The great insect order Orthoptera includes such dissimilar insects such as cockroaches, grasshoppers, walking sticks and praying mantis. This is a green female praying mantis, out for food, as she must ripen the eggs she is already carrying in her body, before creating the typical egg-case to include them. Today we hiked Islas Espiritu Santo and La Partida, enjoying the lovely views of volcanic tuffs and pyroclastic flows. Great numbers of different plant species such as cacti were seen, and the rarest among them was the pencil cactus, Wilcoxia striata.
Endemic to this lovely island near the capital of the state of Baja California Sur are the black jackrabbit and the antelope ground squirrel, of which we saw one individual eating small fruit and seeds between bouts of running and jumping from rock to rock at full speed. Others of us snorkeled in the limpid waters of the bay and saw a good selection of reef fishes of different colors and dispositions. During the morning we had kayaked in the small bay called Bahia Ballenas (Whale Bay), enjoying the typical solitude of Baja California, where we were the only people in the area.
