🐸🦎🐊🐢🐍🦕🦖
All tagged Ecology
The Oceanário de Lisboa (Lisbon’s Oceanarium) is the largest indoor aquarium in Europe. It holds an impressive 5 million litres of seawater and includes some pretty amazing creatures in its exhibitions. If ichthyology is your thing, you’d be in heaven but if you enjoy marine biology in general this is an absolute must if you’re ever around Lisbon.
Let’s talk about frogs and toads!
I often write pretty lengthy posts about specific species, or subjects relating to manuscripts on which I am currently working. However, I thought it would be fun to write a series of short blog posts that go back to basics on one of my favourite extant orders of the amphibia class – Anura.
Spiders are amazing creatures and there are thousands of identified species in the world. In the UK alone, there are over 600 species across 37 families. Many people will commonly refer to spiders as ‘insects’. Although spiders, like insects, are invertebrates and belong to the phylum Arthropoda, they do not belong to the same class. Insects are part of the Insecta class, whereas spiders – similarly to scorpions, mites and ticks – belong to the class Arachnida.
Out of all reptiles in existence, tortoises are one of the most widely kept as pets. This is not surprising considering that unlike other reptiles, they are perceived as mostly docile and non-threatening to humans. There's also, of course, the cuteness factor. Unfortunately, humans seem to be just as uninformed regarding their needs and husbandry as they are of any other reptilian order.
The Conraua goliath is one of those species that most people with no interest in amphibians will have heard of because of its size. The 'biggest frog' factoid being an almost must for any pub quiz...or perhaps more realistically, for any pub quiz I would certainly enjoy.
If you are lucky enough to have ever witnessed a wild common toad hunting, you will understand what I mean when I say that they are pretty endearing creatures. They have an incredibly entertaining 'walking' style that never fails to make me laugh.
