Arad

I went collecting again this weekend with Efrat. This time her supervisor came along, and their lab visitor, and we actually stayed to collect. It was interesting for me to help collect. I think it was also interesting for them for me to be helping, mainly because they were only interested in a few families of spiders, and although I'm pretty sure I knew enough to separate 'spider' from 'not spider', beyond that I was pretty much a novice......there was a lot of "this one has a red shiny butt....it's kind of irradescent.....do you need this one?" You can see I knew a lot of the technical 'spider terms' as well.


We started the day in a Wadi beside the highway between Arad and the Dead sea. After the floods the week before, the plants in the Wadi had started to germinate. This is some of the first green I've seen!


Sometimes there was just a bit of green poking through cracks in the mud.


And sometimes there was a whole lot of green!


Picking up rocks to look for spiders, you find all kinds of interesting things. This gecko covered it's eyes with it's tail everytime we looked at it.....like a little kid hiding by putting their hands over their eyes.


It was a very pretty area. Sometimes you could forget there was a highway 10 metres behind us.


Then we moved to another area near Arad. You can see Arad in the back on the right in this picture.


We found more crocuses (a different type this week) at this site, which we were very excited about


This little bit of colour really does change the look of the desert


We also found some flax in flower


We took this picture of the beetle we found on my t-shirt. Efrat put it there and it just stayed......it's defense strategy is just to freeze, and so it just sat there.....

I feel as though, because it takes me a little while to update my blog, and so I'm writing about the past, and already know what is coming in the 'future' that I should be giving previews at the end of my posts. Or maybe I should just leave everyone in suspense (although this might be a stretch of the use of the word).......hmmmm.......coming up next week......locusts. Enticing?