Frog secrets are not to be told.
Tag Archives: Newport Aquarium – Newport
Penguin
Houston, we have splash-down.
Red-eyed Crocodile Skink
Sometimes I hear zoo guests mispronounce names.
This is not a red-eyed crocodile skank.
Penguin
Later that night, the penguin made a “missed connections” post on Craigslist.
Panther Chameleon
I like how well the chameleons can blend into their surroundings.
Matamata
Matamata is happy to see you – but hard to see herself.
Largescale Foureyes
Foureye fish can survive on land, if they find themselves stranded at low tide.
Not weird enough for you?
Foureye fish only have two eyes, but each eye is split into two parts, with each part having its own pupil and retina. This allows them to see above and below the water at the same time.
Not weird enough for you?
Foureye fish are “one side maters”, meaning that right-“handed” males only mate with left-“handed” females and vice versa.
Green-Black Dart Frog
Frogs have bright colours to warn predators that they are poisonous.
Frogs have mottled patterns to help them blend in with the forest floor.
Frogs ain’t so bright sometimes.
Greater Siren
Just a handful of these almost destroyed Odysseus’s entire ship. That’s why the great siren is kept behind glass.
Snail
TFW you’re close to the abyss but know that withdrawing into your shell would make the fall more likely.
Fish
Many fish are bitey. Some are more bitey than others.
Splash-Backed Poison Dart Frog
I swear, it’s like Spider-man gets a different costume in every movie.
Ribboned Sea Dragon
The sign said there’s a ribboned sea dragon in here somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.
Electric White Lobster
This is an electric white lobster. Why is it called that? Because it’s white, and it’s related to the electric blue crayfish. Neither have electric powers. Instead, the colour is named after lightning and, apparently, was popular in the 1890’s where they distinguished between deep electric blue (aka French electric blue), iridescent electric blue, medium electric blue, and dark electric blue.
Wikipedia takes care to note that iridescent electric blue is only metaphorically electric and metaphorically iridescent. However, odds are that you are looking at this on some sort of computer screen, so it is metaphorically iridescent, but all of these blues are actually electric.
That also means that, even though there is no such thing as electric white, the white you are seeing in the electric white lobster above is, actually, electric. It’s other name is the White Ghost Lobster. It, however, neither a lobster nor a ghost.
This is a crayfish.
Bumblebee Poison Dart Frog
Species naming is largely a matter of luck. If taxonomy had evolved starting in central America, we’d probably have things like “Non-poisonous Poison Dart Frog Bumblebees.”
Blind Cavefish
According to Damian Moran, Rowan Softley and Eric J. Warrant, the blind cavefish lost its eyes because the visual part of the brain consumes 15% of all the energy used by the fish. So it’s less that they lost their eyes because they didn’t need them in the dark. It’s that, in the dark, there’s less total energy to go around so energy-expensive systems are selected against, as the most efficient fish win the energy game.
Read more at http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/8/e1500363.full
Achilles Tang
Things you may not know about digital cameras:
– If you over-expose and get too much white, it may not be possible to save the image
– If you under-expose and get too much black, it may not be possible to save the image
– They’re very sensitive to red, so it’s easy to get too much red, which makes it hard to save the image.
These fish are hard to shoot.