Here, you
will find, and I hope you will enjoy as much as I do, some
of the wonderful plants and bugs of Cuernavaca and environs.
These are things I found in the garden of the house or during
the occasional hike in Tepoztlan. Most of these photos
were taken with a Canon Powershot S10 Digital camera. However,
in February of 2001 I finally got my own camera, a Kodak DC
215, digital. It's not quite what the Canon was but
it's not bad for most shots. You be the judge.
This prehistoric looking this is, I think,
an immature Vinagrillo or Whip Scorpion. A relative of the
scorpion, when fully grown it's about 4 inches long and has
a long tail with which it can spray concentrated vinegar (hence
the name). The front pair of arms grow much bigger in proportion
to the body as well. I wonder if they are blind because of
the way this fellow was gently waving his antennae around.
The antennae are double jointed at the outer three joints
(five joints in total).
A tragic casualty, I found this dead
lizard in the bathroom after the cat had had her fun.
That cat drags in the weirdest things.
There I was, working quietly on the computer when I heard
a flapping sound behind me. I looked down the hall towards
the kitchen and saw the cat playing with something.
I thought it was another butterfly (see below) but when I
got closer it turned out to be a BAT! Just then, it
got away from the cat and landed on the floor behind me and
I swear, it had a wingspan of 12-14 inches. Well, at
least it looked that way in the heat of the moment. A split
second later it leaped in the air and started doing laps around
the living room and landed (?) upside down on a ceiling beam.
It posed calmly while I took this shot. I opened the door,
approached it with the broom and it took off again, did a
couple more laps, slipped out the door and was gone into the
night.
Okay, one night it's a bat, then about
two weeks later, it's a snake! Maybe it wasn't as exciting
as the bat but it was just as cool. We were in the kitchen
cooking spaghetti and all of a sudden there's this snake wriggling
for all he's worth across the floor. It's a polished
marble floor so he wasn't making very good time. I put
him in jar till we finished dinner (let him cool his heels,
as it were). Then after dinner he politely crawled across
this ruler.
I don't care what anybody says, this
does not look like a bug. If I were a bird I never think
of eating it. This thing had a wing span of about 15mm.
The behemoth weighed about a kilogram!
(Just kidding, but he was pretty chubby) He came zooming
in like a 767, bounced off my computer screen, scared the
b'jesus out of me and landed on the answering machine.
Yes, a dragonfly, I just liked the color
of his tail.
My faithful assistant, Saul found this
centipede in the swimming pool, drowned. I guess they
can't swim very well. You'd think that with all those
legs...
An armour plated beetle scrambling over
a pencil. Nothing fazed him!
This is a vicious miniature attack spider.
I approached him with a pencil and he turned and leapt on
it! He was only about 4mm long but he could jump 6-8
inches, easy!
This was my own private garden.
On the left, a wild orchid I found in Tepoztlan. It
seems quite happy here, after having been ripped out by its
roots and strapped to a bunch of rocks and made to live above
a busy street. On the right are two species of Bromelia
(sp?). All three are symbiotic, live without soil and
without harming the host tree.
This cute little thing is a Black Widow.
Sorry I didn't include anything to give you a sense of scale,
but I was trying to be careful that she didn't make a meal
out of me. The beige colored ball in the right photo
is her egg sac, it's about the size of a pea. This photo
shows her sunning herself and caring for her kids in her natural
habitat, under a window ledge behind the house. The
left photo shows her running for her life, just before I squished
her. A dead run is about 15cm per second so she wasn't
hard to catch. Black Widows are the most dangerous little
critters around here. The venom is a nerve toxin that
can really screw you up.
The right photo shows the characteristic
red hour glass figure on her stomach, the left photo shows
a red stripped pattern on her back. I had to enhance
the markings in both photos to make them visible here.
A scorpion. It was dead so I had
not problem getting him to pose for the photo. These
guys aren't nearly as dangerous as the Black Widow.
A sting on the hand can make your arm swell up and hurt for
a couple of weeks but it's rarely lethal, except for small
children, and dinner. The venom is only dangerous when
it causes an allergic reaction. Still, I wouldn't want
to be stung. It hasn't happened yet (knock on wood).
Scorpions hunt by feeling vibrations
with their feet. When it gets windy or rains, the vibrations
all around them must make the kind of nuts, so they head indoors.
I don't know what these are called, but
it reminds me of a scarab. It's about a centimeter and
a half long and when it's flying, it makes a sound like a
chainsaw. There is a brown variety too (we called them
June Bugs, in Canada) that's really prolific just before the
rains come in June. I would find 5-10 per night in April
and May.
The guy at the top of this photo is known
locally as a Grio. Actually, it's just the shed exoskeleton
of a Grio. My faithful assistant, Saul, found about
twenty of these dried remnants one day and brought them to
me. These guys come out at dusk and make a whining,
screeching noise that can be heard a couple hundred meters
away. Because they appear and start screeching just
before the rains, the locals say they are calling for the
rain, hence the name Grio. (A shout, in Spanish, is
"grito")
I include this shot to show the incredible
range of the Canon camera. This is a little hunting
spider with a fly in its mouth. Spider and fly together
are about 4 mm long. I had the lens of the camera about
100 mm away when I took the shot, then enhanced it with Photoshop.
This is a big brown moth (butterfly?).
Real big! He's more than 6 inches across. I didn't
see many this year, only three, but last year I saw about
three each night. Notice the two black eyespots on the
wings. On other specimen they are much more pronounced.
This little monster is a baby dragonfly
(I think). He was buzzing around the house for a couple
of days before I caught him, took his picture and threw him
out.
I'm going to guess that this is some
kind of wasp, I really have no idea. Big sucker though,
it was about 5 cm long.
This is my faithful assistant Saul.
He braves the wilds of the garden to bring me specimens, carried
gently in his tee shirt.
