This alien like creature is a baby stone crab. This species can grow as big and even more intimidating than an adult blue crab. They are very aptly named as they both look like and live on rocks and stones. This young one had a purplish tint to it as did the adult I caught on my vacation. Stone crabs are edible but have very little meat in their bodies. The common practice is to break off one of their claws and allow the other to grow big. The torn off one will grow back, so causes no permanent home to the crab.  In areas near people, stone crabs occur more often than not with one claw larger than the other because of this.  The claws on a stone crab are probably the largest in comparison to body size of any crab species, which is why the claws are the most desirable part of the crab.  However, the crabs are fascinating to watch and unless you intend to eat the claw soon, it is best to just leave them be.

Summer of Bugs

 This tiny but fascinating creature is a baby praying mantis, one of many I have found this summer. This one was probably only a few weeks old. However  its innocence hides a dark secret. This mantis is the product of one of the most violent mating rituals in the animal world, in which the female bites off the male's head to move along the process. Still, they are cute when they are small.

When they grow up however, its a very different story, they ambush prey with their forelimbs and slice it apart with their razor sharp jaws. While watching a nature program I saw a large mantis try to ambush a baby rat snake. The snake managed to twist free before either combatant was seriously injured. This was a testament  to the mantis's boldness, that and the fact is eyes were bigger than its stomach..
 

Still -- no news on the turtles...  Will keep you posted.

Wait!? That's a fish?

 These are some of the strangest catches from my last week's vacation.  The top picture is of a box fish.  Its tail does look very tiny, but it uses its front fins to swim.  Its tail just steers.  This is a young box fish, as they can get 4 or 5 times larger than this at least.  From my knowledge, they live on reefs, so I was shocked when I caught him by our hotel dock in Orange Beach, AL.  He is a very amazing fish. 

 This photo is of a ribbon fish, which I had never seen nor heard of before.  Surprisingly, I caught him on a hook when I was fishing for speckled trout.  This surprised me because his jaw is as thin as a needle fishes and the fight he put up was exceptional, especially since he has no apparent tail fin.  He swam up and down using the fin on this back, which traveled all the way up and down his body.  We saw others of his kind while there and they would bite a small fish, go back down, and then come up and eat it.  Above water, he shimmered like a piece of silk ribbon.

The bottom photo is of a fish that I have never seen or heard of and still do not know the name of.  They swam in small schools that resembled bunches of small floating leaves being tossed in the current.  I only realized they were fish when they swam against a wave and started swimming towards deep water.  They were kind of cute the way they zipped around in the bucket. 

Overall I had a very fun vacation, being mesmerized by these amazing products of the sea.

On another note, my grandmother's snapping turtle nest should be hatching this week.  I'll keep you posted!

 This is Myrtle, a common snapping turtle. We found her as a hatchling, crawling across the ground in my grandmother's yard. We raised her for approximately 1.5 years. In that time, she tripled the size she was in this picture. I account this partly to her high protein diet. When I  could, I would try to catch her live  prey. The most plentiful prey I could find was tadpoles.  I would catch two or three hundred of these and put them in  her aquarium. She would eat them like popcorn, and within two days they all would be gone. However as big as she was, she has a a long way to go be before she reaches her mother's size. We found her mother on my grandmothers front steps once , and she was around one and a half feet long or bigger.    In comparison, Myrtle started out only slightly larger than a quarter, but one day she could become the second largest turtle in north America.   

P.S   Her mother was seen laying eggs this year, more on that later.

Its a leaf--Its a vine-- Its, a snake?

 This vibrant little creature is a rough green snake. It's a small species of snake and they only get around this big, but to make up for this they are extremely camouflaged among leaves and vines. It's not venomous or very aggressive, it rarely bites even when picked up, so it poses no threat to humans. Large insects, lizards, and small birds eggs however are much less safe. It stalks its prey in the trees, hides in plain sight, but once it's close enough,  it grabs and swallows its prey whole.

Don't Bug Me .... I'm hunting

 The creature in the center of the photograph is a Bolas spider, named so because of its strange hunting technique. In Latin America, the bolas is a hunting tool made up of a long leather thong with stones tied to the end. A Bolas spider's weapon is made of a silk strand with a ball of sticky, scented silk at the end. The scent mimics a pheromone put off by  female moths. When a male comes to investigate, the spider swings its weapon expertly and catches the moth on the sticky end. The bottom picture appears to be a pair of egg cases dangling from the tree in our yard where we found this amazing arachnid.