UFO in Panama!

Many of you reading this already know that I am a bit nerdy at times....I might as well admit it to the rest of you because you will figure it soon enough. But really, I am also a fairly normal person too.

So it all started last year...the observation of one of the coolest bugs that I have ever seen. Panama has some great wildlife to observe...but I doubt that many people have visited to see the lightning bugs. Yes, lightning bugs (or fireflys to some) do exist, they are not just a Disney or Hollywood creation as my fellow PCVs from the west coast thought...poor souls who grew up deprived of lightning bug wonders.

Here on the island we have "normal" lightning bugs, a little bit smaller than those in the states and sometimes a bit more sychronized (video of sycronized lightning bugs)....but basically the same. We also have two other types of lightning bugs. My nerdy self just wiggled in excitement at the diverisity of it all.

The first one I noticed had a big bright orange light...its light was about the size of my thumbnail!!! I only got to see it flying as it tended to fly faster and higher than the "normal" lightning bugs. It also seemed to flash with a bit more frequency and when it flashed its light was frequently a sequence of flashes, not just an on and off again. I was facinated by these bigger orange lightning bugs, but they seemed too fast for me to catch, especially since they seemed to like the woods around our house more than the fields...making running after them much more difficult. So I just admired from afar waiting for the day that one would make the mistake to cross my path.

There was also a lightning bug who had the normal green/yellow color to its flash. I only knew that it was a different type at first because the strength of the flash was so strong. It strobed with the power (and sometimes the speed too) of a weak camera flash!! One night we had one of the strong flashers in our bed room, so I got out of the mosquito net to see what it looked like. It was a fairly non-descript beetle...a bit bigger (about 2x the size) than of a normal lightning bug. Pretty cool, not as common as the other two...but very powerful flash!

So just imagine my gleeful nerdyness when I looked out the "window" (fancy word for the space where we made the bamboo wall in the kitchen short to keep the view) and saw two bright green lights at the edge of the woods near the house. They looked like green LED lights. So of course I went to look thinking that it would likely be two bugs...and was very excited to find one bigger beetle with two lights.


This is what the lights looked like. He could control the brightness of the light to some extent...it could be very bright or dim...and powered up and down like it was on a dimmer switch. Very cool.

This is what he looked like under a light. Pretty non-discript in his color and markings.

This is to give you a sense of scale and size. He crawled all over my hand for a few minutes...turning his lights on and off. If touched the lights turned on very bright. I was finally tired of bothering him when he decided to fly away...and shocked the heck out of me...as he took off and flew away the underside of his abdomen light up ORANGE!! I was thrilled!!

Lucky for me, he did not fly far and I was able to chase him down and look at him again. I looked at his underside...but there was no way to tell that he had an orange light under there...it must be covered when at rest. But each time he prepared to fly the orange light would flare up on the underside. After much patience on my part and a hand over top of him to keep him from getting far I managed to get a photo of both lights. The orange light is just starting up in this photo.

It turns out, I think, that he is the same lightning bug that I have been admiring flying around our house. The one that was brighter, orange and tended to fly faster and higher than the "normal" lightning bugs. I had wanted to see one up close and never managed to catch one until now...and even then it was a suprise!

Below is a brief video of the lightning bug taken by Kevin. If you are very observant you can see the orange light start up in the moment before the beetle escapes us photographers with a flying get-away. Watch carefully...when he goes it is FAST!

In my wanderings around the web I visited the Wikipedia site on fireflies and found out that sycronization of flashing is common in some areas...

"In the United States, one of the most famous sightings of fireflies blinking in unison occurs annually near Elkmont, Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains during the first weeks of June. Congaree National Park in South Carolina is another host to this phenomenon."

Guess I know what I want to see if I can ever manage to hit Tennessee in early June!

I continue to watch the lightning bugs in facination. There are some really cool insects here to see...and to photograph. I would like to thank my faithful and patient lighting aide Kevin for his help to photograph the bugs that visit us. Some people would think I am just strange, but he just smiles and holds the flashlights steady.

Beautiful Bugs

Well, it has been a while since my last post showing some of Panama's wonderful insect population...but I haven't stopped taking photos. Kevin helps me with holding a flashlight for lighting while I take close ups of bugs at night, that is true love for you! So I hope that you enjoy them like we did. You can click on the photo to see it bigger...if you care to.

This bright white bug was very patient with his photo shoot and even chose our blue dish rack for a striking background.

This cockroach was truly about 3/4 the size of our cell phone before he lost his head. He was still moving a bit in the morning.


This blade of grass is COVERED in ticks...tiny and medium ticks. This photo gives me the crawly skin feeling. On this walk I once stopped to pick ticks off of my leg to see 8 more starting to crawl up my feet in the time it took me to take off 3. In the cool air of the morning and evening the ticks crawl to the top of a blade of grass, as in the picture in the hopes that someone will brush by and give them a ride and a meal. In the hottest part of the day they crawl down and hide from the heat. They can be the size of the inside of this o or smaller than this period.

The good news is that ticks in Panama are easier to kill than their relatives in the USA...you can do it with your fingernail. They also do not carry Lymes disease...so if you don't find them you just get an itch spot at the site of the bite...not a lingering illness.

A tiny spider on our water filter.



This was just a really big spider. Very pretty. I don't know if this type of spider qualifies as a tarantula or not...I usually think of trantulas as having stocky legs (we have the type in Panama too) but this is the biggest type of spider I have seen on the island.

At our house we have a live alongside the spiders policy...we don't kill them. The theory is that they are less likely to bite than their competition for food is to sting...see below.

A mother scorpion with her young on her back. Scorpions give birth to live young and them protect them for a little while by carring them around. The young are about 3/4 inch long tip to tail when first out. This photo was taken outside a friend's house when we were moving a pile of cement block. Mother and babies did not survive long after the photo shoot.

I have decided that compared to scorpions, (who's first line of defense is to sting and our closest medical center is 2 hours away, not that most stings are hospital worth...but some are) spiders who run away from me are not as scary. They seem to hunt the same foods, so the spiders live and scorpions die in our house.

These leaf hoppers sometimes visit at night attracted to the candleight. There is nothing to quite give you a scare like a large leaf hopper or grass hopper smacking into your chest as they arrive to the circle of candlelight where you are cooking or reading. Just to give you a sense of scale...here is the same leafhopper with my friend Kori's hand.

I have also had the good timing to see some of our local insects as they start to hatch. Below is a newly hatch beetle on a tomato leaf. The eggs that they hatched from are to the left.

Kevin says I should go back to school for a degree in entomology...but I am just having fun. Maybe when I retire. OH! Just wait...I saved the best bug for next week!!! This bug makes me wiggle with nerdiness, giggle like a geek....don't miss out on next week's blog about a UFO in Panama!!!

The island at night

We currently are lucky enough to have a lot of visitors coming down to see us. Both family and friends are visiting in the December to Febuary time frame. We plan to post about thier adventures later...and invite them to contribute thier thoughts as well.

For those of you who are not so lucky...the following video is a taste of what it is like to visit us. When you watch it you can imagine that you are sitting on our porch, just after dusk and are watching the lightning bugs and listening to the insects. If you have a good imagination you can also feel the warm light summery breeze that is common during the evening.

We took the video mostly because it is interesting (to us at least) that the lightning bugs tend to almost be synchronized at times. There are moments of blackness followed by slow undulating pulses of lightning bug flashes. It is lovely.

Hummingbird babies

Recently I had a true "Panamá" moment, my neighbor boys showed me a humming bird nest. I always thought that hummingbirds would make thier nest in private distant places. I never thought that I would see one. But here is the proof that that is not always the case. I think that if you click on the photos you can see them larger.
You can see a foot at the lower right hand corner of the above photo. That food is standing on the main path through our community. It is not a highway by any stretch of the imagination...but it does get regular traffic and this nest was really close to it.

While we were looking at them one startled us and took off and flew about 15 feet and landed on the ground. Elvis retrieved it and put it back into the nest, but I felt lucky to have seen them at all...it was clear that they were about ready to leave the nest.


The boys now have clear directions to show me any nests that they know of. Somedays I feel very lucky to be here in Panamá. Photos copyrighted to April Cropper.

Starfish are Cool

(Kevin uploaded the pictures, but this is April's story you are reading.)

Well, if you are going to be jealous of our time in Panamá, now is a good moment to do so...we just spent a week snorkeling in one of the most beautiful places in Pamaná, an area called Comarca Kuna Yala.



The word comarca signifies that the area is a semi-autonomous region of Panamá that is populated by one of the several indiginous peoples of Panama, in this case the Kuna Indians. Kuna Yala is also known as the San Blas Islands...this being the name it was given in Spanish colonial times. But the Kuna who live there prefer and use the name Kuna Yala for the region.



In many ways the Kuna are very protective (rightfully so) and controlling of what a tourist can do and where they can go and how...but it is the picture of paradise (literally some of the tropical paradise photos you have seen are from Kuna Yala.) Kuna Yala is an area of beautiful coasts, white sand, coconut trees and water so clear that I could see my toes clearly when I was in water shoulder deep. It is said to be home to some of the world´s best snorkeling...I don´t have enough experience to know if it was the world´s best...but it was fun enough to keep me swimming for hours each day for 6 days.





In our snorkeling search for colorful coral and lots of fish, we also found some white sand dollars the size of dinner plates and big starfish. We saw lots of starfish, many different kinds and colors. The above photo is of some starfish that we found in about 12 feet of water. They tend to crawl along the bottom slowly looking for food. They were numerous and easy to borrow for a photo prop. Or to just play with for about half an hour, as April did in shallow water near one island.

When you first pick up a star fish it pulls in all of its tenticles and goes all rigid in your hand. It seems as if it is not capable of moving. But if you have a bit of patience eventually the animal will start to put out its tenticles and feel around. On their underside they have a line of tenticles that run along the middle of each leg, going from the tip to the center of the star. Their mouth is located at the center where the 5 lines of tenticles meet. Each tenticle has a suction cup type tip for grabbing things, and aiding movement.


When the starfish is not holding itself stiff for protection, it is suprisingly soft and yielding to the touch...kind of like incredably thick velvet, but with armory bumps sprinked in the pattern. It is easy to see the bumps, but if you are patient and have a keen eye for observation you can also see little velvety sensors on the upper surface of the starfish that help them perceive and respond to touch stimuli.

For those who are interested enough to wait (it is a bit like watching turtles move...takes a real interest and lack of hurry), starfish are quite flexible. They are capable of folding almost in half to turn themselves over or to go over the edge of a surface (like the edge of my hand). They conform their shape to the surface that they are on and move with undulations of the hundreds of sucker tipped tenticles.

In the below video you can see the tenticals moving pretty clearly.



(Watch the starfish suckers move him along Kevin's hand)

We also saw lots of types of corals including fan corals, vase corals, brain corals and many others that I don’t know. We saw itty bitty colorful fish in all the nature video colors, and big fish with all sorts of colors too. We saw big schools of blue fish and others of yellow fish and grey fish. One fish, two fish, red fish blue fish....

We saw many schools of minnow sized fish where the school had to number in the hundreds of thousands of fish...you could be in the middle of the school and have a hard time seeing out of the school for all the fish and flashes of sun from their bodies. We also saw anemones, sea cucumbers, lobsters, conch (brought a big one back to the hotel and had it for lunch the next day), crabs, sea grass and pelicans.

One thing I don’t mind not ever seeing again was a small school of Barracuda. They were making me nervous, so I popped up to the boat where our guide was following us through an off shore reef and had the following conversation:

me- Are barracuda dangerous?


him- How big is it? (spreading his hands shoulder wide as an example)

me- (thinking...this conversation is not going the way I had hoped) This big. (spreading my hands to about 4 feet wide)

him-Oh...how many are there?

me- (thinking...I really am not being reassured at all by these questions) 4 or 5 of them.

him- Oh. (what felt to me like a long pause for thought here) They will just go away.

me- I am not seeing very many fish here.


him-They are probably hiding from the barracuda. Barracuda are brava. (brava is a word most often used with animals, and can have many context driven tones or connotations...but usually means mad or aggressive)

me-(thinking....If I see them again I think I will be ready to hide like the other fish!)

Of course, we did fine...we didn’t snorkel in that area for long. I am glad to have seen barracuda, but don’t feel a particular need to see them again. We had a great time snorkeling...can’t wait to go again.

Can you see the two starfish that are in the above photo?

On the front lines of a quiet culture war (sea turtles)

This past week I had a very turtlely week and learned of a quiet battle that is being faught every night on the dark beaches of this lovely country. Please excuse the lack of photos...a sore point as I lost some great shots with the theft of my camera from my hotel room.

I spent my week traveling to learn more about sea turtles in order to teach about them in my community of fishermen. Sea turtles are an important part of the ocean ecology, and not all that well understood because of the range of thier travels, the lenght of their life span, and the difficulty in following an aquatic animal in the world´s oceans (especially when they are too small/young to tag). All 7 species of sea turtles in the world are in danger of extintion, and about 5 of the species are known to lay eggs on the coasts of Panama. These include the Olive Ridgley, Hawksbill, Green, and Leatherback, which is the largest of the turtles who´s shell alone can reach 6 feet long.

I started the trip with a visit to San San Pond Sak...which is a wetland park located in Bocas del Toro, very close (3km away) to the Costa Rica border. It is a wildlife preserve focusing on protecting both sea turtles and manatees. While in Bocas del Toro, I got to see and hold my first baby turtle, a leatherback who emerged from his nest a day or two before his siblings....so we only got to see the one baby. Oh boy, was he cute. He had his own paparazzi of people accompanying him to the sea.

(imagine a couple of photos of a turtle baby here)

The egg laying season was finished on the Caribean side...so I went home with my friend and fellow PCV Cassie to her site in Veraguas, on the Pacific side. Together we did some work, some teaching, and went walking the beach in the middle of the night looking for turtle eggs. Sea turtles in Panama face many risks here in addition to the natural risks found in the wild, including:

• human consumtion of eggs (also collected to sell at $1 for 3 eggs for eating)


• dogs eating eggs


• removal of sand from beaches for making cement for construction


• eating turtles for thier meat


• getting accidentaly caught in gill fishing or lobster nets
  

In Cassie´s community there is a small group of people who walk the beaches to collect turtle eggs and protect them in a fenced area of sand. Your typical turtle nest has 100-120 eggs and is burried 12-20 inches deep. They are at the greatest danger from humans the 1st 24 hours after they are laid when the tracks made by the mother still are visible. Each night there were more footprints in the sand in the middle of the night than at any other time of day.

In my three nights of walking the beach I saw about 8 sets of turtle tracks who´s nests had already been robbed. One night I got up at 12:40am and walked with Cassie. We saw 4 nests that I don´t think were robbed but we did not manage to locate the nests to collect eggs. The rising tide was limiting our time...it was raising a river between us and bed. The river went from knee to belly botton hieght in the time we were out there.

While walking back to the river we encountered a turtle who had arrived while we were down the beach a ways. She was just finished laying and in the process of covering the nest up when we arrived. She was not a very large turtle...we couldn´t measure her as she was not in her egg laying state any more when we appoached. It was awsome to sit in the weak moonlight and watch her finish shuffeling and packing sand to cover and hide her nest. We then walked behind her as she went to sea.

(imagine a photo of a green turtle and me here)

After she departed we used a stick to poke the sand and figure out were the nest was...it took 4 trys to find it as she had already filled it in when we arrived. We then collected her eggs (suffering 40ish bug bites along that tender strip of back that shows when your shirt rides up as a reward for my efforts leaning over the nest). We carried them back to the protected area (including wading the now waist high river) and reburied them at the same depth in the same within the fence.

(Imagine a photo of a dirty happy bugbitten April with a while pingpong ball sized egg in her gloved hand here)

All in all, three nests were collected for protecting in my three days of walking the beach. The turtle volunteer group estimated that 15 nests were lost to poachers or dogs while I was visiting. Add those losses to the following facts and you start to see why this is an important issue for the species:

• 1 turtle hatchling in every 1000 lives long enough to reproduce. This is one egg for every 10 nests. For Leatherbacks the number is closer to 1 in 10,000.
• Turtles don´t lay eggs every year....they sometimes skip 1-2 years between laying.
• A turtle must live 9-40 years before it can reproduce...most species averaging 23-25 years before they reach sexual maturity.

Add all the above together and a turtle must survive to reproductive age and lay 10 nests over the course of years in order to beat the odds so that one of her offspring survives.

We saw and talked to a couple of people who were walking the beach to illegally collect eggs. In some cases they responded with exactly what I expected...denigal that they were out to collect eggs (as if walking the beach with a stick in hand...used to poke and feel for the nest... at 2am is normal Panamanian behavior and had nothing to do with turtles). We also got told that the eggs collected were for personal consumtion and not for sale. There are Panamanians out there who don´t have enough food and turtle eggs can be an addition to the diet...but I think that they are the exception, not the majority.

It is a quiet and secrative war being faught over turtles and thier eggs...but yet there are nightly manuvers on both sides. There are very few confrontations in the night. The local volunteers lack the authority to do anything other than talk and it is hard to do when it is your nieghbor you are addressing. The authorities lack the resouces to be out observing and enforcing with frequency. Thus, at the moment the poachers are winning and the world´s turtles are losing.

Stay tuned...this is surely not my last visit to the turtle beaches of Panama...and I am deturmined to get sea turtle pictures!

Snakes Alive!

We recently wrote about snakes and the fact that they often end up dead after any contact with people in my nieghboorhood. (Missed it? See the blog from 6-20-08 called Snakes alive? found at http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2008/06/snakes-alive-video.html)

Well, I am happy to report that since that blog posting I have witnessed at lease 3 snakes come into view of my nieghboors and live to slither away again. Most notably was a little boa that Julian caught....yes caught! He, without prompting from us touched it and showed it to others. I will say that this gave me a huge smile for many days...partly because of how brave he was. If you look at the photo above you can see that he was not taking any changes, he was holding it just behind the head and tightly. Just after the photos were taken he released it into the woods near our house.

At a different event the kids found a vine snake. I was shocked that no one ran to kill it, not even the kids. We were not even in our home nieghborhood were people have seen us not kill snakes, we were on the far side of the island. Well, we figured that this was not going to last for long so we caught it and let everyone look at it.

We tryed to convince them that it is not venomous or dangerous...yes it would bit if it could...but only because it is scared. I often say "I have a mouth too...and if you scare me enough I will bite just like any other animal!" We then released it far away from the people who were gathered around.

I often get a chuckle (or sometimes fusterated) when they tell me that snakes like the one above will eat chickens (one of the two common reasons to kill all snakes - venomous or kills chickens) ...he would have a hard time eating anything bigger than Kevin´s thumb. We are trying to help them see that different snakes have different body types and that this indicates what they might eat and how.

In another moment of small sucess the nighborhood kids brought us a young iguana the other day. He is small enought that he probably hatched in the past 4-5 months, most eggs are laid in January-March.

We used the opportunity to talk more about reptiles and why they are important. Iguanas have the fault that they are tasty, kinda like chicken (sometimes called pollo del arbol or chicken of the tree)...and thus endangered. The problem here is convincing people that every iguana matters, and no there are not enough iguanas in the world.

It is often hard to appreciate how interesting the world that is our personal nieghborhood is when we live there all the time. I bet the kids on the island would think that mudd puppies in Maryland are cool. Mudd puppies are a type of aquatic salemander. They can be 12" long and live to 20 years and never loose thier gills. When was the last time you thought about them?? It has been a long time right? Sometimes close proximaty makes it harder to value that which we have or believe that there could be a time when we might not have it.

More small wildlife photos

It has been a while since I did a bug blog...and Kevin will atest that I do love to photograph the fun and facinating bugs that we find around here. Here are some of the most recent. Yes, a photo is worth more than all the words that I could try, however I did add some words to help you see the signifigance where needed.


Kevin made us a Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches one day and was a little over generous with the jelly...and it dripped on the floor...out near the hammocks. A little while later each of the three (yes three!!) dripps had it´s own cleaning crew of leaf cutter ants working away. In the morming they were gone. Each ant is just over 1/4 inch long.

This little guy was cute and cool white and yellow coloring. You can tell how small he is in comparison to the weave of the fabric on my camera case. I had a hard time getting a serious shot of him because he kept reaching for and clinbing onto the lens.
This is a praying mantis that had cool leaf camaphage..camaphaouge?..or however that silly word is spelled. Note the finger for scale.
This is a grub that Kevin encountered when planing in our yard. For scale note that he is on the tip of our machete...which is at least 3" wide at the tip. If this were Austrailia the kids would have been telling us to eat it...first time I have been glad to not be in Austrailia.
This guy was just cool...he is the type of beetle that I was hoping to see by being in the tropics....one with a strange nose. This one is in here in honor of Kerrie Kovaleski at the Zoo cause he reminds me of a rhino. (someone please show her this photo).
This is just a butterfly that for some reason visited at night. I just wanted you to know that we have non-scary bugs too.

This one doesn´t need much help....other than to say that he is not the biggest that I have seen. These have pretty red and orange wings. They also tend to scare the sh*t out of me when they decide to be attracted to the candles at night and fly up while I am cooking.

This guy is only about a 1/2 big, but I really liked his orange and green colors...especially on my blue laundry soap bar. Some would say..."You have bugs on your soap!!!" and I just say "cool colors!! Get the camera!" Kevin is starting to promote the idea of a degree in entomology for grad school as a way of changing this interest into something useful rather than just strange.
This is not a great photo, but it is here beause one week these little orange beetles with long snouts showed up and they were everywhere...not in huge numbers...but enough to say to yourself "this is strange". Then, three weeks later, they were gone.
I see lots of cool beetles...this one is only 1/4 inch long.
Saved the best for last. This spider (who is about 2 1/2 inches long if you measure only the body...no legs) wandered across our floor one night. Tho ball under her is an eggcase. Very cool. But having her babies all in my house would not have been soo cool....so after her photo session she was escorted out.

Take care out there...and please don´t just kill bugs for no reason. No, being ugly is not a good reason.

Snakes alive? (Video)

I feel a bit like a bad luck charm for snakes...there are few snakes that see islanders and live to tell the tale.

I find that people on the island seem to have more fear than knowledge about wildlife in general and snakes in particular. They tend to kill every snake that they see and many of the animals too. Every time they kill a snake they look at its mouth and head. They are curious about the snakes but fearful of them. They assume that it is venomous even when it is clearly a boa that kills by constriction.

Recently our neighbors encountered a 7-foot boa in the vacant house nearby, chopped its head with a machete, and carried it by our house on their way to dispose of it by the shore. We asked to see it, and then we talked about why snakes don't all have to be killed. We used the opportunity to talk about what this snake eats and how often and what alternatives they have to killing it. We also talked about how to tell a venomous snake from a non-venomous snake.

Since the snake's head was only split, and the snake was clearly responsive to stimulous and still writhing 20 to 30 minutes after they'd hit it, we chopped the head off to end (our feelings for) its pain. This video was taken probably 20 to 30 minutes after that. All the motion you see is after beheading and is reflexive.

You can see from the video that it was a large snake...more than 4 inches wide at its widest point. It showed all the distinticve signs of being a boa: squarish and stout muscular body that doesn't taper much before the tail, narrow slightly bulbus head, and sets of small inward pointing teeth...no big fangs for venom. In my experience, most people do not have enough knowledge to look for these traits. Seeing the differences is the first step towards thinking about whether or not to kill a snake.

When our neighbor Elvis touches the snake in the video it is likely the first time that he has touched a moving (even if dying) snake; he touched it after seeing me do so first, before that he touched it only with a stick. It is my hope that conversations like this one will result in the future in them coming to get me to show me a live snake...maybe even a snake that could be lucky enough to survive the viewing.

Insects the size of NY

Ok, not really the size of New York, but impressive...almost worthy of a Japanese film vs Godzilla. Not all of the insects are scary either. The following is a sample of the insects I have seen in Panama. I did not include scorpions because those photos were in an old post.

The beauty below is a big beetle...note Kevin´s fingers to the right.

We have seen kids with beetles (the big ones that don´t sting) tied to string and used as toys...it is fun for the kids to watch them fly in circles at the end of the string. THere are lots of beatiful beetles here of all different sizes and colors.

The below is a photo from inside our future home. I believe that the insect is a type of spider that has addapted it´s front legs in to claws (look carefully at the lower end of the body. it also has VERY (6" or so) long antenna that it swings in all directions. WHen taking this photo it touched the camera and scurried away. Scary looking but not harmful to people.

You knew that there had to be a roach photo or two...so here they are. The lovely speciment below left that looks armored is special. We have been told that he eats scorpions and other roaches. I really want to put on in a bottle with a scorpion and see what happens. I will belive it when I see it...but everyone else believes it enought to not kill it which is saying something. The other roach is your run of the mill giant roach....both of these measured around 4" long....and have been known to get bigger. Yes, we have your normal small and medium roaches too...but by comparison those are just borring.

This was easily the biggest grasshopper type insect I have EVER seen. Let me give you a sence of scale...the leaves in this photo are a coconut palm...each blade is a tad over an inch wide. I estimate that this beauty was 6" or so long.

I have seen a plethera of caterpillars. Panama has around 10,000 species of leperdoptra (butterflies and moths) so the variety of caterpillers is astounding. Some of them sting, some don´t, unfortunatly almost all are killed on site by the people who live here. The photos below show the two most amazing caterpillars I have seen here.

The green one is next to a normal pencil for scale and was easily bigger around than my thumb. Note the hairlike spikes...I be this one stings (I didn´t test that theory). The yellow one is completly covered in inch long hairs....very interesting. Over all he was 4 inches long. I didn´t test to see if he stings either, not willing to suffer too much for my readers. ;)

I mentioned that Panamanians tend to kill caterpillars on site. Sometimes they have a good reason. The butterfly below lays eggs on the maracua (passion fruit) plant at my host family house. The resulting caterpillars have eaten almost all of the leaves on the plant and stopped it from developing the fruit to maturity. In the photo below I am testing garlic, onion, soap, tabasco, and a local natural plant extract to find out in a natural repellent works on the caterpillars. Hey, I don´t wan to kill them...but I do want some passion fruit fresh off the vine!

Lastly, I got to watch a praying mantis lay her eggs. About 30 days later they hatched...about 40 of them....they were all over the frount house window. They were soo small and beautiful. Praying Manis eat other insects of all types, so they are one of my favorites. These babies were so small that when they jumped off of my hand they just floated to the ground. They were also very fast...so moving them to local plants rather than the open windows was a challenge....but the little girl in the host family helped me. To give you a sence of size...the baby mantis in this photo is sitting on my chaco sandal strap...which is only about 3/4 inch wide.