Hello! Sorry for the lack of posting. Last week I was on Passover break and as soon as I was back on campus, I've been out on the Biodiversity of Sand Dunes field trip. The class has only met once a week for an hour up to this point, and now we've been waking up at 4:30 am to get out to the dunes and collect all the creatures from our traps. The goal of the trip is to assess the biodiversity of the animals living on the Samar dunes. Yesterday was particularly successful for my group - in our traps we caught two baby gerbils, one scorpion, one solifuge, some beetles, some spiders, some ants, and a lizard! And another group caught a skink - I would have never expected all this life in the dunes, which look so sparse and empty. You just have to know where and how to look :)
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| Pitfall trap star - at each corner and in the center, there is a bucket dug into the sand. Creatures run into the fences, then walk along them until they fall into the buckets at the ends - simple yet highly effective. |
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| Unhappy lizard |
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| Two solifuges on either side of a scorpion |
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| Skink after it detached part of its tail (defense mechanism) - pretty ridiculous when that happened |
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| One of the gerbils snacking on Bamba (popular Israeli peanut butter snack) |
Stay tuned for more posts on my travels in the past month.
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