The Smaller Majority

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…

Galapagos in red and blue

The very first animal that I saw upon landing in the Galapagos was also one that I found to be the most beautiful of all the organisms I encountered in the archipelago. Every rock within the splash zone of the shore was dotted with vermilion red, large crabs that moved with a slow, deliberate gait…