Thursday, December 30, 2010
New Species - katydid
A jabbing spiny-legged katydid, new species of plants and animals discovered during just two months of deep rainforest exploration in a small portion of Papua New Guinea's remote forest-cloaked mountains last year.
In the Nakanai Mountains on the large western Pacific island of New Britain, CI scientists worked with local communities to assess new, endemic, and previously un described species at three different sites ranging from lowlands to high elevations in the rugged rain forest-covered mountains.
emerald-green katydid, a brilliantly pink-eyed katydid that lives in the forest canopy (Caedicia), and a sharp-legged katydid with an especially interesting defense mechanism that, when threatened, prompts it to hold its unusually large and spiny legs vertically above its head to jab at predators, a behavior which RAP scientist Piotr Naskrecki described from firsthand experience as "very painful".
Monday, December 27, 2010
New Species of Bee-like Bat
Like most of the Lost World's mammals, this new species of blossom bat is nocturnal. Unlike most other New Guinean bats of the supersize flying fox family, the new bat is only about as big as an average North American bat.
The blossom bat is also "kind of like the hummingbird of the bat world," said biologist Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
"It uses a really long tongue to lap up nectar and of course gets pollen on it as it moves from flower to flower, so it's also a pollinator—a bit like a bumblebee," Helgen added.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
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