This weekend I was down in UC Berkeley's Hastings Reserve in Monterey County for a one-unit course on California ants. It was raining on Friday and soggy on Saturday, but beautiful today. To look for ants we spent a lot of time outdoors turning over rocks, which turned out to be the most efficient way to find them. (Ants, being eminently sensible creatures, tend not to come out early in the morning, or when it's cold or damp.) We found fewer ants than we expected because of the cold and dampness, but we did find a dozen or so very interesting species, including a species Pheidole whose soldiers are adapted for milling seeds; the first ever record this far north of the harvester ant Messor stoddardi; the "primitive" Ambylopone, a centipede predator; and a native relative of the fire ant, Solenopsis molesta, a tiny scavenger only two millimeters long, which often steals food from the nests of other ants. The coolest find though was a bivouac (resting mass) of army ants, Neivamyrmex, which were resting under a warm stone. Neivamyrmex is a relative of the famous army ants of the New World tropics, which doesn't form a permanent nest. Unlike them, it is subterranean, meaning the workers form their hunting swarms in the leaf litter and upper levels of the soil, where we can't see them. Finding army ants indicated that we were in a pretty healthy ecosystem, as far as ants are concerned.

But there was a lot of other great stuff we found while turning over rocks and hacking open logs: many western skinks (Eumeces skiltonianus) and western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis), often too cold to run away;

a hibernating yellowjacket queen; scorpions; huge black darkling beetles (Tenebrionidae); termite colonies (Reticulitermes hesperus); salamanders including an ensatina (Ensatina eschscholtzii); Pacific treefrogs (Pseudacris regilla); and my favorites, pairs of sharp-tailed snakes (Contia tenuis). They were always in pairs, which made me wonder if one was a male and the other female.

Sharp-tailed snakes feed only on slugs. I had never seen one in the wild before.

This one didn't seem to want the slug we gave it, though.

The trip was also fun because Jennifer and I got to hang out with Caitlin a bit. On Friday night we went over to another cabin where a bunch of six female field assistants were having a St. Patrick's Day party. At the point they had run out of beer, two of them were painting a bedroom's walls green, and another was in the process of unplugging the clogged kitchen sink using the toilet plunger. The kitchen smelled pretty foul for a few minutes afterwards. Thanks to Danica for letting me have the beer she had just opened.

The picture was taken this morning shortly after we found the army ant bivouac. (All pictures by Jennifer--but I will be buying a digital camera this week, so the pictures from French Polynesia will be my own!)