Category: herps

Readers’ wildlife photos (and videos):

April 12, 2018 • 8:00 am

As I’ll be traveling till the end of the month starting tomorrow, there will be a hiatus on my saved wildlife photos until I return. But if you send me a batch when I’m on the road, I might put it up then. One never knows. At any rate, we have photos AND videos from a new contributor, reader Fritz. His notes are indented:

These pictures are from my yard in the Weinviertel ~50 km from Vienna. I also have two movies. The sitting bird is an Eurasian tree sparrow whose gender can’t be determined by appearance alone whereas the attacking bird is a female house sparrow (communication from an ornithologist friend). So the witnessed behavior can most likely be explained as a case of inter species aggression resulting from competition for an attractive food resource.
The other movie lacks gender labels: “Sparrows in the morning sun”:

The pictures were unidentified, but readers might fill in the gaps:

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 17, 2018 • 8:15 am

Today we have some herp photos sent by a new contributor. Let’s have a warm welcome for—Peter Uimonen! His notes are attached:

Here are two photos I took in Big Bend National Park in the summer of 2014. The first is of a Trans-Pecos Rat Snake (Bogertophis subocularis). They are not often seen because they are nocturnal. However, I came across this one out and about on a warm summer night.

The second is of a Greater Earless Lizard (Cophosaurus texanus). They are diurnal and quite common in the lowland desert of Big Bend, particularly along the Mule Ears Spring trail (one of my favorite hikes down there). This beautiful male specimen is in an aggressive posture.

Here are two photos from the Osa Peninsula [Costa Rica]; my wife and I are going back down there in June. The first is the helmeted iguana (Corytophanes cristatus). This was a lucky shot in two ways. First, it’s a gorgeous specimen (see the yellow and blue scaling along with the green). Second, they’re cryptic and hard to spot. I was the lucky one to spot it. As I recall even our local guide was impressed.

The second is of two green and black poison dart frogs (Dendrobates auratus) along with a Golfo Dulce poison dart frog (Phyllobates vittatus) below the root buttress. All three were competing for territory along this buttress.

Snake on a wire

February 16, 2018 • 7:45 am

[JAC: In lieu of “readers’ wildlife” today, we have “Mayer’s wildlife”: His disquisition on snake locomotion. Be sure to keep those photos coming in, and don’t worry if you haven’t seen yours yet, as I have them all.]

by Greg Mayer

Matthew sends the following tweet of a tiger snake making its way along a wire fence.

At first glance, two things struck me at about this, aside from its generalized coolness. The form of locomotion is a typical one for snakes called lateral undulation, in which waves of muscular contraction alternate down the sides of the body. You can see the snake is pushing first on one side of the wire, then the other, in waves down the body. This is not unusual for snakes. And there are many arboreal snakes (vine snakes, parrot snakes, etc.) that habitually move along very narrow surfaces, such as vines and branches. The novelty here to me is the length of the narrow surface– most vine snakes frequently encounter crosswise vines and branches, so they don’t move for any great distance in a perfectly straight line along a narrow surface, as this snake is doing.

But its movements are not unprecedented. While checking into this particular mode of locomotion, I found the following in Carl Gans’ Biomechanics: An Approach to Vertebrate Biology (p. 93):

Other climbers show a fabulous ability to throw their trunk into multiple, regular, and controlled bends of very short radius. The African file snakes (Mehelya) apparently can travel along telephone wires with alternate half-loops hanging respectively over the left and right sides of the wire.

The second thing that struck me was that a tiger snake is not a vine snake of any sort– they’re terrestrial. So, climbing along wires is not where I would expect to see them. But that’s book knowledge, and perhaps Australian readers can enlighten us from experience.

On reflection, I was also struck by this being an example of what Gans called “excessive construction”– the ability of structures (and in this case also behaviors) to be successfully used in circumstances that were not part of the historical evolutionary development of the structure. Gans thought, and I agree, that such circumstances can be the basis for adaptation (i.e. heritable changes in the structure/behavior) to the new circumstances.  Again from Biomechanics (p. 14-15):

Gans provides a much more insightful view here of how functions change, and how new adaptations arise, than did Gould and Vrba in their largely unnecessary coining of the word and concept “exaptation“.

Gans, C. 1974 (1980). Biomechanics: An Approach to Vertebrate Biology. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Gans, C.  1979.  Momentarily excessive construction as the basis for protoadaptation.  Evolution 33:227-233.

Gould, S.J. and E.S. Vrba. 1982. Exaptation- a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology 8:4-15. pdf

Readers’ wildlife photos (and videos)

December 4, 2017 • 8:00 am

Reader Andree Sanborn (flickr site here, FB page here) sent a series of photos taken by her daughter.  It shows nature red in tooth and mouth, so be warned. Andree’s notes:

My 2nd daughter, Amelia Michaud, is the manager of the Frontier Animal Society in Orleans, VT. She is crazy busy and never posts her nature sightings but has given me permission to do so. While out walking dogs on August 17, 2017, she captured this drama of a Garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) eating an American toad (Anaxyrus americanus). I’m so glad she had her phone with her. These may be gruesome sights for some  — just be warned. It is something most of us will never see again. And I swear that in one video you can hear the toad vocalizing (it seems amazingly calm, if one can use that word to describe its state of mind).

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And there’s a video playlist of this event (7 short clips), which you can see here. Start with this one and they’ll play sequentially (not in the order of swallowing, though!):

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 18, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Divy F sent some photos from Puerto Rico; her notes are indented:

Hi! You posted some pics I submitted a few months ago, of the fauna my husband saw on his trip through the Indonesian isles. We recently visited our island home of Puerto Rico with a couple of friends who had never been. We are all reptile lovers, so this was a herping trip, with the great hopes of seeing the Puerto Rican Boa, in its native surroundings. Despite going to many caves, popular and unmanned, we had no luck. We did however, manage to take photos of endemic and introduced fauna species.

Alsophis portorricensis, Puerto Rican Racer. Endemic:

Anolis gundlachi. El Yunque (rainforest) Endemic:


Puerto Rican Tody (Todus mexicanus), also known by the locals as San Pedrito. El Yunque. Endemic:

Cuban Rock Iguana (Cyclura nubila). These guys live in a university research Island called Magueyes, in La Parguera, south of the island.

Ameiva. Not sure if they are endemic or introduced.  These guys are seen all over the island, and range in different colors. This couple was sunning in a park in Ponce.

Starfish. Parguera:

Green Iguana (Iguana iguana). Introduced. A plague, they are found all over the island, including common roadkill.

Sugarcane Toad (Rhinella marina). Introduced, also a plague, and are destroyed on site. This one was in a cave, where we were searching for the highly endangered Puerto Rican Boa (no such luck). We left him alone.

And their two cats:

Jango

and Boba ( the two cutest kitties in Florida!):

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 16, 2017 • 7:45 am

Reader Tom Gula sent some photos converted from Kodachrome slides (back in my own photo days, when I had three Nikon bodies, about seven lenses, and a Leitz-Minolta CL, I shot with Kodachrome 64. Now I have over 10,000 slides that are virtually useless–unless I scan them). Tom’s notes are indented:

This is a retro collection of animal and plant photos, some nearly 40 years old. All were originally shot with Kodachrome 25 slide film. I used an inexpensive slide scanner to convert them to digital images, with some obvious loss in sharpness and color. The photos were all taken in northeastern Brazil, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer from 1977 to 1980. I was stationed at the Tapacura Ecological Station (aka “the Estação Ecológica do Tapacurá”), about 50 kilometers west of the coastal city of Recife for two years, and spent a final year in the coastal city of Salvador, Bahia state. The ecological station near Recife was dedicated soon after I arrived, and I spent a memorable two years there conducting basic animal surveys, particularly identifying the birds present on the remnants of Atlantic Rain forest contained within the reserve. I brought along a Minolta SLR with a macro lens and flash attachments, and took pictures of whatever I encountered of interest, limited of course by my supply of about 40 roles of film. These days digital cameras allow you to take as many exposures as you’d like of a subject, selecting out the best of the lot. Kodachrome could not be developed anywhere in Brazil, so I would take 2 or 3 shots of an interesting find, bracketing the exposures and hoping for the best when I finally saw the developed film back in the U.S. months (or in some case years) later. I don’t have definite identification on many of the photos, especially those taken in Brazil. Perhaps some of your knowledgeable readers will be able to supply some taxonomic information. [JAC: readers can help with the IDs.]
This reptile was found on a dirt road after a several days of heavy rain, probably driven up from underground by the saturated soil conditions. I believe it’s known as a white-bellied worm lizard, a species of amphisbaenian, probably Amphisbaena alba. They’re limbless, burrowing lizards with powerful jaws. You can see the highly reduced eye. Photo taken at the Tapacura Ecological Station in 1978.
An unidentified cryptic moth, resembling a dead leaf. It even has a extension off the front of its head resembling a dried petiole. Photo taken at the Tapacura Ecological Station in 1979.
An unidentified katydid, a beautiful leaf mimic. Photo taken at the Tapacura Ecological Station in 1978.
4. An unidentified spiny caterpillar. Its spines certainly looked as if they might sting – I didn’t touch them to find out. Photo taken at the Tapacura Ecological Station in 1978.
An unidentified cryptic Orthoptera 0n on a lichen-covered tree trunk. Photo taken at the Tapacura Ecological Station in 1978.
This is probably a brown vine snake (Oxybelis aeneus), exhibiting a threat display typical of this species. Photo taken at the Tapacura Ecological Station in 1978.
  I found this unidentified stink bug (Pentatomidae) on the underside of a leaf in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (1980). The young bugs had recently emerged from their whitish egg cases, just visible under the adult. I’ve no idea if this is typical stink bug maternal (or paternal) behavior. Perhaps one of your readers will provide information.