Molossus molossus keeps the mosquito levels of our apartment lower than they would be otherwise, as a number of them live under the roof of the building next door. It is also known as the velvety free-tailed bat or Pallas’s mastiff bat. The one that I found on our veranda was small, about the size of my thumb, and a very dark brown, almost black. On St. Martin, the bats that live in buildings and you see in towns are usually this species.

I’m not sure why this one ended up on our veranda, but I took a few photos before leaving him on the ledge of our balcony. After a couple minutes, he climbed to the edge, then hung off the edge and then flew off back to the building where he lives.

In case you didn’t already know, bats are the only native mammals on the island, and there are currently thought to be eight species residing here. After this guy came to visit, I have taken photos of four of the species.

Recently, while waiting to pick up a rental car, I encountered a number of very interesting creatures along the airport road and at one of the nurseries (the where-you-buy-plants kind) across from Hope Estate. My discoveries also exemplified a few recurring phenomena that I’ve experienced in my search for wildlife on the island.

If you see something once, you start to see it more. This of course, isn’t always true. One could see a rare bird only once. But for other things, once you notice them, you often start finding them all over. In this case, I hadn’t noticed the syrphid (hoverfly) larvae that eat the oleander aphids that are often on the apple of sodom plant. Now, I see them frequently.

Boredom leads to discovery. I’ve found many things while waiting around, often in spots that are the opposite of lush wilderness. This is mostly because the closer you look, the more you see, and sometimes the best way to take the time in one spot is to be stuck there. Otherwise, it’s often too easy to keep moving and miss things. This applies especially to things that are well-camoflauged. Or very small…

If you don’t see anything interesting, look for something smaller. Everyone loves iguanas and pelicans, but the real diversity is amongst critters much smaller. Even if you’re in a spot where you don’t see very many 1cm insects, you can probably find 1mm insects. This actually works on much smaller scales as well, over 1400 species of bacteria have been found just in peoples’ bellybuttons.

Anyhow, here are a variety of critters, including small planthoppers and flies. Be sure to check out the last aphid photo to see a tiny wasp that parasitizes aphids. I didn’t even notice it until I looked at the photos on my computer.

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on identifying the flies in my photos. It’s a challenging task. Diptera, the insect order that includes flies, gnats, mosquitoes and a few other similar critters, is thought to contain over 200,000 species. I would estimate that St. Martin is home to at least 300 species, and I have photos of close to 100.

Identifying flies is hard for many reasons. Some are very small, many look very similar to each other, and some may be impossible to identify without dissecting them under a microscope. It’s also hard to know, out of hundreds of thousands of species, which ones are even likely to be in St. Martin. And, of course, while you can look up an image of many flies online, there are just as many or more for which there are no photos online.

It’s also very interesting to learn more about different flies, both how to identify them physically as well as by their habits and preferred habitats. I’m also quickly becoming deeply indebted to diptera.info, a terrific site with a very active forum where experts and enthusiasts are very helpful with identifications. It’s a superb site, and I wish there was something like it for every insect order.

ARKive is a web site that promotes conservation by presenting images of wildlife. Right now, it is focused on collecting images of animals on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which is about 17,000 species. I’m excited to announce that I have contributed a set of images of St. Martin’s endemic Anolis pogus to the site and you can see them by clicking the image below. This lizard is only found on St. Martin. Although it is common here, it is classified as vulnerable because its range is restricted to a single island.

I’m also particularly glad that the entry for this lizard shows it in a variety of colors. Although this lizard can change its coloration dramatically, most of the literature and photos I have encountered refer to a single coloration (tan with blue around the eye). It’s much better to showcase the full range of striking looks.

There is also a video I submitted that will be added in the future, showing two males fighting for territory. This will add another dimension to the entry, showing behavior, and can also be seen here.

Continuing with the next selections from a couple recent walks around Grand Case and its ponds, here we have spiders and everything else.

The spiders alone are pretty fantastic. Near the ponds, the family Tetragnathidae is most visible, and they probably eat a lot of midges and other insects with aquatic larvae. In this family are the orchard spiders of the genus Leucauge and the long-jawed spiders, I think mostly from the genus Tetragnatha. In the Leucauge webs, there are also a number of different spiders from the genus Argyrodes, which are kleptoparasites which live in the webs of larger spiders and steal food from them. It’s possible this is at least a little bit symbiotic, in that they may clean the webs of prey that is too small to be of real interest to the web owner.

A bit away from the edge of the pond, I found another of what I think is Eriophora ravilla, a large, robust orb-weaver that I usually see hiding in the leaves at one corner of its web. This one has a strikingly different color than the last one I saw.

Finally, beneath some cardboard boxes, I found a number of small jumping spiders, a spitting spider and the wolf spider that was previously thought to be endemic to Saint Vincent. In all, more than a dozen species seen in just a few hours around town.

And of, course, there were lots of other things to see, including insects and lizards.

This year’s sargassum invasion has raised loads of questions: Why is it happening? When will it end? Will the beaches be clear by the time tourists arrive for the high season? Today I’ve been wondering how it will impact the coastal vegetation.

Even in areas where the sargassum seems greatly reduced compared to earlier in the year, it’s secretly still there. Even some beaches that look mostly sandy right now actually have alternating layers of sand and decomposing sargassum built up over the summer and fall. Until it is totally decomposed and washed out to sea by the action of the waves, it seems possible that these nutrients might make the beaches could be more hospitable to the salt-tolerant plants that already live near the shore.

If sargassum floats in continuously or in more frequent waves, perhaps beach sand would gradually turn into something more like a sandy soil. Coastal grasses, beach morning glory, sea grapes, palms and mangroves might be able to move down the beach. If something along these lines did happen, what kinds of impact would it have?

For now, as you can see below, there are just a few small plants sprouting up amongst the sargassum, and perhaps they would have been able to grow in these spots even on a regular year. Only time will tell.

Catching the bus on a Sunday can take a while. Luckily, I was waiting near a small palm tree that was home to at least five different species of spider from at least three different families. That’s quite a bit of spider diversity for one tree, even one with leaves that make great spider homes. In my experience, it’s much more common to find a tree with many spiders from the same species rather than many species on the same tree.

Sometimes you just get lucky. Today, I had only walked a few hundred meters from my apartment and happened upon a yellow-crowned night heron doing a strange series of postures, which you can see below. The purpose was unclear to me. I saw no potential mate to impress. It was doing a sort of hyperventilation that I’ve seen herons and egrets doing before. If anyone knows what this heron was up to, let me know!

While investigating the recent fish apocalypse at Salines d’Orient, I happened upon another banded bird, this time a black-bellied plover (Pluvialis squatarola) that had what seemed to be a single, unnumbered metallic band on its upper-right leg. It had two unbanded companions and I have reported the sightings and hopefully will learn when and where it was originally banded.

Below are a couple photos of the banded bird. If you see any banded birds, you can report them to bandedbirds.org and/or reportband.gov.

A couple days ago, thousands of dead fish washed ashore in Salines d’Orient, presumably dead from a hypoxic event. Hypoxia is a lowered level of dissolved oxygen in the water that can kill fish and other animals when they do not have enough oxygen to breathe. Typically, this is caused by an influx of nutrients (e.g., sewage), which causes phytoplankton blooms and increased bacterial activity. This activity reduces oxygen levels in the water, which is what kills the fish.

In this case, there is a large amount of sewage in the water, and the impact was compounded, I have been told, by blockages in the outlets that allow the pond to exchange water with the ocean. Presumably, when the flow of oxygen-rich water into the pond was stopped, the overall oxygen level dropped.

The majority of the dead fish accumulated on the western shore of the pond, which seems natural because the wind would blow the fish in that direction. Above the channel connecting Salines d’Orient to Étang de Poissons I found no dead fish. This makes me think that it is possible that the hypoxic event may not have affected the entire pond, since even with the prevailing easterly wind, there are enough irregularities in the shoreline to catch dead fish floating west.

From what I could tell, there were a minimum of six species of fish dead on the shore, as well as some crabs. There were at least some living fish in the water as well, even near the western shore of the pond. It was unclear what other organisms may have been impacted, such as mollusks, and what the overall impact will be for shorebirds and seabirds that feed on the fish and other animals of the pond.

Overall, it was a pretty gruesome display of our inability to manage our impact on the island. Having just returned from a trip to the British Virgin Islands, I haven’t had a chance to research additional details on the exact triggers of the event, but at the very least it is a clear sign of how fragile our local ecosystems are as they bear the burden of so much human impact. Below are some photos of the pond and the various fish species killed.