Not for me, I’m afraid, but for my friend . In just a few years, Scott has become an expert in high-speed nature photography, both in the field and in the studio. He has a knack for capturing fleeting moments of animal movement and behavior that most photographers miss. It’s not luck – hours and sometimes days and weeks of meticulous planning go into Scott’s images. Not surprisingly, the results are beautiful and, in many cases, completely unique.

MSNBC recently published a story on Scott’s unique photography, which you can read . It’s great to see a major news outlet paying attention to nature photography, especially when the photographer in question is a friend of mine! Great work, Scott! Keep an eye on Scott’s photography by checking out his and subscribing to his . On his blog are some impressive samples from his most recent project: !

The anoles kept me pretty busy in Miami, but I still managed to visit a few photographer friends. On my last weekend in Florida, I headed down to Big Pine Key, where my friend lives and works at the National Key Deer Refuge. The Key Deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) is an endangered subspecies of the White-tailed Deer, and it is only found on a few of the southern Florida Keys (primarily Big Pine Key). Chad is a biologist and a photographer, so he knows the local wildlife and the best places to photograph just about everything down in the Keys. On my first afternoon, we had good luck with the deer; we saw some bucks with velvet-covered antlers, plenty of does, and even a few scrawny fawns.

The following morning, after a late night drinking beer and playing pool at the Coconut (home of the apparently infamous “sip ‘n snip” hair-salon-in-a-bar), we headed out early to another of Chad’s favorite spots, a little lagoon on a small key north of Big Pine. While this lagoon is a nesting site for Wilson’s Plovers and Least Terns, recent rains had flooded most of the nests and many of the birds were either feeding older chicks that had escaped the flooding, or re-pairing to begin a second nesting attempt. It made for some good opportunities to photograph the adults courtship feeding – the male gives the female a fish as a “nuptial gift” to encourage her to mate with him. I didn’t see any matings, but I did manage to photograph the exchange of the fish. With any luck, the weather will cooperate for the terns and these new nesting attempts won’t suffer the same fate as the previous ones!

Chad uses his photography to promote conservation in Florida, and he also organizes others to do the same. He is an administrator of the very active group on Flickr, and he also helps organize the annual , sales of which benefit the state’s “Florida Forever” conservation and recreation land acquisition program. Chad is also on the Committee, where he helps organize a terrific week of photography and networking for the scholarship students at the annual NANPA Summit.

One of my undergraduate research assistants, Alex, recently returned to Miami from Formentera. He flew out here in May to help me with my research and to conduct his own first independent research project. I thought it would be neat for him to share his research experience with people so I asked him to write a little article for the blog. Here it is:

My name is Alex Ehrenzeller. I’m one of Nate’s undergraduate research assistants here in Formentera. In addition to helping Nate with his work, I had the opportunity to conduct my own research project this summer, and I figured I’d provide a little insight into that research.

This is my first time studying behavioral ecology. In fact, this is my first time fully executing a scientific experiment from start to finish outside of a classroom environment. I find it can be difficult to understand scientific literature because the writing is technical, the themes so specific, that it often becomes difficult to relate to what is being studied.  For this reason, I decided to study mate-choice in lizards. Specifically, I investigated whether males sexually prefer females they have already mated and spent time with, or females they have never seen before—a topic almost every human being on earth can relate to!

Male preference to court females they are not sexually familiar with, is known as the ‘Coolidge effect. The term comes from an old story, according to which, President Coolidge and his wife visited a chicken farm. While on the farm tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many eggs with so few roosters. The farmer explained that his roosters performed their duty dozens of times each day.

“Tell that to Mr. Coolidge,” pointedly replied the First Lady.

After overhearing these remarks, the president asked the farmer, “Does each rooster service the same hen each time?”

“No,” replied the farmer, “there are many hens for each rooster.”

“Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” replied the President.

This effect is widespread in animals and research shows that many bird, mammal and reptilian species exhibit this sexual preferences.

Why do males of so many species prefer to mate with females they have never mated with, and why do they loose interest in females they have already mated with? The simple answer is that the more females a male can mate with, the more offspring he’ll leave behind. If offspring don’t require paternal care, it makes much more sense to mate with a dozen females than mating with the same female a dozen times. If the benefits of mating with new females outweigh the costs of searching, courting and mating with them, natural selection should favor males who are capable of distinguishing between new females and ones they have already mated with. I set out to test whether male Ibiza wall lizard (Podarcis pityusensis) can distinguish between individual females and whether they prefer to mate with novel, unfamiliar females over the boring familiar ones.

This is how we did it: we collected 80 lizards (half male and half female) from the scenic Trocadors Peninsula (insert pic).  We then released half the males and half of the females into our outdoor enclosures (insert pic). We observed the lizards for about 40 hours during the course of one week and recorded every time a male try to court a female, or actually mated with one. We then randomly selected half of the females from each enclosure, dew a little dot on their head so that we knew who they were, placed them into the opposite enclosure and continued to observe and record reproductive behavior for the next 2 days.

It turns out that males can distinguish between new and old females and significantly prefer to mate with the new ones! Not only did reproductive activity increase once we placed the new females in, but males tried to mate with the novel females more than twice as often as the old ones.

Working with Nate on his project, and designing and executing my own independent project taught me a great deal of how actual science is performed.  Working in the field doesn’t always go smoothly, but running into problems and finding solutions to those problems is fun and rewarding. I feel privileged to of had this opportunity as an undergraduate student. It seems as if the first time many biologists get the opportunity to do real hands-on research is in graduate school, once they are already highly invested in a science career. Undergrad research not only looks good on a CV, but it really shows you how research is done, allowing you to decide whether is may be something you would like. For this reason, I would highly recommend biology students who are considering a career in the sciences to get involved with research as soon as possible.