The Research Week in Photos: Coral Snake, Glass Frogs, and Tadpoles in Trees

When out bushwacking in the forest, you have to be careful of vines, thorns, and creepy-crawlies that don't appreciate your intrusions. Here's an ant with cool mandibles that remind me of a hammerhead shark:

A handsome tarantula (gearing up for a fight with a contender a few feet away, actually!). The measurements are from my new best friend: a PVC pipe that serves multiple roles as yardstick for stream- and perch-height measurements, hiking stick, and poking-in-search-of-hidden-animals.

Here is a net-casting spider, which uses web strung between its front legs to ambush prey from above:

We crossed paths with a very graceful, shy coral snake the other day. Gorgeous! Went streaking off into the woods as soon as we noticed each other.

I had the opportunity to check out some glass frogs, too! They are so cool: transparent skin, green bones, semi-visible internal organs.

They lay their eggs on the undersides of leaves that hang over water. Once the tadpoles outgrow their eggs, they fall into the stream below. Check out these unhatched tadpoles:

This is a Norops humilis, a ground anole we catch pretty often. To get their SVL (snout-to-vent length) and some good body-proportion photos, we momentarily press them up against a plastic tray and take a few photos.

A lot of my desk work is using a program called ImageJ to calibrate the scale in this photo to measure the different body proportions of some focal species. When the study is complete, it should yield some interesting data on how the morphology of these species changes over time based on habitat and location.