Now that winter has truly set in here in Guelph, I figured I’d escape into the archives and share some photos I took while in Peru and Bolivia on the UofG Field Entomology course in the spring of 2007! This was really my first trip out of Canada and I certainly had a blast! We spent two weeks deep in the Amazon, literally on the border between Peru and Bolivia, in untouched tropical rainforest, with insects, birds and mammals everywhere you look and great food to come back to. Who wouldn’t want to be there!
I plan to highlight a couple of different insect groups each day this week, with some vertebrates on Thursday and an overview of where we stayed on Friday. I hope you’ll join me in escaping the wintery weather, and click on any images you want to see larger!
The leg span of this whip spider was about the size of a dinner plate!
We didn’t find many dragonflies during this trip, but this one was kind enough to pose for me.
Wherever I looked there were grasshoppers and tree crickets sitting on the foliage. This flattened species was certainly one of the most interesting.
Walking sticks were also more frequently encountered than we’re used to here in Ontario.
On night hikes, the cockroaches were the dominant insect fauna, every leaf seemed to have a different species resting upon it!
Another group rarely encountered here at home but openly abundant in the tropics, bark lice were fun to shoot!
Join me tomorrow as I showcase some of the true bugs and beetles from the Amazon!
That looks great, someday I will go to the tropics…someday
Ah, it takes me back to the glorious steamy jungles! And that whip spider kicked butt. Very nice Morg, very nice.
“spider” + “size of dinner plate” = Geek running for the hills.
That whip scorpion must have been awesome. The first time I saw one of these was in Ecuador sitting on a dead log at night while blacklighting. I thought I would try to catch it and was stunned by it’s lightning-fast escape at the first moment of approach.
It was certainly one of the more astonishing finds for the trip! It was great to find, and the group that found it also tried to catch it but it took off way too fast (added to the startle effect of a half dozen undergrads taken aback). Luckily we were able to find the same individual on the same tree a few more nights afterwards!