Readers’ wildlife photographs

February 28, 2015 • 9:30 am

The tank is running low again, so if you have good photos (and by “good,” I mean photos of the quality comparable to those that regularly appear here), by all means send them to me.

Today we have two photos by a new contributor, reader Helen Iwanik, who photographed these mangrove tree crabs (Aratus pisonii) in Florida. These are aroboreal crabs that mainly eat leaf scrapings, though they will eat animal matter when they can get it:

H., mangrove tree crabs

Mangrove tree crab

And here’s a photograph from reader Diana MacPherson; unfortunately, I’ve lost the notes, but I’m hoping that either she or another reader can identify it:

Diana #2

Finally, reader Keira McKenzie sends a bee and a flower. The bee is unidentified, the flower is a coral gum blossom, Eucalyptus torquata, native to a small patch in Western Australia, cultivated elsewhere.

bees_4

26 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photographs”

  1. My notes for the bird picture are: Female Gold Finch (Spinus tristis) with Unusual White Markings Perching on Vine

    I really like those arboreal crabs! The colours in the second photo remind me of leaf hoppers!

  2. I’m gonna guess female golfinch. Can’t tell if the white on head is a reflection or just some white feathers (leucestic?)

  3. Interesting critters, mangrove tree crabs. Crustaceans have done ‘ok’ on land, but it is odd how they never diversified into terrestrial habitats as much as the insects.

      2. Yep, my first mentor wound up at Mount Desert Biological Labs doing DNA sequence work, on lobster expressed sequence tags. Typically, the closest hits they’d get were to Drosophila, since that was the phylogenetically-closest species that had been extensively documented at the DNA level.

      3. No, they’re not. Crustaceans are crustaceans, insects are insects – or, more properly, they belong to two different subphyla of the the Arthropoda, the Crustacea and the Hexapoda. Quite different.

        1. According to mult-gene nDNA analysis (doi:10.1038/nature08742), insects belong to the nested clades Pancrustacea, Altocrustacea and Miracrustacea, closer to remipedes, crabs, copepods etc. than to ostracods, mystacocaridans and branchiurans. They don’t recognise a clade Crustacea, so whether your 20th-century ‘subphylum’ concepts are completely outdated depends on whether you think that ostracods etc. (which have always been considered crustaceans) still are “crustaceans”. 🙂

  7. Great photos! Thanks.

    Wish I had got a good shot of it, but it was in the glooming, evening time, so my video didn’t come out clearly. Right by the back patio door, the local juvenile Cooper’s Hawk was plucking and scarfing down on of ‘my’ mourning doves.

    2. Mourning doves are often victims of hawks. I think they rely too heavily on staying still & not being seen when the other birds scram!

      A hawk took off with one of the little birds that hide in my weigela & I couldn’t get a picture. The hawks are so nervous here, they take off out of the tree if I just look up at them from inside my house.

  9. Love the crabs! I never knew that such a critter existed.

    In the spirit of Ms. MacPherson, I offer this seemingly plausible dialogue:

    “What’s for dinner tonight, dear?”
    “Leaf scrapings.”
    “Again?”

    (Also, typo note to PCC: change “aroboreal” to arboreal”).

  10. Those are some neat looking arboreal crabs. Strange how they eat terrestrial leaf clippings. I imagine crabs eat algae, so perhaps not that strange of a food source.

    Beautiful flower and bee photo. Looks like a European honey bee (Apis mellifera).

      1. Land sharks are bad enough, but it’s the loan sharks you really need to be wary of.

        Might also be a good idea to keep a wary eye out for the lounge lizards, too. They have a tendency to turn parasitic and harbor nasty diseases.

        b&

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