Night around the field station and more

Most nights when I am at the FCRE, I go out hiking around looking for insects, frogs, snakes, and well, whatever I can find to see and maybe photograph.  Then, I get back to the field station where there are still more things to see.  It goes like this...

We turn on the outside lights around the field station at dark and leave them on while we are awake.  Why all this light?  Well, there is this fellow...

A fer-de-lance, locally known as a terciopelo (Bothrops asper).

See, these pit vipers are quite common on the property, and several times have been seen on the sidewalk around the field station.  Since no one wants to wear snake-proof boots all evening, we leave the lights on.  Makes sense to me.

But the lights do have an effect, in that they attract insects.  One evening I spent five minutes and photographed a few that were hanging around.

A scarab beetle of some sort.

This is a moth. Maybe someday I will have time to figure out the moths here, but that time isn't now. So the following couple of pictures need no caption.

There were lots of other little things, but I just shot these couple of moths to show the diversity in even one insect order.  Note how different each one is.  So, there are all these insects, which are of course food for other things.  The first couple nights when the lights come on it is mostly just the insects, but soon the predators figure this bit out and we start to see things like these...

This is the marine toad (Bufo marinus), which can be quite large. They do very well with the bugs on the ground.

The common house gecko (Hemidactylus sp) is always around, but they are very easy to see near the lights. I dare that little insect in front of it to even so much as twitch.

And of course, the spiders. This one has already caught dinner.

And now on to a different topic.  That would be the idea that it's rough out there.  First, I noticed that this beetle had half his head crushed in.

This beetle seemed to be getting along fairly well, given the circumstances.

This frog (Craugastor fitzingeri) has lost a lot of skin in the top of its nose, and has scars on its chin as well. But here it is out looking for insects at night.

And the worst case was this white-headed capuchin monkey (Cebus capucinus) has clearly had something bad happen. But again, it was traveling with a big group of monkeys and jumping through the trees like the rest of them.

And a cute monkey picture to end the bit about it being rough out there.

And a few random shots to wind things up for today.

First there was one bug (a true bug).

And then there were two bugs, and soon there will be more bugs.

And more millipedes.

And as more are created, more go away, as these army ants are hauling away their latest capture.

With a fine example of a damselfly for a big finish.