Very little photography this week, and virtually nothing new either. I have been monitoring the various turtle nests, but no activity yet, and two of them show some less-than-promising signs – we’ll see what happens, or fails to. And I made another attempt to catch the ISS passing in front of the moon, but this was a mere 5° off the horizon near sunset and the clouds thwarted me – I got a brief look at the moon through a break, but it moved past and back into the clouds only two minutes before the event. Maybe next time.
So this is all I have this week, evidence of another failure:
You remember when I found this egg? [You don’t have to – that’s why there are links here.] I set it up in a small terrarium with wet mulch and cover, but up against the glass so I could monitor it, and was keeping an eye on things. However, the temperature had to be maintained higher than we have the air conditioning set, so I moved the terrarium outside my office door, on the edge of the stairwell where it would continue to be in warm enough temperatures but I could check it frequently. Not frequently enough, alas; I was gone half the day Wednesday and found it like this in the early evening, and no sign of the emergent in the terrarium. I considered the sides to be borderline height for a newborn anole to escape, and it apparently managed it. I’ve also kept an eye out since then in case I see it in the vicinity, but no luck at this point.
I have to say that I wasn’t really expecting to catch the hatching, because it can take place in minutes and who can be watching something all day and night long, especially when they had no idea when it was laid? I carried on in case I got lucky, but I didn’t, so here we are with an empty eggshell. The ideal thing to do would be to have it on a motion-sensitive webcam or something, which I may someday attempt, but it would require stringing USB cables in odd locations. A project to ponder…
We’ll have another subject, for giggles, even though it’s hardly an accomplishment. I’ve mentioned numerous times that Walkabout Studios is a basement office half below grade, and the single outside door isn’t sealed as tight as it could be – neither are the windows. So small critters occasionally get in, usually to be escorted back out when discovered, and I’m sorry I missed this one:
This is a mole cricket, likely a northern mole cricket (Neocurtilla hexadactyla,) similar to the one found just once before. Only this one had expired in the bathroom attached to the office before I’d found it, so this is a dead specimen – easier to work with, of course, but see above about ‘accomplishment.’ Still, a motionless specimen makes it possible to see those forelegs in detail.
Mole crickets spend a lot of time burrowing, thus the forelegs, the anatomy of which often help distinguish the species. They’re quite prehistoric-looking. They’re also capable of doing a lot of damage to grasses and gardens, though I don’t think we have many here.
Being all dead and stifflike, I could prop it up for a more menacing pose, which is actually no different than any of these other pics.
They don’t have this genus in Japan, which is a shame, because a giant one would make a much worthier foe for Godzilla/Gojira than a moth. Then again, so would just about anything else.
I’ve got a couple of video clips to edit, so you may see them soon enough. I have to break this habit of posting everything on the weekends…