Can you spot the peacock flounder in this image?
Image via Wikipedia
See more animal camouflage here on The Conservation Report.
CAN YOU SEE ME? | ANIMAL CAMOUFLAGE
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Category Archives: Biodiversity
CAN YOU SEE ME? | ANIMAL CAMOUFLAGE
This grasshopper blends into the leaf litter almost perfectly.
Image via Benjamint444 on Wikipedia
See more animal camouflage here on The Conservation Report.
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ANCIENT TREES: Giant Floridian cypress older than Jesus burned down by a woman smoking meth
Image of The Senator via Kyle May on Flickr
Sadly, a woman burned down a unique pond cypress known as “The Senator” while she was smoking meth. The giant tree “was the oldest pond cypress tree in the world, and was believed to be the fifth-oldest tree on the planet.” The incident should be a wake-up call for government officials who are charged with protecting some of our most valuable, unique natural landmarks.
Apparently, the behemoth was also a victim of neglect by government officials. More via the Orlando Sentinel:
Police say a 26-year-old hooked on meth lit the fire because she needed some light to see while she got high.
But there’s another culprit in this tragedy.
The crime against The Senator started decades ago, when Seminole County let Big Tree Park become a haven for drugs and prostitution while doing next to nothing to protect one of the oldest trees on the planet.
Officials with the Sheriff’s Office have long acknowledged the park’s seedy after-hours reputation.
There was no concerted effort to stop the mischief that went on there after dark. No security cameras. No lights. Cursory patrols. Only a fence around The Senator’s base, and apparently not a very good one considering what happened in January.
WEIRD & FASCINATING CREATURES: Rediscovered “tree lobster” saved from extinction by “secret hideaway”
Image of Lord Howe stick insects via Rod Morris. Ball’s Pyramid image via
The Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, is a critically-endangered species of stick insect that was endemic to Lord Howe Island. The creature’s only-known home during the 20th century was Lord Howe Island. During the 1900s, the island suffered an invasion of black rats after a shipwreck. The rats feasted on the unique stick insects until there were no more to be found on Lord Howe Island. More via NPR:
[O]ne day in 1918, a supply ship, the S.S. Makambo from Britain, ran aground at Lord Howe Island and had to be evacuated. One passenger drowned. The rest were put ashore. It took nine days to repair the Makambo, and during that time, some black rats managed to get from the ship to the island, where they instantly discovered a delicious new rat food: giant stick insects. Two years later, the rats were everywhere and the tree lobsters were gone.
Totally gone. After 1920, there wasn’t a single sighting. By 1960, the Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, was presumed extinct.
However, a tiny population of the stick insects was rediscovered on a nearby Jurassic-looking island called Ball’s Pyramid. Due to the topography of the island, it afforded only a diminutive space for the stick insects to cling on to.
Some climbers scaling Ball’s Pyramid in the 1960s said they’d seen a few stick insect corpses lying on the rocks that looked “recently dead.” But the species is nocturnal, and nobody wanted to scale the spire hunting for bugs in the dark.
. . .
[T]wo Australian scientists, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile, with two assistants, decided to take a closer look. From the water, they’d seen a few patches of vegetation that just might support walking sticks. So, they boated over. … They crawled up the vertical rock face to about 500 feet, where they found a few crickets, nothing special. But on their way down, on a precarious, unstable rock surface, they saw a single melaleuca bush peeping out of a crack and, underneath, what looked like fresh droppings of some large insect.
Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?
The only thing to do was to go back up after dark, with flashlights and cameras, to see if the pooper would be out taking a nighttime walk. Nick Carlile and a local ranger, Dean Hiscox, agreed to make the climb. And with flashlights, they scaled the wall till they reached the plant, and there, spread out on the bushy surface, were two enormous, shiny, black-looking bodies. And below those two, slithering into the muck, were more, and more … 24 in all. All gathered near this one plant.
They were alive and, to Nick Carlile’s eye, enormous. Looking at them, he said, “It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when insects ruled the world.”
They were Dryococelus australis. A search the next morning, and two years later, concluded these are the only ones on Ball’s Pyramid, the last ones. They live there, and, as best we know, nowhere else.
How they got there is a mystery. Maybe they hitchhiked on birds, or traveled with fishermen, and how they survived for so long on just a single patch of plants, nobody knows either. The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of these insects protected and into a breeding program.
You can read more at NPR about the challenges that faced conservationists in removing a handful of stick insects for a captive breeding program, the difficulties in getting these remarkable creatures to thrive and breed in captivity, and the challenges associated with reintroducing them to Lord Howe Island.
Video: Lord Howe Island Stick Insect hatching
Video: ABC news story on Lord Howe Island Stick Insect
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NEW SPECIES of diminutive chameleon discovered in Madagascar
Images: “(A) adult male on black background, showing orange tail colouration; (B) juvenile on finger tip; (C) juvenile on head of a match; (D) habitat along a small creek on western flank of Nosy Hara, where part of the type series was collected.” More on this remarkable discovery can be found at the journal PLoS ONE.
Brookesia is a genus of chameleons endemic to Madagascar. Recently, the smallest-known species of Brookesia was described — Brookesia micra — and it “reaches a maximum length of just 29mm.” It is known “only known from two sites . . . on the small island of Nosy Hara, northern Madagascar.”
The genus Brookesia contains some of the smallest-known reptiles on the planet, and they are leaf-litter specialists. Due to their diminutive size and the habitat in which they are found, these chameleons are very difficult to locate. Undoubtably, there are more species of leaf chameleons awaiting discovery, and perhaps there are even smaller Brookesia awaiting discovery. More via BBC:
The research team, led by Dr Frank Glaw from the Zoologische Staatssammlung in Munich, have a specialist knowledge of Madagascar’s dwarf chameleons having described other species in the past.
They conducted fieldwork at night during the wet season in order to find the easily overlooked animals.
“They mostly live in the leaf litter in the day… But at night they climb up and then you can spot them,” said Dr Glaw, explaining that the animals moved up into branches to sleep.
The scientists carefully scanned the most likely habitats with torches and headlamps to find roosting sites.
They found the smallest species on a remote limestone islet and believe it may represent an extreme case of island dwarfism.
This phenomenon occurs when a species becomes smaller over evolutionary time in order to adapt to a restricted habitat such as an island.
According to Dr Glaw there could have been a “two-island effect” in the case of B. micra.
“It is possible that the big island of Madagascar has produced the general group of dwarf chameleons and the very small island has produced the tiny species,” he told BBC Nature.
Continue reading this article at the BBC.
Video: Dr. Frank Glaw talks about the difficulty of finding the tiny leaf chameleons.
