Leslie Bulion
Children's Book Author

Hurricane Irene knocked all kinds of insects from their hiding places in the forest canopy and elsewhere. I surprised a cicada, stuck my hand in an ants' nest, checked out two gorgeous caterpillars, and said a face-to-face hello to a praying mantis, all in one afternoon of Irene clean-up. It's a great time for a bug safari! Be mindful of disturbed bee and wasp nests as you go, and check out my BUG JOURNAL for the rest of the photos.

I arrived in Austin, Texas for the Texas Library Association annual meeting with a mission: to see BATS! Hundreds of bats, thousands of bats, millions and billions and trillions of bats!

Ok, not trillions. But the underside of the Congress Avenue bridge in downtown Austin is home to the world's largest urban bat colony,and every evening from spring to fall, 1.5 MILLION Mexican free-tail bats wake up and emerge from the concrete crevices for their evening hunt in a long, long river of whirring black that snakes away over the treeline and up into the Austin sky.

It grew too dark for video during our visit, but later in the summer the bats emerge when it's lighter: view video.

To read more about these migratory bats, visit Bat Conservation International.

Last week I was 90 feet below the surface, SCUBA diving and exploring the coral reefs surrounding the tiny island of Little Cayman in the Caribbean Sea. More about Little Cayman in another post, but for now, let's get into the water!

Though I knew that lionfish belong in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and not in the Caribbean, I was still excited to snap an underwater photo of my first sighting of this exotic and venomous fish species. Even the second lionfish got my best diver-paparazzi attention. But by the time I saw my eighth lionfish on that very first dive, I was scowling and growling. So I went topside to the Central Caribbean Marine Institute to learn more about this unwelcome reef invader.

According to graduate research interns Savanna Barry and Morgan Edwards, in the three short years since the first lionfish was spotted at Little Cayman their numbers have skyrocketed. They reproduce frequently, laying tens of thousands of eggs at a go, and have no known Caribbean predators. The adult lionfish are out-competing large native predators for the juvenile and small reef fish, shrimp and crabs they each gobble at an estimated rate of 30 per day. This is disrupting the elegant and delicate balance of the coral reef ecosystem. For example, those juvenile fish can't do their algae-eating job very well if they're in a lionfish's stomach.



(photos courtesy of E.T. Steadman)

Researchers capture 50 to 90 lionfish each week, analyze their stomach contents, and examine the age rings on the tiny bones, called otoliths, that fish use as balance organs.


Although they don't expect lionfish to leave the Caribbean, researchers hope that natural predators will step up and keep them in check so they don't kill off the coral reef ecosystem they have invaded. Those natural predators can include humans! When people develop a taste for a certain kind of fish, it can put serious pressure on fish populations. In this case, that pressure would be welcome, and the researchers assured me that lionfish is tender, flaky and delicious (once you remove those spines). So next time you're in a restaurant you might ask: is lionfish is on the menu?

To find out more about the lionfish invasion, visit NOAA's Coral Reef Information Sytem.