Sunday, September 02, 2007

International Rock Flipping day

So today is international rock flipping day and I thought I was gonna be a bit different and take advantage of the fact that I'm the underwater camera using blogger and go flip some tidepool rocks to try and turn up a cool tropical nudi, commensal shrimp, lobster or something. But that probably won't happen (unless the post after this contradicts me, in which case it happened) as I'm busy today soooo I went out yesterday to the rainforest to turn some stuff over and see what I found. I know that was premature but it was already 2nd September in Australia by then so that counts, right? What did I find? Surprisingly little. I was really hoping for vertebrates cos frankly I generally don't have a clue what the terrestrial non-vertebrates are on this island but again no dice. The most interesting finds were instead two inverts I will restrict myself to describing in general terms as:

1) A cricket


crickit




and

2) A giant millipede (that's my finger and I'm an adult male with normal to longish fingers for scale)


giant millipede


Scientific name suggestions gratefully received! Questing through the forest gave us a good excuse to scale the islands highest peak and also gifted us three other great sightings of animals not under rocks; an Antillean Racer, a pair of beautiful Red-tailed hawks and nicest of all national bird tick #74 - a Bridled Quail Dove ambling through the forest. There was also quite a shocking surprise in the form of a number of huge Black Witch moths that had a habit of bursting out of the leaflitter at our feet and scaring the daylights out of us.

3 comments:

Susannah Anderson said...

That's an interesting cricket! The wing covers almost seem to have writing on them.

tai haku said...

Yeah these little guys are weird - very long legs and antenna - I thought he was a whip scorpion when I first turned it over.

Web Hosting Delhi said...

what a big millipede