Creatures

Utila is quite a small island, and anybody who remembers their second year university ecology knows that smaller islands have less diversity of life on land than large islands. So we didn't actually see a great variety of creatures (underwater was a different story), but what we did see was pretty cool.

There were a lot of crabs kicking around the island, and we even found a colony of hermit crabs living in a rock crack near the shore behind our bungalow. We tried to coax one of them out of its shell...

But it didn't appreciate being bothered.

It was rare for us to see these crabs in the daytime. They usually came out at night and appeared suddenly in the headlamp light in front of our bike tires. There were a few close calls, but we avoided any fatalities. One even wandered through our rickety dock-side restaurant one night as we enjoyed a fabulous indian meal. Sure looks crabby.

But crabs the world over fear my presence.

There were plenty of these really nicely coloured lizards running around. These guys were hard to get close so, so props to Jenny for getting this shot.

This restaurant is in a house that is over 100 years old. We sat in the patio out back, and to our amusement, it backed onto a hillside that is home to a local population of iguanas. So we ate our lunch, drank margaritas and watched the iguanas roaming the dirt and sunning themselves.

This was the dominant male who kept moving around the hillside, bobbing his head. We found out later that the iguana head bob is how they establish dominance over their territory.

This spider is the jewel of Utila. It appears on the tourist maps and resides in a garden at a local inn/bar/restaurant called the Jade Seahorse.

It is hard to tell how large the spider is, so we used Jenny's face for scale.