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Rhinoceros!
I heard a few of the BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects series on WNYC and later I gobbled up the book. One of the episodes concerned Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 print of an Indian rhinoceros. In the episode, I learned that the rhino, Rhinoceros unicornis, a gift to Portugal’s king, had stopped…
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Of course you realize this means war
Half a dozen mosquito bites over the weekend.
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Moth Bible
I picked up the new Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by Beadle and Leckie as soon as it came out earlier this year. I’d been anticipating it because I’ve been following Seabrooke Leckie’s blog for several years now. In fact, I was inspired to blog myself by her example. Moths, which…
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Snug as a snail in a snail
I like the idea of one gastropod hanging out in the shell of another. You’ve seen this before: the Queen Conch shells I lugged home — not from the Caribbean, but from Dead Horse Bay’s eroding landfill — provide an excellent shelter for terrestrial snails. Cepaea nemoralis, the Brown-lipped snail. A new squatter, as an…
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The Volcano
Remember my “bad acid trip” of nearly a year ago? I dropped an egg in some vinegar to show how acid breaks down calcium carbonate. Something like this is happening right now as some of the excess carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere gets absorbed by the ocean and acidifies the water. This…
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Bait?
A Great Black-backed Gull scavenges a Horseshoe crab. This is the last full moon of the Horseshoe spawning season. Gravid females can lay tens of thousands of eggs during the season, making successive trips to shallowly bury their eggs at the high tide line. Very few of those eggs become adults. I’ve seen one estimate…
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Skates
Sun-dried, the remains of a skate repose on that great depository of all things, the beach, Jamaica Bay branch. This may be the Little or Common Skate, Leucoraja erinacea. Cartilaginous like their relatives the sharks, skates reproduce by laying eggs, unlike their near look-a-likes the rays, who bear live young. Rays also have longer, more…
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Arthropods
Hey! a) I got close enough to this slender inch-long damselfly to capture some detail, notably the broken stripes on the thorax, and hence b) I declare this to be a male Fragile Forktail (Ishnura posita). The pollen pack on this bumblebee, foraging in cluster of sumac flowers, is going to make some baby bumblebees…
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Green-Wood
Fringetree. Galls clustering on a hickory. The leaves of one of that cluster of Common Persimmon trees. A Great Egret being photogenic as always. Water Lily in the Valley Water; there were only a few blossoms yet. American Lady butterflies amid a horde of honey and bumble bees.
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7 Spotted, 13 Spotted
Pupating larva, I assume of the Seven-Spotted Lady Beetle (Coccinella septempunctata), adults of which who were all around Four Sparrow Marsh: A species introduced from Europe to eat aphids. Another commercially available aphid eater is the Convergent Lady Beetle (Hippodamia convergens), which is exported out of California:Like the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, this is also…
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Backyard and Beyond 