If we lived in an ideal world, right about now I would have been putting on my headlamp to begin stalking katydids in the luxuriantly green savannas of Gorongosa National Park. But, alas, we don’t. For reasons beyond my control I had to postpone a trip to Mozambique, although I hope to be able to…
Category: Gorongosa
Mozambique Diary: The fat coneheads of Gorongosa
A few years ago I was at the Museum of Natural History in London to examine several type specimens of African katydids. One of them was the holotype of a conehead katydid Lanista africana, a species described by the infamous 19th century entomologist Francis Walker. (Stories abound about the quality of his taxonomic work, such…
Mozambique Diary: The Cat mantis
Arriving in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique at this time of the year, when the grasslands are bone dry and green has all but disappeared from the color palette of this immense ecosystem, I did not expect to see too many insects. Sure, there will always be ants and a bunch of grasshoppers, but the…
Empusids
In about a week I should be back in Mozambique and this blog will likely get more interesting. We have an exciting project developing in Gorongosa National Park, one that is bound to generate a lot of good data and influence biodiversity science in the country for years to come. More about it soon. But…
Hanging in there
Things have been keeping me away from updating the blog, but I finally found a moment to write about one cool animal that usually shows up at this time of year in Massachusetts – the scorpionfly (Panorpa). Or at least that was the original plan. Since I had, literally, only one, rather lousy shot of this…
Night callers
At first I didn’t know what woke me up. The night was silent and nothing but a faint warble of tree crickets could be heard outside my tent. For a few of minutes I just lay there, foggily trying to figure out what disturbed my sleep but soon started to drift off. Suddenly, there it…
The Smaller Majority 