Thorny Lizards and Receding Glaciers
Another year of fieldwork and observation has yielded a slew of captivating photos from LSA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Every year, the department hosts a photo challenge in which snapshots taken by students, faculty, and staff during the past 12 months are submitted to a vote. The contest honors the memory of the department’s longtime “photographer at large,” David Bay, a staff member who passed away in 2009. This year’s photos include a receding glacier, a thorny lizard, and the world’s smallest living monkey. Scroll through the images below for an eyeful of the winners.
Professor Stephen Smith shot this portrait of a ruby-throated hummingbird in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Pygmy marmosets—this one photographed in Ecuador by Ph.D. student Delaney Cargo—are the smallest living monkeys. An adult pygmy marmoset can fit in the palm of a person’s hand.
Ph.D. student Pascal Title found this thorny devil (yes, that’s the animal’s real name) in the desert of western Australia. Amazingly, if water touches its skin, the animal can drink by drawing the liquid to its mouth via grooves embedded in its back and legs.
When naturalist John Muir visited the Davidson glacier in Alaska in the late 1800s, says Ph.D. student Michael Grundler about the landscape he photographed, it extended all the way to the water’s edge. “Now, it sits about a mile inland,” Grundler says. Why? Because the glacier has receded, and the land at the shore—compressed before by the weight of the glacier—is rising in a response called post-glacial rebound.
A lone mushroom grows amid the sphagnum moss shot by master’s student Johanna Nifosi.
Master’s alumnus and current research lab technician Jason Dobkowski (B.S. ’06, M.S. ’13) took this fuzzy photo at the Toolik Field Station in Alaska. “Foxes in general never seem too afraid of people,” he says, “and this little kit was especially comfortable around the researchers in our camp.”
Postdoctoral researcher Joseph Brown (Ph.D. ’10) spotted this unusual snow pattern on a bridge at Ford Lake in Ypsilanti, while he was observing his favorite study subjects: birds. “Everything was covered in snow, when an uncommonly hot sun popped out from behind some clouds,” he says. The exposed snow melted, leaving behind this pattern formed by the railing’s shadows.
One of Anat Belasen’s favorite things to photograph is frogs (see #frogsofinstagram), which probably blows her cover as a Ph.D. candidate specializing in herpetology. But this lizard in Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil, worked its way into her oeuvre. Its common name in Portuguese translates as “lazy lizard.”
