6/29/2013


 I got four new froggies last night. I'm up to to 86/120 now. I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

One of my little babies had something pretty interesting to share with me too...

See those lines on it's back?

Those are caused by one of my favorite creatures...










PARASITES!!!

They're some kind of subcutaneous nematode. I did a pretty thorough literature search and couldn't find anything specifically. I'm going to see if we have anything to anesthatize the frogs so I can try and extract them.

Pretty cool.

When I first saw them, I thought it was just some kind of skin growth.

Then I touched it with a glass rod.

And it moved!

They're like something from a horror movie. "It came from the deep...to live in your skin!" waaaaah!


Other than that it was returning lizards a frogs back to their homes in the morning and running experiments in the early afternoon.

Even on their backs these frogs are just too cute to handle.

I ended up loosing my footing when I was out in the morning returning some of my lizards from yesterday. Why is it so much fun to get stinky and dirty?

 At about 3pm it started raining... and it didn't stop for the next 16 hours!

Of course, that didn't stop us from seeing some cool animals.

Every time I feel like the day isn't going as planned, I run into rule #1...monkeys!

And of course, we all remember what type of day you'll have after seeing a monkey.

It hadn't rained in a couple of days, so we figured we'd head out to one of the drier swamps to looks for frogs.

On our way we saw this little bad boy. I have no idea what kind of scorpion this is. I was not about to mess with it though. I've come to quickly realize that pretty much everything in the jungle (choose your own adventure: wants to/can/will) hurt you.

Many jungle frogs, especially my study species the red-eyed tree frog, are 'explosive breeders'. That means that when conditions are right (like the first good rain after a dry spell), they all come out at once to breed.

The red-eyed tree frogs lay their eggs on the underside of leaves, often times before there is even water on the ground. That way, when the water accumulates and the tadpoles hatch, they fall into the water and can begin their little frog lives.

I was told not to worry about catching them.

 "When they're out, they'll be more than you can grab."

Always a skeptic, I still had my disbelief's.

After a ~2.5 mile bike ride in the rain, I was pretty wet and miserable.

 We wanted to try out a new swamp we'd heard about.

After 15 minutes of searching I was getting over it. Then we spotted our first frog of the night.

"Oh, oh, get a picture of me catching it so I can show everyone how cool it is here."

 

I was pretty excited.

Where there's one, there's normally more.

After an hour though...







We caught 21!

The only thing that kept me from grabbing more was lack of bags. We already doubled up on all the ziplocs we brought.

In hindsight, it's a good thing we only grabbed the number we did.

 I have to remember how much work I'm goign to have to do tomorrow.

Oh boy.

It might be a long one...