View allAll Photos Tagged Intermediate
Intermediate Periwinkle (Vinca difformis), garden escape along Sandpit Lane, St Albans. Leaves hairless like V. minor. Calyx lobes & corolla tube/lobes intermediate between V. minor & V. major. Often white or paler blue than its relatives.
While on my walk today, I strayed past the duck pond in the Botanic Gardens and got relatively close to this Intermediate Egret. This was the only shot that came out, the other nine were overexposed in various spots (darn white birds in the sunlight).
Name: Intermediate Egret
Also Known As: Plumed Egret
Scientific Name: Ardea intermedia
Range: Northern, Eastern and Southern Australia, Africa, Japan, Malaysia and New Guinea.
Tiger swallow butterflies are found throughout north America and has a range from Alaska to southern Mexico. The butterflies travel in air streams form location to location but most populations only travel in a range of a few hundred miles. Swallow tail butterflies reproduce in large numbers and are considered R selected organisms. When they reproduce the eggs they lay can be in the hundreds. Each single female once mated can lay between 10 and 300 eggs. The swallow tails only specific physiological adaptation is the fake eye on their wings. Most species have a black spot on each wing that tricks predators into thinking it’s an eye. From my observations I have determined that the population in the area is very large and local only. It seems that they are mostly composed of yellow phenol types (the females can be black pheno) and are larger in body size. I see members of the population everywhere within my plot because there is a population of aspen and black cherry trees. Nearest mating members are very close and they do not have to travel very far. The distribution is clumped around the aspens and black cherry but is still distributed in the plot everywhere. It seems this is a source population and the hatched eggs travel to black cherry trees to feed until they pupate. Immigration can come from anywhere in the state as they are distributed everywhere. From my data I have determined if allowed to grow without disturbance after 5 cycles the population would go from 100 to 16000-22000. If allowed to go 20 cycles the numbers would be above 600,000. This shows an R selected growth pattern. While this is what the number would be its not this case. The eggs and pupa often are eaten and many adults do not mate. This means that while my population is growing it is only growing by a few hundred each cycle at most. I applied the intermediate disturbance hypothesis model and the diversity index model to my site. Both models predict population numbers based on disturbance and other species distribution. I found that the intermediate disturbance hypothesis gives reason why the population is growing at the rate the population equations show it to. It is disturbances that keep the population in check. The diversity index also applies because the butterflies need a abundance and diverse number of trees and food sources to sustain a population. It shows that a variety of trees and flowers are used by the butterflies and this shows how there is a population in my plot (there are food sources).
Scriber, J. Mark., Yoshitaka Tsubaki, and Robert C. Lederhouse. Swallowtail Butterflies: Their Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Gainesville, FL: Scientific, 1995. Print.