Oranje

In honour of Holland's excellent start to Euro 08, here's something orange.

This is an orange cup coral (tubastrea sp. I believe). in the day time you often see kind of reddish/orange blobs on the reef. at night they open up like this to reveal dozens of hungry polyps. Tubastrea is a truly predatory coral; in aquaria it is often direct fed with small shrimp. They tend to close when lit up with torches so photos are hard to expose but I'm reasonably happy with this clump.

More snake stuff

So I got the ID wrong yesterday. This is yesterday's snake which is actually Arrhyton exiguum, the Antillean Ground Snake.

Whereas this is Alsophis portoricensis, the Antillean racer:

As you can see both are small, slender, brown snakes with stripes down the side. They are both quite variable colourwise too. The racer seems to have a yellow chin and have various spots and things one can use for ID. As far as I can tell the easiest way to tell the two apart is that the ground snake is friendly and relaxed whereas the racers rear up like a cobra, hiss and strike at you if you get too close. They lead pretty similar lives although the racers get a little bigger and are a little more easy to find. Both are mildly venomous in a way that is not at all threatening to humans (as far as I know, think bee sting, Ok as long as you're not the unlucky person who's allergic).

They're both pretty speedy too - you can see that in a video I shot of the Ground Snake in the hand and upon release the next morning (once we were sure he was definately OK and not catmolested).
Is the video working? if not go here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deep-blue/2569350960/

Cutie

After a few weeks of striking out on some really cool herps this afternoon went some of the way to making up for it. As I went to feed the cat, I found this guy hiding out under the food bowl (our cat is afraid of most things that move, including crickets and cockroaches but even in light of this I thought the snake was pushing his luck a little too much). This is not Alsophis portoricensis (anegadae?), a snake species we've featured before photographed from range but never up close, its the cloesely related Arrhyton exiguum:

Since I'd grabbed this guy I took the opportunity to introduce him to my girlfriend who deemed him cute enough to be held.

After which he decided to accessorise the bracelet of my watch for a while.

and generally hang out amidst my fingers. Aww.

Edited 10/06/08 to correct the id - more tomorrow on the id error and this species.

It will be mine....oh yes it will be mine......

So as I'm hosting festival of the trees this month, I figured a few more garden/tree bloggers may be popping by the blog and I figured one or more of you may be able to help me. You see a few months ago in the Arnold arboretum I came across a small Magnolia sapling with these magnificent flowers on.

I must have it. I mean look at the size of them. Now typically in this situation I'd google a supplier, converse with mes parents, we'd agree on a spot in the mini-arboretum and said tree/shrub would join our little family collection (which is far to big for the space already).

Except this plant wasn't labelled and I don't have a clue which species it is (I'm thinking its probably an american one but am stuck). If it was just the flowers I could probably forget it but look at these awesome leaves. I must have it!

Anyone able to help me out?

P.S. I kinda think it might be M. macrophylla - anyone agree?
P.P.S. In addition (hopefully) to the answer to the above query a very cool post is coming soon. Watch this space.

Poolside surprise

Because the Caribbean has a number of endemics its possible to see some amazingly rare animals surprisingly easy and purely by chance. In fact a friend recently took his visiting family to an offshore island and was shown an animal by the local naturalist there who then revealed that this had doubled the number of people alive who'd seen the animal. This isn't quite in that category but these Ameiva were lounging around our Antiguan hotel's pool.

I took the opportunity of catching them cold in the morning to get some shots. There are about 35 species of Ameiva spread accross the Caribbean and they fill a kind of mini-Monitor lizard niche. When I came down to identifying this they turned out to be Ameiva griswoldii, a highly endangered endemic. I don't think anyone told the 5 lounging around the pool they were so at risk.

If they were they seemed pretty at peace with it.

Sightings

Urgh - big missed opportunity missed this week - the flamingos turned up on a different salt pond very close to the roadside and looking very photographable. Sadly by the time I returned with my camera they'd done one.

Other interesting sightings were:
a sphaero gcko running out of my luggage upon returning home - no idea which species or where it went; an excellent lesson in how geckos colonised the world; and
a red tailed hawk getting severely abused by a number of kingbirds overhead.
Things have been a little quiet of late but I'm building up to a couple of really interesting little expeditions.