Staying calm by picturing serene landscapes such as this. I’ll be back there in just 2 weeks.
Tag Archives: Costa Rica
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.
Black-crowned Night-herons
Kind of dark, but still cool.
Boa constrictor
A juvenile boa caught at Palo Verde that I would have loved to take home…
A resting demslyfly
Streak-backed oriole
Flying fly
I can’t remember whether I’ve posted this before…. I searched but didn’t find it, so I assume it hasn’t been posted yet. I wonder though, if someone can name the family, because I haven’t a clue.
Erotylidae
A monster Erotylid beetle lumbers about.
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
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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.