On Saturday, I couldn’t help but go outside and watch the “supermoon” for a while. For those who don’t know, supermoon has become the fashionable term to refer to a full moon that coincides with the closest approach the moon makes to Earth in its orbit (also called the moon’s perigee). Saturday’s supermoon was about 30 percent brighter than the average full moon, and as I stood outside my apartment building at around 10pm, the light from the moon seemed to overwhelm the LA streetlights.

I figured this would be a good opportunity to get some images of the moon’s disk, so I brought out my camera and my biggest telephoto lens, a 500mm. As many photographers know, you can use a modern SLR’s “live view” function to help you manually focus on small or distant objects; by magnifying the sensor’s image, on the camera’s LCD screen, you can see minute details and focus more precisely than you can by looking through the viewfinder.

As it turns out, this is a pretty cool way to see some amazing details on the Moon, too! With a decent telephoto lens and magnified Live View, your camera isn’t half-bad as a telescope. My wife Liz was looking at the highly-magnified moon image on my camera’s LCD screen, and she asked “why does it keep moving?” I wasn’t sure what she meant at first; it’s hard to keep the camera steady at extreme magnification levels, but the motion Liz noticed was smooth and consistent. We both realized at the same time what we were seeing: the moon’s apparent motion across the night sky! We were seeing the Moon with so much magnification that we could actually watch it “move” as the Earth rotated beneath it! Pretty darn cool, if you ask me!

Here’s how you can observe this effect yourself:

1. Attach your camera and your longest telephoto lens (mine was a 500mm + 1.4x teleconverter, but a shorter combination should also work) to a sturdy tripod.
2. Aim at the moon, focus through the viewfinder, and lock down the tripod.
3. Switch to Manual exposure mode to maximize your control over the Live View image. If your camera allows “exposure simulation” in Live View mode, that’s the option you want.
4. Activate Live View and adjust your aperture and shutter speed settings to get an image of the moon on your screen that’s not overexposed.
5. Zoom in as far as you can on the Live View image. Fine-tune your focus on the moon.
6. If your lens has Image Stabilization / Vibration Reduction, turn it OFF. By attempting to correct for random camera movement, your lens’s IS will obscure the subtle movement of the moon.
7. Enjoy watching the moon move across your LCD screen!

Let us know if you try this for yourself. How did it work? (You don’t need a supermoon to make this work — try it out on any moon, any phase, super- or not-so-super!)

A few weeks ago Dr. Catherine Newman, a biologist at Louisiana State University, published a paper describing a new frog species, previously unknown to science. Many of us have grown accustomed to reading news about new frogs being discovered in remote, primeval forests around the world – frogs just aren’t a very well studied group, so we still have a lot to learn. But this discovery was different. The new frogs described described by Newman live in one of the most urbanized places in the world – New York City. The idea that an unknown frog was living virtually in the shadows of New York’s skyscrapers made this story an instant classic, and news outlets around the world announced the finding to great fanfare.

The remarkable thing about these frogs, however, wasn’t that they were unknown to science. It was that we knew the frogs were there all along, but no one had ever studied them carefully enough to realize they were something new! The frogs in question were clearly “leopard frogs” – a widespread group in North America – but for decades, herpetologists couldn’t agree whether they were Northern Leopard Frogs (Rana pipiens) or Southern Leopard Frogs (Rana sphenocephala). These two species look nearly identical, and the New York frogs produced calls that didn’t sound like either species. Newman and her colleagues compared DNA sequences of the New York frogs with both of the better-known leopard frog species and found strong evidence that the New York frogs belonged to a third, previously unrecognized species!

Biologists might call these New York frogs (which still don’t have an official Latin or English name) a cryptic species – a species that is genetically distinct from its relatives, but otherwise difficult to tell apart.

A thin crust of snow is slow to melt on a north-facing talus slope in the San Gabriel mountains

But if it’s not obvious that two species are different, should we really care that they are? Well, if their DNA shows that they haven’t been exchanging genes with their closest relatives for a few million years, then clearly they know that they aren’t the same species! More pragmatically, conservation biologists care about cryptic species because their genomes may contain genetic information that’s not contained in the genomes of any other species. That genetic information could be the key to a species adapting and surviving in a fast-changing world.

Coincidentally, I recently learned that Los Angeles has its own enigmatic amphibian. But unlike the familiar-but-incognito leopard frogs described in New York, ours lived completely undetected until just a few years ago.

The San Gabriel Slender Salamander (Batrachoseps gabrieli) has only been observed at a handful of sites in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of LA. The first specimens weren’t collected until 1985, and even then, it took until 1996 for Dr. David Wake to examine the museum specimens carefully and realize that this species was quite distinct from any of its known relatives – not just genetically distinct, but visibly different from any other species in its genus. Genetic evidence suggested that this species had split from its nearest relatives something like 10 million years ago!

As soon as I read about the San Gabriel Slender Salamander, I wanted to find it for myself! How could something so different be living right under our noses in one of the world’s great metropolitan areas? I looked up the latitude and longitude of the sites where these salamanders were first collected, and on a crisp day in early March, I drove into the mountains with my camera.

According to the scanty literature I could find, the San Gabriel Slender Salamander favored north-facing talus slopes. It was only a short hike from the highway to reach the first GPS coordinates I was looking for, and when I stopped I was faced with a long, steep expanse of loose rock – the habitat fit the bill perfectly. So I began to climb, carefully searching under rocks and logs as I went. In the first hour, I found a lot of nothing… a few centipedes and beetles scurried away when I lifted their shelters, but there was no sign that I was in salamander country.

An Ensatina eschscholtzii poses for the camera before being returned to its home under a rock.

After about an hour, I spotted what looked like a fat earthworm under a large rock… It turned out to be the tail of a retreating Ensatina eschscholtzii – a big, rubbery, dull-pink salamander that’s found in mountainous areas all over California. I was re-invigorated – there were salamanders here!

I photographed the Ensatina, returned it to its home, and continued searching for my real target. Finally, after another hour or two of methodical searching, I lifted a big, flat rock in a well-shaded section of the talus slope and saw a tiny, curved shape among the roots and pebbles – the San Gabriel Slender Salamander! It was smaller than its name, mostly black, but with beautiful golden speckles down its back.

Batrachoseps gabrieli in all of its glory!

I kept the little salamander cool and moist during a brief photo shoot (like other members of the family Plethodontidae, the slender salamanders have no lungs – they need to stay moist so they can absorb oxygen through their skin!), and then carefully returned it to its home, which I had marked with a tripod of sticks to help me find it again among the scores of similarly sized rocks that dotted the talus slope. I was so thrilled to find this amphibian enigma that I was tempted to keep looking for more, but I had satisfied my curiosity, and I decided to leave the salamanders alone.

As I gathered my camera gear to head back home, I reflected on my find. I was, at most, a ten-minute walk from a well-traveled highway. That morning, I had eaten breakfast in my apartment in LA, and I would be back home by early afternoon. While I was searching for the salamanders, the growls and rumbles of motorcycles climbing the steep, winding highway were a constant reminder that I was still very much in civilization. Yet I had just found a beautiful little animal that, when I was born in 1983, no one even knew existed.

Batrachoseps gabrieli, the little-known salamander endemic to Los Angeles County, one of the world's most heavily populated areas.

On the one hand: how could a species remain undetected for so long in a place that’s so accessible to people? On the other hand: how could it not remain undetected? With a penchant for cool, wet spaces between rocks, north-facing talus slopes were the place to be. It’s hard to imagine a slow-moving, inch-long salamander traversing ridges to get from one talus slope to another. But these salamanders have 10 million years of history behind them; that’s a lot of time to get around. And one way or another, they’ve managed to populate several talus slopes in the San Gabriel Mountains.

If there are new species of vertebrates waiting to be discovered in our own backyard, then surely there are countless cryptic species of insects and spiders all around us – and that’s just the start! Imagine the unexplored diversity among those organisms so small that we can’t even see them: rotifers, nematodes, protists, bacteria, viruses! Consider the diversity of parasites that live inside the bodies of better-known organisms. We clearly still have a lot to learn, even about the nature that’s closest to us!

Cited:

Newman, C. E., J. A. Feinberg, L. J. Risser, J. Burger, H. B. Shaffer. 2012. A new species of leopard frog (Anura: Ranidae) from the urban northeastern US. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 63(2):445-455.

Note: The salamander images in this post were photographed using the Meet Your Neighbours “field studio” approach. I’ve just started working on this project with some incredibly talented photographers from around the world. What a great visual way to get people connected with the wildlife all around them!

The winners of the 2011 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards were announced at a ceremony in London earlier this month. This competition is the biggest of its kind, and the awards are highly coveted among nature and wildlife photographers worldwide.

"Boy Meets Nature," Alex Badyaev's winning image in the Urban Wildlife category of the 2011 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards

I’m always pleased to see familiar names among the winners. This year, fellow evolutionary biologist Alex Badyaev, a professor at the University of Arizona, won the “Urban Wildlife” category with a beautiful image depicting a young boy gazing in wonder at a tiny bat flying outside his window. I have followed Badyaev’s photography for several years, and I am always impressed with the depth of his photographic explorations into the lives of animals. I encourage you to spend some time perusing his website, which has some truly extraordinary animal behavior images. Badyaev kindly agreed to a short interview for the Day’s Edge blog, which I’m reproducing here:

NL: You capture some fascinating animal behavior in your photographs! It’s clear that you have spent an enormous amount of time with some of your subjects (e.g. flying squirrels, shrews, spotted sandpipers). How do you choose these “assignments” for yourself, and how do you approach the serious task of documenting behavior that’s never been photographed before?

AB: Essentially all of my wildlife photography is part of my scientific projects. Most often, photographing a particular fascinating phenomenon launches an in-depth research project, such as in my recent obsession with aerodynamics of hunting bats and mating flying squirrels; other times, research projects suggest what should be photographed in the wild, such as in our long-term projects on the evolution of rapidly dispersing bird species or shrews’ life history.

As to approach: I photograph because I want to know everything about a particular animal, and everything at my disposal – reading all the primary literature I can find, sketching in the field, long hours of observations – goes into preparation. A good photograph for me captures the essence of a particular species – in a sense it is the summary of all the knowledge about what the animal does and is.

NL: Your winning image, “Boy Meets Nature,” shows a boy looking out a window as a bat flies by outside, frozen in time. Learning the habits of the bats was obviously key to making this photo happen. But as a photographer, I’m equally impressed by the lighting — if you don’t mind sharing your secrets, how did you manage to light the scene properly and balance the interior and exterior lights?

AB: To capture the scene, I needed to reconcile warm “slow” light of the cabin with the necessity to have “fast” light right outside the window to freeze the feeding of the tiny Myotis bats. There are several ways to accomplish this. The simplest, used here, is to expose for the internal light — the table lamp here — but use a very short range flash outside the window to take the bats out of the complete darkness of late summer night. The flashes set for the fastest output (about 1/32 of the full flash here — you can barely detect it with your eyes) is what is needed to freeze the bats and moths. A remote external flash with such an output will have a range of about 2 meters, it sits here above the window, hooded and pointing straight down.

Biologically, this image works because satin moths that come to the window for a few nights in August are exotic to local bats and are not palatable. It takes the bat colony few days to learn this, but in the meantime they hover over the moths echolocating nonstop and trying to figure them out. This predictability of the hovering distance from the window enables manual pre-focus that, with great depth of field, simplifies night photography considerably. The kid standing on his bed under the window and making his way into the frame for a moment was an added bonus. My title for the photo was “Bedtime TV.”

NL: You’re a professor in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Academic faculty are some of the busiest people I’ve ever met! So how do you manage to make time for photography? What advice would you give other scientists struggling to fit photography or other outreach activities into their lives?

AB: Well, I have always thought that there are unfairly few hours in a day. And I have always spent a long time observing animals. That’s when I think, get inspired, learn, come up with my best scientific ideas. So there is no conflict. There is no question, however, that I would be a much better nature photographer if I could only skip the administrative commitments that come with a faculty job…

I find a compromise between science and photography because one is enhancing the other in my work and both really exist in synergy for me. Science and photography are similar in the sense that you get better at both by figuring out your unique combination of background, interests, and approaches.

Alex Badyaev receives his award at the 2011 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards ceremony

NL: Among the other images recognized in the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, do you have a favorite? If so, what makes this image your favorite?

AB: This is a tough one. This year’s winning images are very strong. I love “Illusion” by Stefano Unterthiner and “Harbinger of spring” by Sandra Bartocha. Both are extraordinary artists and I have followed their work for years. Both images just stop you dead in your tracks. I can smell the air in the snowdrops’ photo – this is an image straight from my childhood. “On the tracks of a coyote” by Martin Cooper was all around London advertising the exhibit. I love that image!