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My students from “Natural History of the Vertebrates” and I set up our wildlife cameras again. This time, we put them out in the forest along the College of Wooster Golf Course, right in the middle of the town of Wooster, Ohio. In addition to cottontails, possums, raccoons, etc., we got lots of deer photos

one of a squirrel bringing leaves back to repair its nest

and (surprise) more than a few shots of coyotes. These photos were almost always taken in the dead of night when these clever carnivores are unlikely to be seen. Someone (or something) is always out shopping for dinner!

Recently, I got a few wildlife cameras for my “Natural History of the Vertebrates” class. We deployed them out at Fern Valley Field Station for about a month (January and February 2018). The great thing about these devices is that you can see up close and personal some of our wonderful wildlife that you might not ever otherwise see. Below are some of my favorite pictures:

Is this a red or a gray fox? I can’t tell for sure without color.

Several other photos were taken weeks earlier – I thought these guys were supposed to be true hibernators?

Always up to something, raccoons are common residents at Fern Valley.

No surprise here – white-tailed deer out for a late night snack.

Stay tuned for more wildlife camera photos!

On the Caribbean island of Tobago, there is an odd snake. Many snakes are well camouflaged to blend in their environments, to surprise a tasty meal and to avoid their own predators. Other snakes are brightly colored to advertise their dangerousness to predators (called aposematic coloration). Coral snakes are an excellent example of aposematic coloration, with conspicuously banded color patterns usually in some combination of red, black and white or yellow (and the deadly venom to back it up).

There are also a host of coral snake mimics that look like coral snakes but are not venomous or only mildly so. These mimics get protection for looking like what they are not. However, the snake on Tobago (Erythrolamprus ocellatus), is neither well camouflaged nor a good mimic of coral snakes. It is red with black blotches (not rings) and virtually no white coloration at all.

Now, Tobago does not have coral snakes (though neighboring Trinidad does) and we hypothesized that E. ocellatus was in the process of evolving away from being a coral snake mimic in their absence.

In summer 2014, Erin Hodson (’15) and I did a field experiment to test this idea. Erin (and her friends and family) laboriously made 480 clay replicas of E. ocellatus and the relevant coral snakes (see below). We then hauled them down to Trinidad and Tobago to set out and see what would attack them. Notable overweight baggage fees were incurred.

The paper describing the results of our work has recently appeared in the pages of the journal Evolutionary Biology. Feel free to look it up and see what we found!

Erin E. Hodson and Richard M. Lehtinen. 2017. Diverse Evidence for the Decline of an Adaptation in a Coral Snake Mimic. Evolutionary Biology 44: 401–410.

As I sit here, an ice storm is on the way that will wreck havoc among all of us endotherms that are active at this latitude in January. Our salamander friends, however, are waiting (happily, I hope) below the frost line, looking for signs of spring. Salamanders are ectotherms and have body temperatures (and corresponding metabolic rates) that are primarily influenced by temperatures in the environment. It might seem like an advantage to have high internal body temperatures year round but when the food runs short and the ice storms come, it makes you appreciate that the salamanders have a pretty good system, too.