Favolaschia calocera.  An aggressive invasive, wood-rotting saprotrophic fungus in Hawaii named the orange pore fungus for the enlarged pores on the underside. Records show its introduction to the islands from Madagascar by 2009. It thrives in disturbed habitats which was certainly present courtesy of extensive understory rooting by Kauai’s wild bore population.

With no doubt, this is a flashy reptile. The Gold Dust Day Gecko, Phelsuma laticauda, is a Madagascan gecko introduced back in 1974 on Oahu. Primarly insectivorous, they love nectar and indeed anything sweet.

While looking for much smaller subjects to photograph, I ran across one of my favorite encounters on Kauai. My dear friends, Tom & Jerilyn Kloss have an amazing tropical garden including a collection of maybe 20 pots of these ornamental pineapple many of which were somewhat timidly visited by these nectar-loving geckos.

Nectar Addiction

Normally quite easily spooked, these colorful invasive Gold Dust Day Gecko is becoming increasingly resilient while engaged with one of their favorite activity; servicing freshly emerged blossoms. Here on a miniature ornamental pineapple, you can see this GDDG purple tongue exploring a freshing offering.

Reptilian Competition

During 30 years of either living or visiting Kauai, I have witnessed population and dominance struggles between the various introduced species of gecko and anole. At one point it was the Common house gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus that was prolific on the walls of Hawaiian homes. Once the GDDG’s made it to Kauai, they out competed the house geckos to become the dominant species but of late the Green and especially Brown Anole are vying for that position of dominance.

Last September saw my initiation into assignments with National Geographic/Lindblad Expeditions. This opened the door to many fantastic adventures. During assignments, I work on-board the National Geographic ships as the video chronicler. It’s a fantastic job where I get to share in and shoot video of the “adventures of a lifetime” for guests. I edit the adventure together into a trip DVD the guests get to take home with them at the end of their voyage. Starting in mid-December 2014, I headed down to the Galapagos for 6 weeks.

Here is a video of one of the voyages aboard the National Geographic Islander.

© Copyright Lindblad Expeditions.

The new website for Pure Pulse Photography tripppod.com is currently in development. Determining menu items and suitable imagery are the current tasks. Very grateful for all of the work provided through a WordPress theme named King Sized available from themeforest.net. Since this theme was also available as HTML code, I had considered hand-coding this site but practice in the WordPress world is a needed.

Monday July 9th, 2012 – Uploaded a complete set of gallery imagery organized by date in the “PHOTO” section. Figured out how to modify the FancyBox hover effect. Spent the weekend determining image themes for the galleries in preparation for adding these options for browsing the collection. Test theme is “PURE:BLACK&WHITE“.