Corbin Jones, at UNC was ridiculously generous with his scarce free time while I was in town. He took me and Shelah on a hike through the forest near his house. It was a very cool place. We walked a couple of miles (maybe?) on this loop through the forest, setting out bait along the way. Early the next morning, Corbin and I went back through to collect the traps. Unfortunately, it had rained quite hard the night before, so most of the traps were flooded and useless. Fortunately, it had rained quite hard the night before, so I was witness to a lovely thunderstorm. For those who don’t know, the San Francisco Bay Area does not have thunderstorms. I see a streak of lightning about once a year here, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard thunder. I took a video of the storm with my camera. I love how the thunder goes on forever. I turned out all of the lights, opened my doors, and enjoyed the storm with my hookah.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3869308407971584944&hl=en

Anyway, Corbin and I collected the traps and we also found a ton of drosophila feeding on some mushrooms. I’m posting a bunch of pictures of them here, so that someone will tell me what kind of mushrooms these are. The little black insect on the underside are some kind of wasp, but the red-eyed buggers on top are my Drosophila.

I also couldn’t get over the poison ivy in this forest. I grew up around poison ivy, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Apparently, it grows like a giant, red, hairy vine all over these trees. Dead vines were everywhere!

I also saw a lot of really cool insects here, as well as a lizard with a blue tail and a copperhead snake! (I know that’s not an insect there on the right, by the way.)

There were two insects that were really bizarre. One of them is this black freaky thing on the ground (below left) and one was this cryptic little bug that I saw getting attacked by a spider when I was trying to take a close-up picture of the hairy poison ivy. The spider kept running at him and he kept waving his front legs around in the air at the spider. His legs looked like medieval weapons, like maces. Anybody know what these are?