Lizards, Snakes, and Frogs Oh My!

This last Saturday we held the second annual Lizard Hunt at Malibu Creek State Park! Dr. Greg Pauly, Museum Herpetologist, and Dr. Bobby Espinoza, CSUN Herpetologist, took a group of 25 lucky people out to observe, catch, and identify local herps.

Are you looking at me?

Western Fence Lizard, Sceloporus occidentatlis

Here is a list of all the herps we encountered:

Western Fence Lizard, Sceloporus occidentalis

Common Side-blotched Lizard, Uta stansburiana

Tiger Whiptail, Aspidoscelis tigris

Western Skink, Plestiodon skiltonianus

Southern Pacific Rattlesnake, Crotalus oreganus helleri

Gophersnake, Pituophis catenifer

Striped Racer, Masticophis lateralis

Pacific Treefrog, Pseudacris regilla (heard calling)

American Bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana (heard calling)

Dr. Greg Pauly lets an aspiring herpetologist

touch a Western Fence Lizard

Dr. Bobby Espinoza shows off a striped racer,

Masticophis lateralis

One of the primary goals of this field trip is to increase participation in our Lost Lizards of Los Angeles (LLOLA) project. Currently we have about 250 submissions, but for us to be able to do anything interesting with the data, we need at least 2,000 submissions. Hopefully we were able to inspire at least 25 more people to participate at this field trip. Are you inspired?

One last thing for all you ultra herp-nerds—you can now get your daily herp dose by visiting the Museum's new herpetology section facebook page. Go get 'em Tiger Whiptail!

North Campus Unveiled with a Bang and a Bug!

Yesterday, we unveiled the North Campus at a press preview! We wowed the press with our amazing scientists, Poppy the pond turtle from our Live Animal Program, and a gaggle of school children planting in the Home Garden.

Dr. Greg Pauly, Museum Herpetology Curator with

Poppy the Pond Turtle

Student from the Ambassador School of Global Education

inspecting the Home Garden

Although there was a lot going on, there were a few distractions. Firstly, in the middle of Poppy's debut performance, there was a loud bang—yes people, that was a collision between a motorist and the new Exposition light rail. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured! Secondly, I found a Green Fruit Beetle grub! In my mind, both of these distractions are equally diverting.

Big bangs aren't always theoretical!

Green Fruit Beetles, Cotinis mutabilis (or GFBs as I fondly refer to them), are a well-known scarab beetle here in the L.A. basin. Many people regale me with stories of their dealings with these insects. It's either, "Oh yeah, I used to tie dental floss to their legs and let them fly around my head." Or, "that's what has been eating the fruit in my garden, they are Japanese beetles right?" These beetles do indeed feed on a wide variety of fruits including tomatoes, peaches, plums, figs, apricots, nectarines, grapes, and even cactus fruit! However, they are not Japanese Beetles, Popilla japonica, which is an East coast species. To make matters more confusing, these insects are commonly referred to by many names including "junebugs", "fig eating beetles", and even "crawlybacks" when speaking of the grubs!

Finding a picture of the adult in my

copy of Insects of the Los Angeles Basin

Green Fruit Beetle grub

I usually find GFB grubs in compost piles. These c-shaped larvae are, like caterpillars, tube-shaped eating machines. They hang out in decomposing plant material and move around on their backs. According to Insects of the Los Angeles Basin, "they obtain purchase on the substratum with transverse rows of stiff short stout bristles on the back of the thorax." Next time you find one of these grubs, pick it up and rub the top of the thorax—the area right behind the grub's head—and you can actually feel the bristles (I just tried it, they are really there). 



Hey People We've Got Baby Opossums

Remember back in December, when I said I'd let you all know if we had baby Virginia opossums, Didelphis virginiana? Well it's spring, and right on cue they're here! Sam Easterson's camera traps have caught the babies (we think there are three) on video over the last week, and although many people don't find opossum babies cute, there are a few of us here at the Museum that do. Check them out and make your own assessment.

Out for ride on Mom's back!

Here are some interesting facts about opossum babies.

• The opossum gestation period is only 11-13 days.
• When they are born, the babies are the size of a lima bean!
• Female opossums can give birth to more than 20 babies in one litter.
• After they are born the babies crawl up into the mother's marsupium (aka pouch—remember opossums are the only North American marsupials) and attach to one of her teats.
• There are only 13 teats in the marsupium, and its first come first serve. 
• Babies are carried in the marsupium for between two and three months
• When they are large enough, the babies venture out of the marsupium and are carried around on the mother's back when they are out of the den.
• The average lifespan for an opossum is only two to three years!

Check out this video Sam's camera trap caught. It puts me in mind of all those fight scenes I've seen where outlaws are fighting on top of moving train that is about to go into a tunnel. Admittedly the mother opossum moves quite a bit slower than a train and the baby is not as nimble as a knife-throwing outlaw, but hey, you get the picture!

Carting all those babies around must be pretty tiring!

Rotting Fruit and Puddle Parties: Check out the Butterfly Pavilion!

It is that time of year again! Sunday is the opening of our Butterfly Pavilion, and although we still have hundreds of free-flying butterflies there's a lot that has changed out there. We have replanted the entire space, adding many more nectar and host plants for adults and caterpillars. We have also added new food sources for some of the adult butterflies that aren't quite so partial to sipping nectar!

The Mourning Cloak butterfly, Nymphalis antiopa, is one of the California native butterflies we put in our pavilion. Although these butterflies are not common to our area, they can be found in areas where their host plants thrive. Caterpillars of this species feed on various willow (Salix species), cottonwood (Populus species), and ornamental elms (Ulnus species). Unlike many of the other species of butterflies in our pavilion, the Mourning Cloak butterfly prefers to feed on rotting fruit  rather than plant nectar. In an effort to appeal to the tastes of this epicurean butterfly, we've put out platters of rotting banana, mango, and plum.

Mourning Cloak butterfly sucking up

liquefied rotten fruit—tasty!

Shawna Joplin and Lydia Gotcher working

in the Butterfly Pavilion

We've also installed two mud puddles in the pavilion. These puddles will hopefully be places for butterflies to get the other nutrients they need beside sugar—nutrients like salt, amino acids, and nitrogen. In nature, male butterflies are often seen gathering on the edges of puddles. Sometimes large numbers of males gather at the same puddle, which entomologists have termed, puddle parties! Males more often exhibit this behavior because they need salts and other nutrients for their spermatophores. Spermatophores are small capsules containing sperm and nutrients that are passed from the male to the female during mating.

Puddle party pads! Look very closely in the yellow circle

and you can see a Buckeye, Junonia coenia, feeding.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is how we get all the butterflies for our pavilion. The short answer is, we buy 'em. This makes the process sound easy and non-time consuming, it is anything but! Months ago, Shawna Joplin, the Museum's Coordinator of Animal Care and Education, started placing orders for butterfly pupae. She works with vendors all over the United States, to ensure that we will have the numbers and diversity we need to achieve a magical butterfly experience.

Last week we received our first pupae shipment. Each vendor sends us about one shipment a week, and each shipment can contain anywhere from 25 to 250 pupae! Every time we get a shipment, the Live Animal Program staff have to inspect each individual pupa and then prepare it for emergence. Some pupae get pinned and hung in our emergence case, whereas others can rest on the bottom of case. Twice a day this case is inspected and all healthy adult butterflies are removed and then released in the pavilion.

Emergence case with emerging sulphurs and monarchs

Pipevine Swallowtail, Battus philenor, pupa.

Look at those colors!

Come by and check out the Butterfly Pavilion! For ticketing information visit our website.

North Campus DIY

This week I've been working with Jared Nielsen, one of the Museum's Exhibit Technicians, who also happens to be a DIY (Do it Yourself) enthusiast. With his help we've managed to build and install two nest boxes and launch our first garden surveillance balloon!

Jared installing a nest box in the Shadow Garden

The other nest box in the Home Garden

The nest boxes we chose are made of PVC and designed to be particularly appealing to certain cavity nesting birds such as Western Bluebirds, Sialia mexicana.  These birds have been spotted in Exposition Park by Kimball Garrett, the Museum's resident ornithologist, and we hope they'll stick around to use our new nesting sites. The boxes are also designed to be minimally appealing to other species of birds that we don't wish to encourage, such as introduced European Starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, and House Sparrows, Passer domesticus.

We ordered the boxes from the Gilbertson Nestbox Company and Jared brought all the materials necessary to assemble and install them in the North Campus. The cost for all materials including the nest box is approximately $30 each. Instructions for installation and how to properly monitor birds that move in are available on the Gilbertson website.

I'll keep you posted, and let you know as soon as any birds move in. Of course Sam Easterson, our resident video naturalist is also waiting in the wings. As soon as a nest is built, he will install a video camera and we'll hopefully be able to capture images of eggs being laid and nestlings hatching!

As if that wasn't exciting enough, today we launched our first garden surveillance balloon.

Affixing the surveillance camera to the balloon

Our garden surveillance balloon is a project Jared discovered through the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. Their Grassroots Mapping project provides instructions on how to build your own balloon mapping kit, or you can purchase a kit for $85 from their website!

Jared opted for the DIY approach and sourced all of his own materials, including the 2 meter wide weather balloon and a rental helium tank! Following the Grassroots Mapping instructions, Jared rigged the balloon to carry a camera and tethered it to a 1000 foot long string which he held onto as we walked it around the site. The camera was also adapted to continually take pictures every second until our 16 megabyte memory card was full (about 2 hours). Over the next few days Jared will take all the images and stich them together using a free online software that will create an aerial map of the North Campus gardens. Not only will this map look really cool, it will also help us to keep track of all of the plants in the gardens and see how it changes over time. Yes, we are going to do this again, maybe even every few months!

We needed a lot of help from staff to make sure the balloon

didn't float away as we were filling it with helium!

(Jesse Daniel, Jared, Briana Burrows, and Karen Ewald)

Karen celebrates a successful launch

Our first aerial view of the North Campus.

Can you spot us in the bottom right corner?

New Snail Record for North Campus and Los Angeles County

We've discovered a snail never before found in L.A.! A few weeks ago, I was wandering through the North Campus and  happened upon a tiny gastropod snailing along the Living Wall! Most snails don't catch my attention as they are usually of the common garden variety, aka Brown Garden snails, Helix aspersa. This particular specimen caught my eye, because unlike the Brown Garden snail, this snail was much smaller and flatter (the shell is only 6.9 mm wide). I grabbed the snail, placed it in a vial and took it to our snail expert, Lindsey Groves.

Brown Garden snail, Helix aspersa

Southern Flatcoil snails photographed in Cathedral City

(Image courtesy of Patrick LaFollette, Museum Research Associate) 

Lindsey is the Museum's Malacology Collections Manager and when I showed him the snail, he got pretty excited. Although some people may find this strange, I did not. In fact, I was excited too. What I did find strange was that Lindsey already had another specimen of the exact same species sitting under his microscope at that very moment!

Malacology Collections Manager, Lindsey Groves

It turns out that the snail I found is a Southern Flatcoil snail, Polygyra cereolus. According to Lindsey, this species of snail ranges from southern Florida to South Carolina and across much of the Gulf coastal states to Texas, as well as several areas of northeast Mexico. Over the past few of decades, it has become common in other locations such as Wisconsin, Hawaii, and even a number of countries in the Middle East including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates! These range extensions are attributable to accidental introductions through importation of sod and/or ornamental landscape plants.

The specimen that Lindsey was examining under his microscope was recently collected in the Laguna Hills area of Orange County. He is currently working on documentation of this new county record and will also document the snail found on the North Campus, which is now preserved in the Museum's Malacology collection. The snail has also been discovered a bit further afield in Cathedral City, Riverside County.

Top view of Southern Flatcoil snail.

Another in a long list of introduced terrestrial mollusc species in our area, 20 to be exact, it is reported that the Southern Flatcoil snail feeds on clover and alfalfa. As such, they have in some instances been reported as agricultural pests, but will likely feed on many other types of vegetation found in parks and gardens. In Florida, they have been observed assembling in large numbers on sides of buildings and walls without apparent regard to sun exposure, which is very unlike many snails. In one building at the University of North Florida, an aggregation of thousands of individuals were found coating the building surface! According to one of Lindsey's colleagues in Florida, "they are like a weed."

Side view of snail. Apparently the characteristic apertural 'tooth'

for this genus must have broken off when it was collected.

Breaking and Entering: Squirrel Moves into Opossum Den

We have another new sighting for the North Campus. A California ground squirrel has been spotted using the opossum den located underneath one of our Museum sheds. So far it seems that both the opossums and the squirrels are sharing the space!

Sam Easterson's camera trap captures the first image!

This is what Jim Dines, our Mammalogy Collections Manager, has to say about them:

The California ground squirrel, as its name suggests, is common throughout California as well as the rest of the western U.S. Scientists know this rodent as Otospermophilus beecheyi (formerly known as Spermophilus beecheyi). They are diurnal (active during the daylight) and, like other ground squirrels, live in burrows that they excavate or take over from other animals. Our ground squirrel has apparently moved into a den built by an opossum.

Ground squirrels eat seeds, nuts, and a variety of other plant material, as well as insects and handouts left by humans. Since they also invade gardens and cultivated areas, California ground squirrels are commonly regarded as pests. Their extensive burrow systems can be very destructive. They are also a host to fleas that can carry plague, so pose a health risk to humans and their pets. Rattlesnakes are one of the main natural predators of California ground squirrels and the squirrels have developed an interesting defense mechanism: the ground squirrels will eat the shed skins of rattlesnakes and then lick themselves and their young, thus covering themselves with rattlesnake scent and confusing a potential rattlesnake predator into thinking it is merely smelling another rattlesnake. Pretty sneaky, eh?

The California ground squirrel has a fairly bushy tail so is sometimes mistaken for the Eastern fox squirrel (a tree squirrel), but has different colored fur and retreats underground instead of up into a tree.

Watch Sam accidentally startle the squirrel into the den!