{"id":16949,"date":"2015-06-23T13:21:55","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T17:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=16949"},"modified":"2015-06-23T13:21:55","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T17:21:55","slug":"well-i-still-dont-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2015\/06\/well-i-still-dont-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, I still don’t know"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unidentified
After making the previous post, I went out to water the plants (yes, at 2 am, don’t judge me, I’m not judging you<\/em>) and was able to creep up on the frog in the pond with the use of the headlamp. The bright light doesn’t register as a danger to them, so even though this one was the wariest I’ve seen in a while, I could do a nice portrait – despite scuffing my foot on the first attempt and sending it hurtling into the water (the frog, not my foot, which remains resolutely attached.)<\/p>\n

The problem is, I still don’t know what species this is. In size and body shape it appears to be a green frog (Lithobates clamitans<\/em>,) but with the lack of a ridge extending back from the eye along the body, called a dorsolateral ridge, it would seem more like a bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus<\/em>) – both of these are common here, and found at the proper pond<\/a> nearby that serves as the foreground to lightning pics. It’s a small specimen, about 4 cm in body length, so it’s most likely a juvenile, and no source that I’ve found has told me whether the ridge develops later in life.<\/p>\n

You might think a nature photographer should know all of this automatically or something, and perhaps this is true for some definition of “should.” But here’s how it works for me:<\/strong> I have shot several hundred different species, from mammals to arthropods to flowers, and the distinctions of many are known mostly to specialists within a given field, such as herpetologists in this case – NC has at least 30 species of frogs and toads<\/a> alone, probably more counting subspecies. What happens fairly frequently is that I shoot something and find out later what it was – or, also frequently, that I did not capture the necessary detail that would distinguish one species from another, such as belly coloration or the stripe along a leg. But considering how many species I can<\/em> recognize on sight now, across multiple Kingdoms and Phyla, this method hasn’t been too shabby from an amateur naturalism standpoint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After making the previous post, I went out to water the plants (yes, at 2 am, don’t judge me, I’m not judging you) and was able to creep up on the frog in the pond with the use of the headlamp. The bright light doesn’t register as a danger to them, so even though this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[2913,965,2914,2907,2975],"class_list":["post-16949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-american-bullfrog","tag-green-frog","tag-lithobates-catesbeianus","tag-lithobates-clamitans","tag-shoot-first-ask-questions-later"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}