Category: mammals

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

And we have more photos. Today’s come from Jan Malik, documenting the birds of Barnegut Inlet in New Jersey. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

My previous batch from the Barnegat Inlet covered geese and ducks. It’s time for some of the other coastal birds now.

Immature Double-crested Cormorant (Nannopterum auritum). In contrast to diving ducks, these birds have no buoyancy problem and submerge easily.

Common Loon (Gavia immer). Judging by the slightly pinkish gape at the base of its bill and the fuzzy transition between black and white, this is an immature bird that stays on coastal bay waters before maturing and returning to quiet inland lakes to breed:

Another loon, this one with a mangled crustacean that I suspect is an Atlantic blue crab (Callinectes sapidus). I wonder if a diving loon preferentially picks a freshly molted crab the way we select ripe fruit:

Not a great loon picture, but we can see enough of the prey’s fins to identify the fish as an Oyster Toadfish (Opsanus tau), a species in which males provide parental care to eggs and young. The fish was big and bony, so the loon struggled a bit to swallow it. That fish would be a terrible choice for performing the Fish Slapping Dance. For the loon, it would be preferable to swallow its catch underwater, because at the surface it may be stolen by gulls, who know where a bird has dived and circle above waiting for it to reappear:

A couple of Savannah Sparrows were hopping on the rocks. I suspect that this pale bird with very little yellow in its brow is an Ipswich Sparrow, a subspecies (Passerculus sandwichensis princeps) that breeds on the sand spit of Sable Island off Nova Scotia:

Three species of shorebirds are common in winter at the Barnegat Inlet, all quite similar at first glance in size and plumage, but each occupying a different ecological niche. First, the Ruddy Turnstones (Arenaria interpres), here trying to sleep—probably using only one half of their brain to watch for predators, in unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. Their bills are short, stubby, and slightly upturned, adapted for—just as their name suggests—turning over beach debris to search for invertebrates hiding underneath:

Next, the Dunlins (Calidris alpina). They feed, roost, and migrate in large flocks. Unlike Turnstones, their bills are long, slender, and sensitive, used for probing tidal mudflats for worms and crustaceans:

Last, there are the Purple Sandpipers (Calidris maritima). Their bills are more “general purpose” than those of the other two species. Their covert feathers do show a purple sheen in the right light:

Purple Sandpipers and Dunlins are not very afraid of people on their wintering grounds; they may rest a few meters from a quiet observer. But the slightest hint of danger can trigger the whole flock to take flight in an instant—only to land nearby a moment later:

Purple Sandpipers are adapted to rocky coasts, where they feed on mussels exposed during low tides and on other invertebrates. The undersides of their feet must have a texture that allows them to walk sure‑footed on slime‑covered, slippery rocks:

 They have also evolved Silly Walks:

A distant Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina), a frequent sight in the Inlet, always seems to look at the jetty with disappointment when it notices that this prime haul‑out spot is occupied by people:

As I was about to leave, the colors of the sunset behind a distant house caught my attention, so I took a picture, thinking little of it. Only back home—rather like the character in Antonioni’s Blowup—did I realize that the picture hides a predator the sleeping shorebirds must be on guard against. To be honest, I can’t be sure this was a flesh‑and‑blood predator and not one made of polystyrene, but the impression remains:

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 9, 2026 • 8:15 am

I have a few batches now, so I’m complacent (never happy!). Today’s photos of Costa Rica come from reader Rachel Sperling.  Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

In January I took my first (of many, I hope) trip to Costa Rica. We spent about a week in Manuel Antonio, on the Pacific Ocean side. We took a couple of nature walks in and around Manuel Antonio National Park, and we saw plenty of wildlife. One of these days I’m going to treat myself to a really good camera, but these were all taken with either my mirrorless Olympus or my iPhone camera, which are light and easy to stash in a backpack. I did see a couple of sloths – both three-toed (Bradypus variegatus) and Hoffman’s two-toed (Choloepus hoffmanni), but they were high up in the trees, so I wasn’t able to get a good photo of them.  These are the photos I was able to capture:

On the drive from San Jose to Manuel Antonio, we stopped at a creek to view some American crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus):

We saw a number of Central American Squirrel monkeys (Saimiri oerstedii), which were incredibly cute:

Then there were these little beasts: the Costa Rican mafia, aka the Panamanian/Central American White-faced capuchin (Cebus imitator). According to our guide, these monkeys can be pretty vicious with animals their own size, and they’ll just riffle through your backpack if you’re not watchful. Someone had to be on guard whenever we went to the beach.

We went on a nature walk in the rainforest at night (with a guide), which gave us the opportunity to see a lot of nocturnal animals. Among them was the Red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas):

Masked tree frog/New Granada cross-banded tree frog (Smilisca phaeota) in Manuel Antonio National Park. I’m sorry I’m not better at identifying plants, to the disappointment of my botany-teacher father:

Black iguana (Ctenosaura similis), at the beach at Manuel Antonio:

We also saw a coati (Nasua narica), which Wikipedia tells me are diurnal, but it was definitely after sunset and that is definitely a coati. They’re relatives of the raccoon, and our guide told us that a mature one can hold its own against a jaguar. This one wasn’t afraid of us, anyhow:

Back at our b&b, this Black-hooded antshrike (Thamnophilus bridgesi) came to visit me as I read on the veranda a few times. I think it’s a female, though the sexual dimorphism of this species doesn’t seem terribly dramatic. I did see her building a nest:

On my last day in Costa Rica, I heard a tremendous ruckus in the trees outside my hotel in San Jose. I looked and discovered that the trees (American oil palms —Elaeis oleifera —I think) were full of Crimson-fronted parakeets (Psittacara finschi). They were LOUD and they were going to town on those trees. There were too many to count. Fortunately, they quieted down after sunset:

Manuel Antonio National Park from the water. These little islands are bird sanctuaries that tourists are not allowed to visit:

Sunset over the Pacific, near Manuel Antonio National Park:

Nauyaca Waterfalls, near Dominicalito, where we swam:

Finally, I thought you’d like these because they’re jaguar-inspired. We spent an afternoon at a village belonging to the Boruca, an indigenous tribe. They cooked us a delicious lunch, and showed us how they made dyes from local plants, and carved and painted balsa wood masks. The masks were first used to frighten the Conquistadores. Now you can buy them just about everywhere:

No readers’ wildlife today; instead, we have my own photos from 2004-2006

February 26, 2026 • 9:15 am

Sadly, the tank has run dry.  To proffer some content today, I’ve dug into my personal photo bank and will post a few miscellaneous shots with brief captions. Click to enlarge the photos

Galápagos marine iguana, Amblyrhynchus cristatus, 2010:

Same trip, baby Galápagos sea lion, Zalophus wollebaeki:

Woman collecting land snails for dinner, São Tomé, 2004:

BBQ dinner at City Market, Luling, Texas, 2004. Brisket, sausage, and the trimmings (beans, potato salad, and the mandatory white bread):

Death Valley and a rare post-rain desert bloom, 2005.  Where do the insects come from since these blooms occur only about once a decade?  (If you can ID the lepidopteran, do so.)

Usually there is only saltbush and creosote growing on the land, but in a bloom all sorts of flowers emerge from dormant seeds:

A rare Jewish cowboy, photo in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The last time I went the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it:

Mugging in the Alabama Hills, California:

Doing flies, 2005. This is what I spent most of my time doing before I retired.

Flying onto a glacier at Denali (Mt. McKinley).  They were dropping off two climbers in a four-seater bush plane, and I hitched a ride there and back. I got to sit next to the woman pilot. From Talkeetna, Alaska. The peak in the center is Denali.

After we landed on the snow-covered glacier, the pilot had to make a runway to take off from, going back and forth on the snow about ten times to pack it down:

The famous polymorphism of color and banding within the snail Cepaea nemoralis, studied intensively by evolutionary geneticists for years. Despite that work and subsequent population-genetic analysis, we still don’t understand the significance of the variation. For some reason the field was covered with snails; these were on a fencepost. Dorset, England, 2006:

The cottage where poet and author Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and grew up. Upper Brockhampton, Dorset, 2006.

When Hardy became famous and wealthy, he moved to a house he designed (also in Dorset), Max Gate, where he lived from 1885 until he died in 1928.  In the garden by the house are the burial sites of his beloved dogs and cats.  Here are two graves of his cats, Snowdove and Kitsy; I was told that they were inscribed by Hardy himself, who had worked as a stonemason when younger, but I can’t vouch for that story:

A draft manuscript of the famous novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles  in Hardy’s hand (taken at the local museum):

T. E. Lawrence‘s (1888-1935) final residence the cottage called Clouds Hill. He lived here after he gave up his fame as “Lawrence of Arabia” and served in the RAF under the pseudonym “T. E. Shaw” beginning in 1935, commuting back and forth to the airbase on his motorcycle.  The cottage was very spartan, and had no electricity. As Wikipedia notes,

In a 1934 letter to Francis Rodd, Lawrence (who had changed his surname to Shaw) described his home thus:[5]

“The cottage has two rooms, one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep time I take a great sleeping bag… and spread it on what seems the nicest floor… The cottage looks simple outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection… Yours ever, T. E. Shaw”

Lawrence had an education in the classics, and is one of my heroes as he was both a man of action and a man of learning. Here’s the inscription in Greek over the door above: οὐ φροντὶς (“why worry”), taken from Hippoclides.

Lawrence’s bathtub and shaving mirror:

Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash on May 13, 1935, soon after leaving the RAF. Heading home on his motorcycle, he didn’t see two boys on bicycles ahead of him because of a dip in the road. Swerving to avoid them at the last moment, he crashed his bike, sustained a serious head injury, and died six days later.  A study of his death by a neurosurgeon who tended the dying Lawrence eventually led to the use of helmets by motorcyclists.

The crash site is a km or two from Clouds Hill, and my friend and I scoured the road on foot looking for the crash site, now marked by a memorial (I saw no dip in the road). We finally found the stone:

Ironically, there had been a car crash at the site right before we found the memorial:

When he crashed, Lawrence was riding a Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle. Here’s a picture of him from Wikipedia riding one (clearly not the death vehicle) that he called “George V”. If you go to Clouds Hill, you’ll see several of his motorcycles in a small garage. 

Lawrence on George V, Wikimedia Commons, author unknown

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 16, 2026 • 8:15 am

Dean Graetz has come through with a set of images from the outback of Australia. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Dean has added links to two videos, one of them his.

And send in your wildlife photos! Once again, this is the last batch I have.

Australian Landscape Images

Being geo-patriots, we frequently travelled and camped in the remote Australian Outback, aka ‘The Bush’, which is about 70% of the continental area.  Our interest was landscapes – their vista, and the living and fossil lifeforms they contained.  Here is a series of landscape photos chosen by their appeal summarised as one word.

Bliss

Dusk: Site chosen on extensive plain – see horizon.  A table set for two, one-saucepan meal on gas burner, and swags (bedroll) to be positioned and occupied last.  A near cloudless sky with dry airmass promises a dome of stars all night.  Bliss!:

Beginning

It is always entrancing to witness the silent illumination and transient colours of a landscape as our world turns to the Sun.  Always, you see detail and colours that you didn’t appreciate during the previous dusk.  This is a sandy bed of a large but ephemeral creek – a great campsite.  The stark, dead (Eucalypt) trees germinated with the 1974 floods only to be killed by a wildfire some 20 years later.  Such is life:

Reboot

A ‘Spinifex’ (actually Triodia) grassland wildfire: hot and lethal, reducing all in its path to ashes.  This hummock grassland type covers about 25% of the continent.  Ignited by lightning or people, such fires are frequent.  With the first rain post-fire, the Triodia regenerates from seed and roots, faster than competing woody plants.  So, repeated fires – burning your neighbours – is a sustainable way to persist:

Success

Heavy rains in 2009 triggered a massed pelican breeding.  Thousands of birds gathered at one location, mated and successfully bred.  More details are here.  Success in this time-dependent gamble is shown by the chicks (darker heads) are now as large as the parent birds.  All life is a Game: If you win , you stay in the Game:

Bugger

A feral camel (Dromedary [Camelus dromedarius] single hump) enjoying an uncommonly lush grassland.  Imported in the mid-1800s, camels facilitated the exploration and settlement of Outback Australia.  Displaced by motorized vehicles in the1920s, instead of a bullet, they were abandoned to die out.  But they didn’t.  Then a couple of hundred camels is now a large feral population of at least 600,000 damaging pests – a significant multi-million dollar problem.  In the Southern Hemisphere, a well-intentioned action resulting in a disastrous outcome is widely known as a Bugger, made famous by this Toyota video:

Mute

A rock engraving, a graphic message from a pre-literate time, meticulously pitted on a vertical rock face.  What can be inferred from it?  In order of certainty, it was done by a male, likely over a working period of 3-5 days, at least 10,000 years ago.  In spite of much speculation, we cannot ever really know the message or the audience, a realization that sometimes evokes a puzzling tinge of sadness:

Harsh

The Pilbara region is Australia’s harshest landscape.  It is hot –(recorded 160 consecutive days of above 100°F (38°C)), and essentially water- and treeless, and rendered unfriendly by the swarm of small spiny hummocks of Spinifex (Triodia).  Yet prospectors and geologists continue to search here for mineral riches.  After we found the rocks containing a fossil stromatolite, dated at 3.4 billion years, and then thinking about Deep Time, we forgot about the current temperature and Spinifex spines:

Serenity

Why do we find a slow-flowing river so timeless, relaxing and peaceful?  In 1925, two men, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, wrote their explanation as the words of the song ‘Old Man River’.  A truly timeless contribution to our culture that you are probably silently singing right now:

Awe

This image captures a mind-stretching contrast in ages between the biological world and the geological world.  In the foreground are several species of ephemeral  plants – bright, colourful, with a life spans of months to a year or so.  In the background, the blood red rocks looking sharp edged and resistant, are dated at more than 2.5 billion years.  The smallest units of geological dating, millions of years, are beyond the reckoning of biologists, yet life was present on earth when those background rocks were being formed.  The Deep Time of Life is right up there with the Rocks:

Me

A densely painted gallery in Arnhem Land, northern Australia.  The gallery contains older figures – devil-devil figures (LHS), a python and several crocodiles (Middle) – all overpainted by numerous, modern (less than 100 years) ‘hands’.  The ‘hands’ are not stencils or imprints.  They are deliberate drawings infilled with colour.  The overall impression of the modern ‘hands’ layer is just exuberant happiness celebrating ‘Me’, ‘Look at Me’, by the many painters who contributed.  No deep cultural significance just an expression of the ‘joy of life’ in vivid colour.  The longer you scan this image, the more surely you will smile:

Renewal

It was a hurried camp selected in falling light with the best site option being a desert track in the sea of (flowering) Spinifex.  All that is forgotten now as you slowly wake in the golden light of a quiet and calm dawn, along with the smell of dew-dampened sand.  Life is good!:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 15, 2026 • 8:15 am

Ecologist Susan Harrison has stepped up to the plate with some bird photos (and a herd of mammals), ensuring that we have wildlife photos today. But this is the last batch I have; will you help us tomorrow and thereafter?

Sisan’s text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Some winter birds, and one herd of ungulates, in California and Oregon

It’s been a quiet winter for me aside from a previously WEIT-recorded trip to Belize, and so it’s taken a few months to accumulate a handful of photos that seemed at least a little bit striking – either because of the sheer beauty of the animal or because of the behavior it was displaying.

The first three photos are from an Ashland, Oregon streamside. It was especially intriguing to see a pair, or perhaps adult and offspring, of American Dippers (Cinclus mexicanus) eating very large tubular items that turned out to be nymphal October Caddisflies (Dicosmoecus gilvipes).   This insect is an key menu item for fish at a food-sparse time of year, and thus is well known to Western US anglers, but it was new to me.

American Dippers:

Near the Dippers were the showiest bird in town, the male Wood Duck (Aix sponsa), and the bird with the biggest voice despite its tiny size, the Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus).

Wood Duck:

Pacific Wren:

The next three photos were from a winter raptor-watching trip to the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon and northeastern California.  Watch closely for the non-birds 😊

Ferruginous Hawk (Buteo regalis) in front of Mt. Shasta:

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) crossing a stretch of farmland:

Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulosa) lurking beside a meadow at dusk:

The following are birds foraging in the parks and neighborhoods around Ashland.

Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum):

Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus):

Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus):

Lesser Goldfinch (Spinus psaltria):

Spotted Towhee (Pipilio maculatus):

The last three shots are from the seaside or bayside in Northern California.

Black Oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani) prying up barnacles:

American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchus):

Black Skimmers (Rhynchops niger).

Black Skimmers are most unusual birds that hunt in large flocks by dangling their huge lower mandible into the water while flying at high speed.  They mostly inhabit much warmer climes, and I was surprised to learn of this flock in the southern San Francisco Bay.   Per AllAboutBirds, they have been described as looking “unworldly… aerial beagles hot on the scent of aerial rabbits.”:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 14, 2026 • 8:30 am

These are the last photos I have, and I’ve gathered singletons in a potpourri of photos. Please send me any good wildlife photos you have—otherwise there will be a LACUNA tomorrow. Captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

From Pratyaydipta Rudra in Oklahoma.

This is a Pine Squirrel [Tamiascirus sp.], photographed in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

From Adrian:

Here’s a picture of a European Pine Marten (Martes martes) from the shores of Loch Duich, near the Isle of Skye, Scotland:

From Guy:

Taken in Lake Saint Clair Metropark in Michigan a few years back by my 12 year old son Nolan at a bird-banding station where we volunteer. I think it’s a Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata) with the image taken in the fall (so I don’t really know if it’s male or female):

From Robert Lang, whose house and studio burned to the ground during the California fires last year; both are being rebuilt:

Our gardener found this California native tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.) while clearing some fire debris at my former studio and, knowing that my wife had a pet tarantula and was helping the Eaton Canyon Nature Center in its fire recovery, he left it for us at our temporary home in a little plastic bottle. (Umm…the tarantula was in a little plastic bottle. Not our home.) After we determined that ECNC didn’t have a place for one yet, we released it locally, but I took this picture before it wandered away.
When we got home from the release, there was another plastic bottle on the porch with another tarantula inside.

A Hummingbird Moth (species unknown) from Marty Riddle:

The Hawk Moths, aka Hummingbird Moth, love the nectar in resident maintained gardens at Brooksby Village Peabody, Massachusetts:

And a cat/bird encounter from Barry Lyons:

For years now, I’ve had mourning doves  [Zenaida macroura] alight on my air conditioner. Some of them are regulars, and what interests me is that they haven’t taken the next obvious step: pecking at the window.
What I mean is that a dove arrives and then stares into my apartment, sometimes moving its head back and forth: “Are you in there? Ah, there you are!” And then I get up from my chair and go feed them.
But when will a dove start pecking at the window to alert me that he’s there? Why hasn’t it figured out that it’s something it can do? And at no cost to his safety because he can still fly away.
And look at this photo. The dove seems to understand windows. Every time a cat goes to the window (I don’t own a cat; I cat-sit) it flares its wings instead of flying off, as if to say, “Ha ha, you can’t get me. I’m out here, you idiot.”

Readers’ wildlife photos: Darwin Day edition

February 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have a Darwin-themed text-and-photo contribution by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, and on his favorite topic: pollination (and my favorite topic, speciation). Athayde’s IDs and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Parting ways

As superlatives go, it would be difficult to beat the South African Platland Baobab [Adansonia digitata]. Its 10.6-m diameter trunk was large enough to accommodate a bar inside its hollow trunk. The massive tree, now deceased, was also old – it had been on this Earth for about a millennia.

There aren’t many places where you can order a pint inside a tree like the Platland or Sunland Baobab © South African Tourism, Wikimedia Commons:

Leaving aside its connection to thirsty pilgrims, the Platland Baobab was not exceptional: other specimens belonging to the same African baobab (Adansonia digitata) species are similarly big and old. The African baobab’s size, age and the somewhat bizarre shape (the ‘upside-down tree’) inspired many legends and superstitions. Beyond the mythical, baobabs have practical uses to some rural communities in parts of Africa: fruits and leaves are rich in vitamin C, the bark can be used for making rope, and tree hollows serve as water reservoirs. Wildlife also feed on baobab’s parts, sometimes in excess: elephants eat baobab bark during the dry season, resulting in significant tree mortality when elephant numbers are high.

One African titan squaring up to another © Ferdinand Reus, Wikimedia Commons:

Like the vast majority of flowering plants, the African baobab is a hermaphrodite:  its flowers have male and female reproductive organs. And like most hermaphrodite plants, baobab flowers are self-incompatible; they can’t fertilise themselves. Therefore, pollinators have to come to their reproductive aid. That’s particularly important for African baobabs, which often grow in isolation, with an average of 2 trees/ha.

When researchers started investigating baobab reproduction in West and East Africa in the 1930s and 40s, bats were soon singled out as their likely pollinating agents. It made sense: the white, large (up to 200 mm in diameter) pendulous flowers open at night and release a musty smell, all signs of chiropterophily, or pollination by bats. But things are a bit more complex. Flowers in west and east Africa are mostly visited by the straw-coloured fruit bat Eidolon helvum (Eidolon helvum) and the smaller Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus), respectively. However in southern Africa, baobab flowers have no appeal to bats, but do attract hawk-moths. These regional differences are linked to floral features such as shape, scent and nectar volume. In west Africa, flowers are larger, have longer peduncles, longer styles and more nectar than flowers in east and southern Africa. East African flowers are smaller and sturdier, with less nectar but enough to encourage visits by the Egyptian fruit bat. Flowers in southern Africa are smaller still and produce nectar in volumes just enough for moths (Venter et al., 2025).  And while baobabs flowers from the three regions release bat-attracting sulphur compounds, southern African flowers also produce β-caryophyllene, a chemical known to lure moths (Karimi et al., 2021).

Below:  A) A straw-coloured fruit bat in west Africa feeding on a baobab flower while a hawk-moth thieves, that is, it takes nectar but does not pollinate. B): an Egyptian fruit bat in east Africa landing briefly to lick nectar. C:) a long-tongued and a short-tongued hawk-moths feeding in southern Africa © Venter et al., 2025:

The African baobab is by no means unique; many other species comprise populations of diversified floral traits that suit particular pollinators and local environmental conditions. Ecologists refer to each of these populations as pollination ecotypes, species complexes, geographical races or ecological races. Pollination ecotypes have one possible outcome of exceptional importance: given enough time, they may drift further apart in their morphological and physiological traits to the point of becoming reproductively incompatible with each other.

Examples of pollination ecotypes. Long-spurred Platanthera bifolia pollinated by the hawk-moth Sphinx ligustri (a) and a shorter-spurred form pollinated by the hawk-moth Hyloicus pinastri (b); short-tubed Gladiolus longicollis pollinated by hawk-moths with short probosces (c) and a long-tubed form pollinated by hawk-moths with long probosces (d). © Johnson, 2025:

It’s worth emphasising the meaning of such an outcome. Different forms – or morphs – in each ecotype associated with their own pollinators will eventually become different species, a process that has become widely acknowledged (Johnson, 2025). Speciation via ecotypes supports Darwin’s view that species and infraspecies taxa (varieties, subspecies, forms, morphs, etc.) represent a continuum: In short, we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species (Darwin, 1859). Such a continuum implies that speciation is much more common and frequent than one may expect (Mallet, 2008).

The roles of insect pollinators as safeguards of biodiversity, crop production and human health are well known and celebrated. But the tale of African baobab pollination ecotypes reminds us of another fundamental aspect: pollinators greatly contribute to the radiation and diversification of angiosperms, the largest and most diverse group in the plant kingdom and largely responsible for the functioning of all terrestrial ecosystems. It’s a hefty responsibility upon tiny shoulders.

Accumulated diversification of insect families through time. Dotted lines indicate the Permian–Triassic (P–T), Triassic–Jurassic (T–J), and the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinctions © Peris & Condamine, 2024:

References

Darwin, C.R. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray.
Johnson, S.D. 2025. Pollination ecotypes and the origin of plant species. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 292: 20242787.
Karimi, N. et al. 2021. Evidence for hawkmoth pollination in the chiropterophilous African baobab (Adansonia digitata). Biotropica 54: 10.1111/btp.13033.
Mallet, J. 2008. Hybridization, ecological races and the nature of species: Empirical evidence for the ease of speciation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 363: 2971-2986.
Peris, D. & Condamine, F.L. 2024. The angiosperm radiation played a dual role in the diversification of insects and insect pollinators. Nature Communications 15: 552.
Venter, S.M. et al. 2025. Regional flower visitor assemblages and divergence of floral traits of the baobab Adansonia digitata (Malvaceae) across Africa. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society boaf085.