Cuban Tree Frog, Osteopilus septentrionalis from the photographer's back yard in Central Florida. The photographer writes; As you may or may not know, the Cuban Tree Frog is an invasive species in Florida, having worked (or hitchhiked) its way up from Cuba and/or other Caribbean islands. It is an ugly, voracious predator that likes to hang around our pool at night with its buddies making lots of froggy noises. When I am not attentive to maintenance of the pool, I sometimes find hundreds and hundreds of jellified egg clots floating in it on certain mornings during the summer. The species it displaced is cuter and more Disneyesque. We Floridians have been instructed to put them into plastic bags when we find them and place them in the freezer. This is because they can get quite big, well beyond the squash-with-a-single-swing-of-a-shoe size. Freezing them is a less messy way to accomplish their demise.
Image: Ricky Cope Copeland.
As long as you send images to me (and I hope it will be for forever), I shall continue to share them with my readership. My purpose for posting these images is to remind all of us of the grandeur of the natural world and that there is a world out there that is populated by millions of unique species. We are a part of this world whether we like it or not: we have a choice to either preserve these species or to destroy them in search of short-term monetary gains. But if we decide to destroy these other life forms, the least we can do is to know what we are destroying by learning that they exist. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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WOW, thanks for posting my picture of Ricky, The Cuban Tree Frog. Since this represents the greatest degree of internet notoriety I have yet attained, I am somewhat reluctant to point out that Ricky and I do not, in fact, share the same first name.
However, thank you again for giving me a reason to send countless e-mails with links to unsuspecting friends and passers-by. You made my day.
And for any who might be pondering Ricky's fate: no, he did not end up in our freezer. My feeling about most invasive species is that if they somehow managed to con their way to our shores, more power to them. I can state that confidently with the premise that I belong to the most successfully invasive species of all time.