On a birding trip organised by Partnership for International Birding (https://www.pibird.com/). Main birding guide: Solohery Rasamison. Participants: Louis Imbeau, Fabio Olmos, Rita de Souza, Yuval Ofek. Local guide = Luc.

I found this wasp near a light on my house. The light was surrounded by araneid orb weavers (probably Araneus). Once the wasp got somewhat stuck, and the spider shot out to nab it, but being rather large and heavy, the wasp fell out of the web in the nick of time. This guy was pretty chunky, maybe 2-3 cm from head to the end of the abdomen.

This is high up on one of the dunes in Archer on the northeast coast of Socotra.

This was the only one of its species here, and it has survived change in a way that’s quite remarkable. For one this place is sandblasted for months, during which this is not a place even for humans. Then there is the lack of water, and the hot sun.

Perhaps the most remarkable is that it has been completely buried for months, and still been able to thrive! Now it is in the open and is flowering, and hopefully it will be able to produce seeds that will germinate.

For plants to survive in a desert, they need to get to the water whenever it’s available, and thus grow very long roots. Here the wind has revealed what looks like long tentacles, and in a way they are as without them the plant would die.