Golden Carpenter ants from my last trip to Costa Rica. They are huge, about 1.5cm. They build nests in wood. Unlike termites, they don’t eat the wood, they just make a home for themselves there. They don’t have stingers, but if disturbed too much, they can bite with their jaws (as seen in the photo on the left) and inject formic acid. Their distinctive feature is a golden abdomen. I’ll write about other notable leaf-cutter ants next time, half of my phone is full of them.
In the forests of Costa Rica, several species of monkeys were encountered. The most interesting are the coatis. They live quite high up, but the trail also went up the mountain slope
Last night, I encountered the most dangerous, most venomous snake in the jungle – Fer De Lance (Bothrops asper) on a path. Generally, local clinics have antivenom and with it, the mortality rate drops to zero, but it’s better not to test it – the venom causes rapid necrosis and disrupts blood clotting. It also has a built-in night vision camera in its head. The system is so sensitive that the snake can detect a temperature difference of just 0.003 °C. This helps it hunt warm-blooded rodents and birds at night, when visual sight is limited.
It’s also super fast. Four and a half meters per second. That’s faster than you can blink. Indeed, if you’re not sitting right in front of its nose, there’s enough time for it to switch to a combat position, allowing you to jump away – so I managed to get by from behind.
You can find anything in the jungle at night. A tree exploding with poisonous spikes suddenly.
It’s not the tree that explodes, of course, but its fruits. They resemble little pumpkin-capsules. When ripe and dry, the fruit’s walls gradually stretch, accumulating internal tension. At some point, this “biological device” bursts with a loud pop, throwing seeds at tremendous speeds — up to ~70 m/s covering dozens of meters, the sound resembling a gunshot.
All parts of the tree are extremely toxic. The sap contains irritants that cause severe burns and rashes on skin contact, and temporary or even permanent blindness in the eyes.
There are simply more trees around with spikes (non-poisonous), but long and sharp. Just like the one shown in the series pluribus
A wild Costa Rican boar, as part of a small herd, mistook me for one of its own and let me take its pictures. Strictly speaking, it’s not exactly a boar—it’s a peccary. Half of my phone is filled with these little grunters.
Great photo from today’s trip to the national park. My phone is full of these little monkeys, they were running around by the hundreds underfoot
It all started when about 20 genuine cowboys on dancing horses passed us at the intersection. Turns out there are thousands of them here. Tope Nacional parade, San Ramon, Costa Rica
I’m checking out what open data we have in our county to play with data analysis over the weekend, and discovered, for instance, an open database of all 1.5 million trees in the county. The screenshot shows just a tiny part around my house.
“How deceptive nature is!” said the hedgehog… Interesting things we encounter when we step off the path
Imagine how hard it is for me to live. Walking with the dog and you can’t easily and quickly answer your own question, why is the snow only on one end of the twigs. And yes, they all look in different directions.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 