Crickets are some of the oldest and best studied singers of the animal world. Their ancestors were probably some of the first animals to break the silence of the dry land in the Permian and the Triassic (acoustic communication underwater had probably appeared long before that, albeit fossil evidence for that is scant.) The ubiquity…
Category: Macrophotography
Bengalia
The dilapidated remnants of Chironde, an old hunting camp near the town of Inhamitanga in Mozambique, don’t make for a particularly enticing location for visitors and most of the year the camp sits empty, looked after by a lone guard whose most exciting part of the day used to be cooking a pot of rice…
Gladiator spiders
In June 2006 I was in Ghana with a group of conservation biologists to gather data and arguments for the creation of a new national park around the spectacular and highly threatened Atewa Forest Reserve, a lofty goal that, alas, has still not been reached. Sweeping my insect net through the lush vegetation, I knocked down…
Mozambique Diary: Coconut crabs of Vamizi
In July 1937 Amelia Earhart’s plane vanished somewhere over the southern Pacific in the general vicinity of New Guinea. Neither the plane nor her and her co-pilot’s bodies were found during the massive search operation that followed. But two years after her disappearance scattered skeletal remains, later identified as those of a tall woman of…
Lungless and happy about it
Of all the organs in my body, the one that I would be most reluctant to part with (perhaps with the exception of my eyes) are the lungs. It seems that we need them more than anything else. True, we need all the other bits, but lungs seem particularly useful. Without them the brain stops working in…
Ghost hunting
I have been working in Africa for quite a while and during this time I have seen my share of iconic animals that epitomize the awesome continent’s fauna. There are still, of course, many that I yet need to meet in person – aardvark, “hairy” Trichobatrachus frog, Acridoxena katydid, to name a few – but luck…
The Smaller Majority 