Insect Tales:  High Drama in Hidden Worlds

Today we went to see a National Geographic Live! presentation featuring Mark Moffett, an award winning National Geographic photographer.  He showed us a slide show of some of his favorite bugs, frogs, and tarantulas he's photographed in the wild and told us funny stories about each photograph.  He's a great presenter - very animated and funny!  We all loved it!

This is an acorn weevil.  She drill a hole into an acorn with her long, sharp probe and places her eggs inside the acorn.  When the babies are ready to hatch out of the acorn, they have to squeeze through an teeny, tiny hole.  He described it as squeezing toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube.

This is a picture of a poor ant whose body had been taken over by a mind controlling fungus.

See a video about these mind controlling fungus below.  Amazing!

In Panama, the female strawberry dart frog lays her eggs on dry ground, in the leaf litter.  This becomes a problem when the eggs hatch because, naturally, tadpoles need water so the mama backs up to a tadpole and it wiggles its way onto her back.  She then climbs up a tree looking for Bromeliad plants because they hold water in the top.  They look like the top leaf part of a pineapple.  She leaves one baby tadpole in each plant's water collection to grow.  Amazingly, the mom returns after about three days to check on her babies and she lays an unfertilized egg in the water for each of them to serve as food.  She remembered where she had left each and every tadpole.

To see a video of her journey, click here.

This is the funny Brazilian Dancing Frog.  He lives in roaring rivers where its voice doesn't carry very far. Males attract the females by kicking sideways with one leg and then the other, each time wiggling the toes of its opposite foot.

The Terribilis frog is the most poisonous frog of them all.  The natives only need to rub their darts on them once each year and the dart will have enough poison to last the whole year of hunting.  Now, that's powerful!

This picture is of his fellow researchers.  This is how you avoid getting leeches......just wear pantyhose!

This is Mark Moffett's book.  We were lucky enough to get a signed copy of his book as a parting gift.

This is from the live frog exhibit.

Check out our friends' webpage to see more on our outing.

Participate in Frog Watch USA

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