Research & Collections at the Florida Museum of Natural History

Museum Resource 🐍 Florida Snake ID Guide

Easy visual ID and searchable tool for learning about our state's snakes including habitat, range, diet and look-alike species.

Featured: Gray Ratsnake (Pantherophis spiloides)
Other common names: Gray Rat Snake, Oak Snake, White Oak Snake
NON-VENOMOUS
Most adult Gray Ratsnakes are about 42-72 inches (106-183 cm) in total length. Adults are light gray with darker gray blotches down the back. The belly is sandy-gray with dark square blotches.

In Florida, Gray Ratsnakes occur in the Panhandle west of the Apalachicola River. However, they do readily interbreed with Eastern Ratsnakes (Pantherophis alleghaniensis) in the area.

The names for species and past subspecies of ratsnakes within the “Pantherophis obsoletus” complex have changed many times over the last several years. However, the currently proposed names and relationships are not universally accepted, and they may continue to be tweaked as additional information is collected and analyzed.

Full info and browse more:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/florida-snake-id/snake/gray-ratsnake/

Photo courtesy of Luke Smith

Dancing spiders, cryptic females and experimenting with makeup -- learn all about these jumping cuties! 🕷️ Our recent gallery exhibit has been reimagined as an online exhibit so you can check it out any time:

Online Exhibit 🕺💃 Colorful Dancing Spiders
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/online/colorful-dancing-spiders/

"One cannot overemphasize the importance of plant/pollinator interactions. The world as we know it would not exist without these complex components of ecology." Listen 🎧 to In Defense of Plants:

Ep. 497 - Understanding the Bewildering Diversity of Plant/Pollinator Interactions — In Defense of Plants In Defense of Plants' Matt Candeias talks with Dr. Chris Cosma of Conservation Biology Institute about what it takes to bring plant/pollinator interactions to the forefront.

Online Exhibit 🧵 Rare, Beautiful & Fascinating

In the early 1900s, Seminole women adopted hand-cranked sewing machines and revolutionized their patchwork tradition with more complex patterns.

"Nowadays patchwork is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Seminole culture. The colorful designs and combinations of colors are truly spectacular," said archaeologist Bill Marquardt.

🎧 Read + listen to more with Bill: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/100-years/object/womans-patchwork-skirt/

Feature:
Woman’s Patchwork Skirt
Made by a Seminole artist, South Florida
Dates to 1950s

📸 Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace

Tiny frog! 🐸 A closer look at one of the smallest known vertebrates on Earth -- smaller than some ants. It's a little frog.
The New York Times 🔒 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/science/tiny-frog-toad-brazil.html

Our herpetologist Dave Blackburn and Jaimi Grey were co-authors on this new paper.

This Toad Is So Tiny That They Call It a Flea A “toadlet” in Brazil is the second-smallest vertebrate known to exist on the planet.

Spooky natural history 👾 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Columned stinkhorn (Clathrus columnatus)

A strange, alienlike egg has appeared in your home garden. It is the columned stinkhorn, a fungus that grows on decaying plant material and receives nutrients from bacterial activity in rotting wood.

Inside the white, round structure, a brown gelatinous substance encases the immature fruiting body until it is ready to emerge. Once it does, two to five spongy, orange-red columns will appear, curled like tentacles and sometimes merging at the top in a squishy arch.

The smell will hit you before you lay eyes on it. Stinkhorns are aptly named, with an odor similar to rotting flesh or f***s — or both. Unlike many other mushroom-forming fungi, the columned stinkhorn does not disperse its spores by releasing them into the wind but by recruiting other organisms.

At the top of its stalks, the stinkhorn produces a slimy mass of spores known as the gleba. While the smell may be repugnant to humans, it’s irresistibly alluring to some insects and other invertebrates. As they crawl and fly around the columned stinkhorn, insects pick up a small amount of the brown, spore-embedded slime, which they later deposit on the next surface they rub against next.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

Photo by Alex Abair, CC BY-NC

Online Exhibit 🌅 Women of the Everglades
In the early 1900s, three influential Florida women laid the foundation for Everglades conservation: May Mann Jennings, Minnie Moore-Willson, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Inspired by three different causes, these women helped pioneer Everglades conservation during a time when women’s roles in politics and policy-making were limited:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/online/women-everglades/

Spooky natural history 😱 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Cicada killer wasps (Sphecius speciosus)

By Halloween, many cicadas will have undergone unimaginable horror at the hands of the cicada killer wasp.

Measuring up to 2 inches long, cicada killer wasps evolved their disturbingly large proportions to abduct cicadas, which are themselves large insects.

Throughout July and September, female cicada killer wasps mate, dig nesting burrows in soil and hunt for cicadas. The wasp paralyzes its prey with a venomous sting, then glides back to the nest with her immobilized captive in tow.

Back in the burrow, the wasp lays an egg on top of the unlucky cicada and seals up the entrance on her way out.

Later, the egg hatches into a larva that eats the cicada alive, gaining fuel to grow and spin a cocoon. It remains below ground through the winter as it transitions into a pupa before emerging in the summer as an adult, ready to start the cycle all over again.

Despite their intimidating name and appearance, cicada killer wasps are rarely aggressive toward humans and play an important role in keeping ecosystems balanced by controlling cicada populations.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

Photo by Alejandro Santillana, Insects Unlocked, CC0

There are 16 species of clover in Florida, but only two (Trifolium carolinianum and Trifolium reflexum) are native to the state. Learn more:
🍀🍀🍀

Five Facts: Clover in Florida Fact 1: There are a lot of clovers! The genus Trifolium, commonly known as clover, consists of about 255 species in the pea and bean family, or Fabaceae. Clovers live in temperate and subtropical parts of North and South America and the Old World. Three geographic regions have the most clover d

Spooky natural history 🪤 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Bladderwort (Utricularia spp.)

Bladderworts can be found lurking in freshwater all over the world, and they’re especially diverse in Florida, which boasts 14 native species. Bladderworts may look like regular aquatic plants, but don’t be fooled. Beneath the water’s surface, each plant produces hundreds of water-filled sacs called utricles or bladder traps.

The trap is one of the fastest, most sophisticated and deadliest structures in the plant kingdom, and bladderworts use them to abduct and digest prey.

For the trap to work, specialized glands push some, but not all, of the water out, creating a bubble of air and a pressure differential inside. When the unsuspecting insect, protozoan or fish fry wanders too close, its movement triggers the tiny hairs on the outside of the trap.

In less than one-hundredth of a second, the trap door mechanically buckles and caves in, acting as a vacuum and dragging the victim inside. The door quickly closes, and the trap secretes enzymes to break down its prey. A cabal of hungry bacteria and fungi that live inside the utricles help speed up digestion. The speed of this capture mechanism is so remarkably fast that scientists couldn’t figure out how it worked until the invention of high-speed cameras.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

Photo by Gilles Ayotte, CC BY-SA

Our live, interactive labs in exhibits have been popular among visitors. A new study looks at what our scientists and volunteers got from the experience and how they think we can make the live labs even better.

Interactive museum exhibit shows how paleontologists study the past A recent paleontology exhibit at the Florida Museum of Natural History put fossils and scientists on full display. The exhibit featured a live laboratory in which paleontologists and volunteers cleaned and prepared specimens from Montbrook, a nearby fossil site with animal remains that have been pre

Black Witch Beer Launch 🍺 Oct 30
WEDNESDAY! 🧙‍♀️ Meet our Daniels Lab team at First Magnitude Brewing Company for a special beer highlighting the Black Witch moth to support butterfly conservation in Florida. Bonus: native plant giveaway!

Check out spooky specimens from the museum collections and grab a free native plant (while supplies last)! Glasses with the logo imagery will also be available for purchase at the event.

📌 Event info + plant giveaway details:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/event/black-witch-beer-launch/

🐘 Rare fossils discovered in the Kashmir Valley show the earliest evidence of animal butchery in India and add to our knowledge of an extinct genus of elephants whose members were more than twice the weight of today’s African elephants.

The stone tools likely used for marrow extraction at the site were made with basalt, a type of rock not found in the local area.

Story & studies:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/rare-fossils-of-extinct-elephant-document-the-earliest-known-instance-of-butchery-in-india/

Spooky natural history 😨 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Winter worm summer grass (Ophiocordyceps sobolifera)

An ancient Chinese text from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618- AD 907) and Tibetan manuscripts written in the 15-16th centuries reference a shape-shifting organism that lives out the winter as a worm and transforms into a plant during the summer.

This fanciful creature may seem like the stuff of myth, but it’s actually a fairly good description of a fungus that infects certain insects, including moths and cicadas.

If you live someplace warm, you’re probably most familiar with large adult cicadas, which ascend to the forest canopy in droves and emit a shrill, deafening chorus. But this is just the tail end of their lifecycle. Cicadas spend most of their lives as larva (worm-like, juvenile insects) and more developed nymphs, which live underground and chew on roots.

In many areas, including Florida, these juvenile cicadas are susceptible to a fungal infection that eats away at their insides and engulfs the cicada in a hardened sphere of wispy filaments called hyphae. At the onset of warmer weather, the fungus produces fruiting bodies that grow out of the cicada’s head and emerge above ground, where its spores are distributed by wind.

The Chinese and Tibetan text likely refer to a closely related fungal species, Ophiocordyceps sinensis, which similarly parasitizes ghost moths in the family Hepialidae.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace

Spooky natural history 👻 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Scrub ghost pipe (Monotropa brittonii)

You may see ghost pipes out of the corner of your eye, growing beneath the trees in the deep, shady wilderness. These plants spend most of their lives hidden away underground, but when conditions are right, they emerge from the shadows with frightening flowers.

Their ghastly stalks and flowers are eerily white and turn a dark coal black when they die. Ghost pipes have no chlorophyll, and they don’t photosynthesize. Instead, they indirectly steal nutrients from other plants by tapping into a massive subterranean network of fungi.

At least 80% of plants are known to have symbiotic relationships with underground fungi. Plants give sugars from photosynthesis to their fungal friends in exchange for water and nutrients from the soil. They also create a sort of below-ground information highway, allowing plants to pass along signals to each other.

Ghost pipes hack into this fungal wood wide web and feed off the nutrient exchange network. It’s a hauntingly unique method of obtaining nutrients. They closely resemble the flowers of blueberries and cranberries, to which ghost pipes are closely related.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

Photo by Liz West, CC BY

Spooky natural history 🧟 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Dead man’s fingers (Xylaria polymorpha)

Like an omen, dead man’s fingers grow at the base of dead and dying plants. Often bent and swollen, as if afflicted with arthritis, the fungal growths bear an uncanny resemblance to their namesake. When younger fungal bodies appear in the spring, they even produce a layer of pale, sometimes blue, asexual spores on their surface that often resemble fingernails.

This wood-rotting fungus grows on trees and shrubs, where it breaks down glucan, a chain of carbohydrates that binds the cell walls in wood together. After the fungus has made its meal of the rotting wood, all that’s left of the stump is a soft mass of cellulose and lignin that insects or other fungi can consume.

Dead man’s fingers grow throughout eastern North America, including Florida. It often appears on American elm, pear and plum trees and darkens until it is mature in summer or fall. Each of its “fingers” has a tiny hole for releasing sexual spores. Removing the above-ground portion of the fungus can reduce the spread of the spores but does nothing to slow the decomposition happening in the soil.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

While we know museum visitors love live labs in exhibits, a new study looks at the experience of the scientists and volunteers laboring in the lab.

Elizabeth Riotto, the study’s lead author and a senior majoring in anthropology and education science, said some of the participants in the lab were initially leery of being in the spotlight.

“Some people hinted at the fact that they were hesitant to be working in a public space. But at the end, people across the board were saying this is exactly what we should be doing.”

Story: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/interactive-museum-exhibit-shows-how-paleontologists-study-the-past/

Study by Megan Ennes, Elizabeth Riotto, and Melanie Giangreco https://doi.org/10.32473/ufjur.26.135449
📌UF Center for Undergraduate Research

The Value of Museums 🐢 From collection to exhibit, our scientists and exhibit team worked to highlight the beautiful biodiversity of our state's turtles in this eye-catching display.
About:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/blog/so-many-shells-freshwater-turtles-of-florida/

FREE Exhibit: Water Shapes Florida
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/water-shapes-florida/

Spooky natural history 😈 It's a great time to take a closer look at some of Florida's underappreciated natural history ... if you dare!

Devil’s tooth fungus (Hydnellum peckii)

Straight out of John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” this alien fungus is sure to unsettle even the bravest mycologists. When it absorbs excess moisture, it exudes a red liquid that looks like blood from pores in its cap. The crimson color is the result of water mixing with red terphenylquinone pigment in the mushroom.

The underside of the mushroom is equally unsettling. Many mushrooms produce spores in furrows or pores on the underside of their caps, but — as its name suggests — the devil’s tooth fungus uses teeth instead. These fungal fangs aren’t real teeth. Instead, they’re made of mycelium like the rest of the mushroom, and their elongated, toothlike shape provides more surface area to produce spores.

Explore more spooky natural history: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spooky-natural-history/

Live photo by ngkoons, CC BY-NC; Specimen photo by Florida Museum

"How does one "benefit" pollinators in their community? There are a lot of great ways to do this, especially when it comes to native plants, but finding good, digestible information can be overwhelming." 🎧 Listen with the In Defense of Plants podcast:
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/podcast/2024/9/25/n3azvdayziwaz9888orysph1937b69
🐝

Ep. 493 - Being Friendly to Bees — In Defense of Plants In Defense of Plants' Matt Candeias talks with Sara Wittenberg of Pollinator Partnership about bee (and insect) friendly gardening.

Online Exhibit 🤺 Rare, Beautiful & Fascinating

This might look like a sword but it's the ghost of where a sword once was!

"When archaeologists were excavating the ship they found a large chunk of coral which they brought up and had X-rayed. The X-ray showed that the coral had grown around a sword that had been lost, and over time the sword had deteriorated leaving a hollow hole where it once had been," said archaeologist Gifford Waters.

🎧 Read + listen to more with Gifford: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/100-years/object/spanish-sword-cast/

Feature:
Spanish Sword (cast)
From the East Coast of Florida

📸 Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace

Rare fossils discovered in the Kashmir Valley show the earliest evidence of animal butchery in India and add to our knowledge of an extinct genus of elephants whose members were more than twice the weight of today’s African elephants.

Some of the younger Palaeoloxodon species had unusually large, protuberant foreheads unlike that of any living elephant species, while older species lacked this crest. These species in this study represents an intermediate stage.

The stone tools likely used for marrow extraction at the site were made with basalt, a type of rock not found in the local area.

Story and studies:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/rare-fossils-of-extinct-elephant-document-the-earliest-known-instance-of-butchery-in-india/

Museum Resource 🐟 Fishes in the Fresh Waters of Florida
Explore our state's freshwater fish species and click through to see our collection records, photos and map.
Shown: Quillback (Carpiodes cyprinus), native to Florida's freshwaters
🔗 More info & browse gallery:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/discover-fish/florida-fishes-gallery/quillback/

Natural Wonders: Florida’s Freshwater Springs
FREE Gallery Exhibit
Learn how in addition to their vibrant ecosystems, our springs also provide a window into the condition of the state’s groundwater, the source of 90% of drinking water for Floridians.
Exhibit info:

Natural Wonders: Florida's Freshwater Springs Free Admission Dive into the natural beauty of the Sunshine State with 14 high-resolution photographs showcasing some of Florida’s iconic springs. These breathtaking images, taken by nature photographer Jason Gulley, highlight their beauty as well as the plants and animals that call these habitats

Scientist Spotted 🐍 Our herpetologist Coleman Sheehy contributed to a HowStuffWorks post about coral snakes. "Safety includes things like leaving them alone when one is seen and not trying to catch or kill them." Read more:
https://animals.howstuffworks.com/snakes/coral-snake.htm

Coral Snake: Brightly Banded and Highly Venomous These colorful snakes are found all over the world and are highly venomous, so the best strategy is to avoid them.