During the last few days I was supposed to be a member of a team of photographers and scientists, whose job was to document the biodiversity of animals and plants of the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. This event, organized and sponsored by the National Park Service and National Geographic Society, aims to bring…
Author: Piotr Naskrecki
The holotype that walked away
In the final post on the amazing fauna of the Galapagos Islands, I thought I would present another animal that somehow failed to impressed Charles Darwin when he visited the archipelago in 1835. Upon seeing the majestic, peaceful land iguanas (Conolophus), he remarked that they were “ugly animals, of a yellowish orange beneath, and of…
Focus stacking of live subjects
I first became aware of the technology known as focus stacking in 2002 or so, when a new company called Syncroscopy came to our museum at Harvard to demonstrate its new software “Auto-Montage.” It was designed to combine several shallow-focus images taken with a video camera attached to a microscope into one, seamlessly focused photo….
Galapagos: Lava lizards
As soon as you start walking on any rocky path in the Galapagos, you will almost certainly encounter an interesting member of the Galapagos herpetofauna, the lava lizard (Tropiduridae: Microlophus.) The jury is still out on the exact number of species (or monophyletic lineages) of these reptiles that inhabit the islands, but the evidence is…
Galapagos: A most unexpected find
Like virtually all geologically young, small oceanic islands and archipelagos of volcanic origin, the Galapagos should not have certain groups of organisms. Neither amphibians, for example, nor freshwater crabs are found in such places. This is because these freshwater-dependent organisms are extremely unlikely to survive an oceanic voyage needed to colonize remote islands, and even…
Galapagos: The lovely orthopterans
Considering the fact that the archipelago is situated right on the equator, the insect fauna of the Galapagos is shockingly small, with only about 1,500 recorded species. Of these a large proportion is endemic, and additional 400+ introduced species were also recorded at least once. Although I went to the Galapagos mainly to see marine…
The Smaller Majority 