Rockfish 2006!

This past weekend my wife and I were back in Virginia visitng family, and we had the pleasure of going out on my Uncle Billy's boat to fish for Rockfish (Morone saxatilis)(aka striped bass) in the Chesapeake Bay around the Bay Bridge Tunnel. This fish is slowly but surely recovering thanks to conservation efforts and very strict control of commercial and recreational quotas. The weather was perfect, about 50 F, and we had a fantastic time! We caught ~40 fish all total, ranging in size form 16 inches to 29 inches in length. We concluded the day by cooking some of the fresh fish up on Billy's grill. The menu included green beans, batter bread, homemade oatmeal-raisin-walnut cookies (courtesy of my grandmother Lucy), and Boston Cream pie with peppermint ice cream. It was so much fun fishing and cathcing these hard fighting fish, and I can't wait to go after them again! Most of them were caught on either a white colored swimbait or heavy stick plugs jigged about 10 feet below the surface.

Red eft

Eastern newts (Notophthalmus viridescens viridescens) have three stages of life: the aquatic larva or tadpole, the red eft (terrestrial adult stage), and the aquatic adult. The larva possesses gills and does not leave the pond environment where it was hatched. Larvae are brown-green in color, and shed their gills when they transform into the terrestrial red eft. The red eft is bright orange-red in color, with darker red spots outlined in black. An eastern newt can have as many as 21 of these spots. The pattern of these spots differs among the subspecies. After two or three years, the red eft begins to transform into the aquatic adult. The adult's skin is olive green, but retains the eft's characteristic outlined red spots. It has a larger and wider tail and characteristically slimy skin. At home in coniferous and deciduous forests, eastern newts need a moist environment with either a temporary or permanent water source, and thrive best in a muddy environment.

During the eft stage, they may travel far from their original location. Red efts may often be seen in a forest after a rainstorm. Wild eastern newts eat a variety of foods such as insects, small mollusks and crustaceans, young amphibians and frog eggs. I took this image in spring 2006 on my Dad's farm in south-central Virginia on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I used a Nikon D200 and Sigma 150mm HSM EX macro lens, handheld with a little fill-flash from my Nikon SB800.

Save the Tiger, Save the World!

As I was creating a holiday card for family and friends this morning, it struck me how easy it would be for me to post it here. Especially since it has an underlying message of conservation that is near and dear to my heart as a wildlife biologist! This is a glimpse at a brief moment of intimacy between a mother Sumatran tiger and her cub, a scene which has played out thousands of times in the wild, but one which is now more commonly found in captivity than in the wild. This particular mother-cub pair are living at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. I find it a sad badge of conservation that it is estimated that there are 4 times as many tigers in captivity as in the wilds of Asia and Russia. Save the tiger, save the world.