tag Archives: Las Cruces
Stick insect
Phasmatodea
Spot the katydid
Tettigoniidae
Belastomatid laying eggs
I discovered a female belatomatidae waterbug laying her eggs on the father’s abdomen in Río Java, but the flashes from my camera scare her off before a got a nice photograph. You can make out their abdomens touching and the partial clutch on the male.
B
Piper trichomes
Some more small snails
Long-whiskered catfish and Pencil catfish
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.
Onycophora!
I’ve heard that onycophorans (Velvet worms) occur at Las Cruces, but I’ve never seen one. These organisms are likely sister to Arthropods—they have an outer cuticle that they shed to grow, are segmented, and many appendages with varying specialization… but their appendages aren’t articulated. They’re predators, shooting slime at prey and gnawing on them with a bizarre, circular mouth. Oddly, they also look cuddly—they’re like teddy bears with 50 legs!
This makes a new PHYLUM of animals for me. The specimen was found in a litter grab by Cristian and his students.
Voracious click beetle larvae
These elateridae larvae roam moss-covered boulders and banks of the streams in Las Cruces, mandibles wide-open and hunting prey. Not pictured, because I don’t have an appropriate camera with shutter control, is their glow. If you’re in the stream at night and turn off your headlamp, you’ll soon notice small green “stars” lining the banks—hundreds of them. These guys are bioluminescent!
Roosting flies
These flies were sleeping on leaves above Río Java one evening and were cooperative in photographing. I don’t know fly families… so I suppose I’ll just write “Diptera”.
