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July 4, 2009

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Bug-eyed photographer

The dapper fellow below (Phyllobates terribilis) seems friendly enough, but don’t be fooled. His name means “Terrible One,” and this inch-long golden poison dart frog is actually the world’s most toxic living organism.

One tiny frog contains enough poison to kill a thousand people. But when Mark Moffett, an ecologist at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, went to Colombia to capture its portrait, he had even more to worry about: “I was caught between hostile drug lords and unfriendly Indians.”

But the challenge was irresistible to Moffett, who is an award-winning photographer for National Geographic magazine. Only three outsiders had ever seen the frog alive. “I like to photograph things that have been considered impossible, or have never been shown before,” he says.

That was surely his motive for traveling to New Guinea to capture a glimpse of stag flies (above). With their mini-antlers, musk glands, and vicious battles over territory and females, they look and act just like tiny deer. Moffett, the first person ever to photograph them and their remarkable behavior, jokes: “I call them Dr. Seuss flies because they look the way he would draw a fly, with multi-colored antlers!”

A lot of patience, perseverance, and a good dose of luck led him to capture a tarantula (right) shedding its skin—a once-a-year event. “I call this one ‘A new skin for Ms. Ugly’!” Easier to find, but no less photogenic, was this leaf-cutter ant (below) neatly pruning vegetation by vibrating its mandibles like a hedge-trimmer.

Moffett is the world’s leading photographer of very small creatures—a skill he discovered while a graduate student at Harvard. “The key thing

is to make people forget how small things are,” he explains. He is also an expert on life in the tropical rainforest canopy, where as many as two-thirds of the world’s species live. But don’t call him to shoot the family portrait. Moffett says he has trouble taking people pictures: “They are large, disturbing creatures with minds of their own.”

—Ayala Ochert

Photos: Mark Moffett/
Minden Pictures

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