Saturday, May 9, 2009

grunion greeting, 2009 #1

We attended a Grunion Greeting Workshop at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. Among many informative and serious bits of information, they also showed a film clip from the 1981 horror movie Piranha II: The Spawning by James Cameron, which featured genetically modified attack fish created from grunions, piranha, and flying fish. We still laugh about this film and think we should add it to our Netflix queue.

Later that day (10:55pm-12:55am) we went out to Del Monte Beach in Monterey with a group from the workshop, including Dr. Karen Martin from Pepperdine University. She had the coolest toy - a night vision scope! A visitor from out of town compared watching grunion to watching the bulls run in Spain. I thought that was an odd comment. I hope we're not that odd.

We missed seeing the 4 scouts other people saw, because we had walked down the beach to the cement structure where we saw a night heron land briefly on the berm.

Friday, May 8, 2009

habitat ~ 05/08/09 ~ Pinnacles National Monument



Pinnacles National Monument - west entrance
May 8, 2009

smoky arches moth ~ 05/08/09 ~ Pinnacles

smoky arches moth
Drasteria fumosa
8629


It sure is pretty! Noctuidae? It makes for an awesome Rorschach test. I see a horse's head like Chauvet Cave drawings in the dark part.

ps 10/14/10 -In the neighborhood of Hodges 8640?

pss 04/06/11 - This was one of first 5 posts on Nature ID. I originally posted it as an unknown moth. Thanks to the help of Chris Grinter of the Skeptical Moth, I now have corrected the ID above with embedded links.

variable checkerspot ~ 05/08/09 ~ Pinnacles

variable checkerspot butterfly on Brewer's ragwort / Brewer's butterweed
Euphydryas chalcedona on Packera breweri

From my days of butterfly monitoring in Ohio, I always found Euphydryas sp. (Baltimores in OH) to be "friendly" and extremely cute with their brightly colored antennal clubs. They are voracious nectarers, don't seem to mind being touched or held, and will often follow you down the path.

True to its "variable" common name, this butterfly's appearance is highly variable with a top view that can range from predominantly black to predominantly orange. It doesn't help when seeing them on the wing that the underside is equally patterned and gorgeously orange. Larvae feed in Indian paintbrushes. There's a slight chance this one is Euphydryas editha, but in other pics I think I can see white spots on the abdomen. Glassberg says Edith's checkerspots are often impossible to distinguish in the field from variable checkerspots.

Brewer's ragwort and variable checkerspots were extremely abundant along the Juniper Canyon Trail. See our eastside Pinnacles visit April 16, 2009 for variable checkerspot caterpillars.