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Frangipani Caterpillar, also called tetrio sphinx hornworm or rasta caterpillar. When looking at this caterpillar, what's the first thing you think about?  Probably its unusual colour, which often acts as a warning sign.  It signals DANGER, meaning that you risk possible death should you mess with it.  Sometimes colours are used as a faint, a ruse, a trick - where no danger really exists, but even the thought may prevent an attack.  That's not the case here.  The danger is real.  You can, however, pick them up.  Large ones are longer and bigger around than your middle finger ( click here for image).  Impressive. The caterpillars can grow very large, and they are voracious.  They feed on members of the dogbane family, poisonous plants that carry the same poisons as found in milkweed plants - cardiac glycosides.  These are highly poisonous to many vertebrates and may cause death or severe illness.  There is an exception to this, thou...

The Dominican ground lizard lives on the ground and forages for insects and fruit. I photographed this  Pholidoscelis fuscatus , more commonly called the Dominican ground lizard, while visiting the the island of Dominica on a cruise to the Caribbean in 2016.  These lizards are aptly named, as they spend all of their life on the ground searching through leaf litter and ground debris for sustenance.  They eat insects and some vegetable matter, being fond of fruits.  They can grow to modest sizes, having a snout-to-vent (nose to cloaca) length of 20 cm (males), slightly smaller for females.  Including their tail, they could be up to 40 cm. I found this one trudging through the bush, on the ground, surrounded by forest debris and rocks.  I couldn't get a good photo of it, as there was plenty of foreground foliage to prevent me from getting a clear photo.  If I had time, I could have patiently waited it out, but I was part of a group, and there was no desir...

Nature, when left alone, will amaze us.  Inset:  original photo. The island of Hispaniola is the second-largest island in the Caribbean.  At just over 75,000 square km, it is about 2 ½ times larger than Vancouver Island.  The Dominican Republic has the eastern two-thirds of the Island, the western third being occupied by the nation of Haiti. If you ever want to see a contrast in how politics and choice affect the land, you need to look no further than Hispaniola.  The western half is an impoverished nation with a fractured economy, largely run by criminal gangs, and whose ecology has been decimated by foraging for firewood.  Only 4% of Haiti's original forests remain, and none of them are protected.  The eastern half is a tropical paradise where almost 40% of the original forests remain.  The difference is because of foresight, planning, and education. To compare the socioeconomic status of both nations, click here .  It turns out that it isn...

Leach's Anole ( Anolis leachii ), photographed on Antigua in 2016. Also called the panther anole, Leach's anole is a common lizard native to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean.  The interesting thing about endemic island life is that the various species didn't just magically appear; they would have travelled there on some flotsam from some distant point of origin, most likely the nearest continent. We don't know when the first anoles showed up, but the chances are very good that they didn't look anything like they do today, other than that they were anoles.  Separated from the original gene pool, the now-isolated lizards would breed and lay eggs, producing new generations.  If they survived, the population would grow. Two things would happen over the millennia that would produce the new species of anole.  Natural selection, where the environment would weed out less well-adapted individuals, and random mutation, where existing genes would experience small changes...

Antillean crested hummingbird, male.  Photographed in 2016 on Antigua. I wonder, is the raised crest and pointy beak an attempt by this fellow to blend in with his surroundings?  Probably not, but it's a funny thought. The Antillean crested hummingbird is one of three hummingbird species on Antigua, one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean (the archipelago is called the Lesser Antilles).  Like the green-throated carib (yesterday's blog, found here ), it is endemic to the Lesser Antilles.  The third species, which I have never seen, is the purple-throated carib. The female (click here for image) looks stunningly different from the male and reminds me of the Anna's hummingbird females I used to see on BC's coast. This photo was taken in 2016 when my wife and I took a cruise of the Caribbean.  We didn't see a ton of birds, but I did manage to get half a dozen good photos on the island of Antigua.  I was using my D500 camera and my 80-400 mm S-series Nikon l...

Male green-throated Carib hummingbird, photographed in 2016, on the island of Antigua. Islands are hard for organisms to colonize without help from humans.  Hawaii, for example, only had two endemic mammals on it before humans showed up, a bat and a seal.  Birds are much more common on islands since they can fly.  Hawaii and the Galapagos have many endemic bird species, although humans have caused the extinction of over half of them on the Hawaiian Islands.  The creatures on these remote islands rarely exist elsewhere. The Caribbean Islands are much closer to continents, and so there is a greater number of bird species.  Even so, these islands typically have their own native bird populations.  In the case of Antigua, there are three species of hummingbird that are present.  I have photographed two of them.  I will do a blog on the Antilles crested hummingbird tomorrow.  The one above, the green-throated carib hummingbird, can be found on many...