Flickers on a Rainy Day

Rain makes lots of animals behave differently than they normally do. Many birds either take shelter or, like the American robin, head out to forage for drowning worms. The other day (and by other day, I mean several months ago, because I kept forgetting to post this post) during a rainstorm, I was walking with my friend Mona when we noticed a flicker stabbing repeatedly at the ground.

Here is a picture of the end result of what we were witnessing!

According to one source, the Puget Sound Backyard Birds, ants compose about 80% of a flickers diet, and foraging for this tasty insect snack is probably what the flicker was doing as it continually stabbed its beak into the ground! Even if it wasn't looking for ants, most of the flickers diet is insects. During the winter, when insects can become scarce, the flicker consumes berries and seeds. Certainly an unusual diet and foraging behavior for a woodpecker!

Below is a video uploaded by Deepa Mohan of a flicker foraging for food.  As you can see in the video, this flicker is foraging when the weather outside is not so frightful.  I assume that perhaps the flicker we saw was active while it was raining both because the insects would be scurrying around trying to find safe ground, and also probably because the ground was softer than usual.  

Like other woodpeckers, the flicker will nest in holes of trees, but will sometimes nest in the abandoned burrows of birds such as the belted kingfisher or the bank swallow, whose nests are located in holes within the earth.  Below is a picture of a pair of belted kingfishers flying into their nest:

Flickers are pretty common where I live, and they seem to be pretty common throughout the United States!  If you have any great flicker stories or pictures, make sure to send them in or comment below!

Works Cited:

Stick, Leaf, and Buffalo Insects at the San Diego Zoo

Recently, my family and I visited San Diego for my cousins wedding, and we were able to make a stop at the San Diego Zoo!  Amongst the many fascinating critters that we saw there, we got to see several incredible insects, the best of which were expert camouflagers!  First off, we have the dead leaf mantis, Deroplatys dessicata.  Similar to both the walking leaves and the ghost mantis mentioned in the last post about the greater angle-winged katydid (click HERE to check that out), the dead leaf mantis is perfectly adapted for lying in wait for its prey amongst the leaf litter of the Asian forests it calls home!  If you can't see it, the mantis is in the center of the two pictures below.

Next, we have Heteropteryx dilatata, or the jungle nymph!  The females of this species are one of the heaviest insects, reaching almost ten inches!  This one is less of a camouflager, and more of just an awesome insect!  My mother is used for scale in the zoomed out picture.

This insect is another katydid, just like Damu!  This is the giant katydid, Macrolyristes corporalis, also native to Malaysia, as well as Indonesia.  Though I am not as impressed by the giant katydids camouflage skills as I am of Damu's, it still is a pretty cool insect!

Next up is the children's stick insect, Tropidoderus childrenii!  This guy eats eucalyptus leaves down under in Australia.

If I remember correctly, the jumping stick of the genus Stiphra was in the same cage as the children's stick insect.  This one is one of those really great camouflagers: not only is it an insect camouflaged as a stick, its a stick insect camouflaging as a walking stick!  Despite this superficial resemblance, the jumping stick is actually in the same family as the grasshoppers!  They are native to Peru.

One last camouflaging insect!  Below is the New Guinea Stick Insect, Eurycantha calcarata, native to Papua New Guinea!  According to the zoo signs, the males make up for the fact that they are smaller than the females by having giant spikes on their legs and emitting a "foul-smelling secretion."  I'm not certain whether I have a male or a female pictured.  My mother is again used for scale in the zoomed out picture.

Got two more insects for you!  The first is actually a picture of just one insect, a jade-headed buffalo beetle, Eudicella smithi.  This beautiful African beetle eats tree sap, pollen, and rotten fruit.

Finally, for those of you who don't like ants, you might not want to look at the next picture!  Leaf cutter ants!  Millions of these suckers can fit in a single colony: now THAT would be an infestation!

All of this info was brought to you by the labels at the San Diego Zoo.

Encinitas on Dwellable

Damu the Greater Angle-Winged Katydid!

A few months ago, I looked up at the dorm room wall and there was a katydid perched there!  I captured him and put him in a container for a week!  I learned a little bit about katydids, so put your listening ears on!

Damu in his container.  "Damu" means "blood" in Swahili, and for good reason.  This little insect was a bloodthirsty demon, I tell you what.  Which is a joke because it eats leaves.  Ha.

I figured out that Damu was probably a greater angle-winged katydid (Microcentrum rhombifolium), native to the southwestern and eastern United States.  The adults are only around from between July and October, except in Florida, where the higher year round temperatures allow the species to live year round.

The greater angle-wing is pretty large as insects go (especially here in Colorado), and looks quite cool!  As you can probably tell from the picture below, the katydid has evolved to superbly mimic its surroundings: i.e., the leaves of trees!  This makes the katydid one of my Top Ten Favorite Camouflagers, one of four insects to make the cut!

Top Ten Favorite Camouflagers
By Zack Neher

1.  Octopus
2.  Walking Leaves
3.  Leafy Sea Dragon
4.  Katydid
5.  Ghost Mantis
6.  Harry Potter Under the Invisiblity Cloak
7.  Arctic Fox
8.  Walking Stick
9.  Optimus Prime
10.  Ptarmigan
11.  Leaf-Tailed Gecko


If you live in much of the United States (refer to the map below), you can probably see the greater angle-winged katydid!  Or, at least, hear it!  I know for me personally, once I knew what I was listening to, I heard them ALL the time!  Click the link to hear a sound clip of the male making its distinctive clicking sound!  (Damu made these sounds, which is why I am almost positive of him being a male).

Male Katydid Clicking Sounds

Damu is sadly no longer with us: I kept him for about a week, and decided to let him go.  He spent a lot of time making his clicking sounds (which are surprisingly loud for a critter of his size), especially at night when we were trying to sleep.  It got quite annoying, and I wanted him to be free, so I released him from his prison.  Plus he pooped WAY more than an insect of his size should.

I caught another katydid later on, this time a female.  You could tell that Damu Mbili (Damu II in Swahili) was a female because she never clicked and had an ovipositor, an organ possessed by some animals to aid in egg laying.  She died in the middle of October, right around when you would expect these katydids to pass away, though I did hear male katydids clicking away intermittently through the 27th of October.  Here are a few pictures.

Check back soon for our next post, where we look at some insects that I saw at my recent visit to the San Diego Zoo, many of which are expert camouflagers!

Works Referenced:

Adventures at the Park!

Today I went walking with Grace and her black lab puppy Kenosha!  We saw lots of cool things, and here are some pictures of some of them!

We also saw this ADORABLE and GIGANTIC dog sitting on her owners lap!!

First off, we saw some more damsel fly nymphs!  A few weeks ago when I was walking Kenosha, I saw one in a little ditch, and brought it home with me as a pet!  Here are some pictures of it then!

I talked to a local aquatic insect expert who came to talk to our Outdoor Ed class about fishing and aquatic insects named Wallace Westfeldt, and he told me that they were blue damsel nymphs!  Here are some more pictures of the blue damsel nymphs that we saw today!

And here is a picture of what these nymphs will grow in to!  They look a lot like the closely related dragonflys, but they aren't quite!

A dead crayfish in the same pond!

We also saw this hawk or falcon, I'm not quite sure which, land right in front of us on a fence!  [MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE:  Hello, this is Zack Neher speaking to you from 12/21/2014.  As you will one day learn from Anne Price, the Curator of Raptors at the Raptor Education Foundation in Colorado, this is an adult female Cooper's hawk.  Thank you for your patience.]

Here's a few pictures of a blue jay!

We also saw this random bird that was flitting around in groups of about thirty or so!  Neither Grace or I knew what kind of bird it was, so we took a picture and sent it to my dad, but without even looking at the picture he knew that it was a nighthawk when I called him just by telling him that it looked kind of like a swallow and that it was in a large group eating insects in the air!  

Here's a close up picture of a nighthawk!

Finally, here is a picture of another cute dog that we saw!

The Bazinga Bee: In Honor of the Big Bang Theory

Recently on The Natural World, we've been doing our fair share of yakking about bees: FIRST, we talked about the house in Utah with the ENORMOUS beehive in it! THEN, just a few days ago, we talked about Bumblebee! (Granted, Bumblebee is a giant silicon-based alien lifeform from outerspace, but.....it still counts).  Today, I'm going to introduce you to a brand new bee: Bazinga!!

For those of you who enjoy the Big Bang Theory, you might think that I just pulled a joke: after all, the star of the show, Sheldon Cooper, always utters that catchphrase following one of his "classic pranks!"  However, this is no joke: in honor of the hilarious show, a bunch of Brazilian brainiacs have betrothed this bee with the brand Bazinga!!

With a full scientific name of Euglossa bazinga, the Bazinga bee is one of many creatures over the years whose scientific name references or honors someone or something. (We actually did a post on some of my favorites awhile back, and HERE is a link to that post.)  Not only does the name give honor, it also helps to draw attention to the animal. According to Dr. André Nemésio, “Many orchid-bee species inhabit forested areas that may soon vanish and, as a consequence, it is possible that the bees might disappear, too,” Nemésio said.

Dr. Nemésio went on to say that, “For many areas and many species, only a strong action from the society can reverse the extinction process. So, I think it is also a valid way to make people know about these wonderful creatures and the situation concerning their conservation status.”

The executive producer of the show, Steve Molaro, stated in a press release that “We are always extremely flattered when the science community embraces our show. Sheldon would be honored to know that Euglossa bazinga was inspired by him. In fact, after ‘Mothra’ and griffins, bees are his third-favorite flying creatures.”

Museum Spotlight: California Academy of Sciences

Another really cool museum that my family and I visited in California was the California Academy of Sciences.  They had lots of really cool exhibits!  My favorite was a prehistoric mammals exhibit, but unfortunately, pictures weren't allowed inside, so therefore I don't have any pictures!  We also didn't get to visit the whole museum, but the parts that we did we all really enjoyed!  But I did get a few pictures of some of the other really cool things, so here they are!  A brief overview of the California Academy of Sciences!  Enjoy!  First, we are going to look at what they call "The Living Roof," which is a cutting edge....garden.  However, although it does sound a bit unexciting, it was actually pretty cool, as the cutting edge garden was on the roof!  (Hence the name "The Living Roof," in case you missed that part.)  It actually always reminds me of the Shire from Lord of the Rings!

Although I didn't get any pictures of any prehistoric mammals, I did get a picture of another prehistoric animal!  Does anybody know what it is?

One particular exhibit was called "Rainforests of the World," which, as you can imagine, focuses on the worlds rainforests.  It was really cool, and it was all inside of this enormous dome thing!  But yeah here are some pictures from inside of the dome!

 

 

Finally, the last thing that we saw that I thought was really cool was this: an albino alligator!  Definitely don't see those every day!

Sausalito on Dwellable

The Archosaurs: A Brief Summary of Reptilian Evolution

320 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period, the flora and fauna looked quite different than it does today.  Oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher, allowing insects to grow to enormous sizes.  Centipedes were the size of snowboards; dragonflies were the size of hawks; and spiders were the size of dinner plates.  There were also no mammals.  Not only that, but there were no reptiles, no dinosaurs, and no birds (which, of course, are dinosaurs).  There were, however, amphibians.  Amphibians, like frogs and salamanders, cannot lay their eggs on dry land, and instead must lay them in pools of water.  This is because the eggs that they lay, unlike those laid by dinosaurs, birds, reptiles, and monotremes (the two egg-laying mammals), have soft-shelled eggs, which allows water to move in and out of them.  They would simply dry up on land!

Around 320 MYA, however, something changed.  Some of these amphibians developed what is known as an "amniotic egg," the type of egg typified by the dinosaurs, birds, reptiles and monotremes.

Around 5 million years after that, around 315 MYA, another major split occurred, this time between the amniotes.  This split resulted in two lineages, the first of which, the synapsids, would one day become the mammals.  The second of these two lineages was the sauropsids.   Within the sauropsids was the group known as the archosaurs.  The archosaurs, in turn, suffered two major splits.  The first split was the crocodiles, alligators and their kin.  They joined with the rest of the reptiles contained within the sauropsids.  The second large split within the archosaurs was another large group, off of which the pterosaurs broke off, before the rest of the group became dinosaurs (and, in turn, birds).  If you look at the family tree below, you can see that the group known collectively as the "reptiles" is what is referred to as a "paraphyletic group."  Put simply, that means that a paraphyletic group consists of "all the descendants of the last common ancestor of the group's members minus a small number of monophyletic groups of descendants, typically just one or two such groups." So for reptiles, that means that the group consists of the last common ancestor of all reptiles (which includes both extant reptiles and the extinct mammal-like reptiles, the precursors of the mammals), including all of the descendants of that ancestor....EXCEPT for the mammals and the birds, which are defined separately.  I feel like I have confused you enough, so I am not even going to get into the whole dinosaur debate.