A new paper on a Bolitoglossid showed up in my alerts today! 🥳

It is a one-pager and comes with a beautiful photo of a foraging arboreal salamander 😄

Found this Imantodes cenchoa sleeping on top of a leaf in Punta Laguna, Quintana Roo.

Here is a photo of where it was sleeping:

There are a few different snakes of the genus Imantodes in Yucatán. What sets this species apart is that the row of scales on its back consists of enlarged scales. Here is a closeup emphasizing that row of scales. The green arrow points at an enlarged mid-dorsal scale, the blue arrow at a regular scale.

In comparison, here is a photo from an Imantodes tenuissimus that I took back in 2009 in Mérida, Yucatán (with a less sharp camera), and a closeup of its mid-dorsal scales that does not show this enlargement.

One of my favorite frogs! Spent some time specifically looking for it. Managed to find two near Cobá, in Quintana Roo (in the Yucatán peninsula). This frog hides in holes in lime stone and tree trunks, and makes use of its flat head to block the entrance. This type of defense is known as phragmosis.

Some other shots:

Found this anole in Yucatan. I am not sure of its exact species - probably an Anolis sp..

Anoles often sleep at the tips of leaves and twigs. My guess is that this is a strategy to prevent nocturnal predators sneaking up on them through the branches without making its bed vibrate. When woken up they can quickly drop down.

These are quite common in Yucatan, Mexico.

The leatherleaf slugs belong to the family Veronicellidae. This particular one could be Sarasinula plebeia, but it is not so easy to definitively ID these.

I originally identified this species a few years ago from the description on this website, but since then they have added an update stating that my original source is also unsure on this one.

UPDATE: It seems that IDing certain slugs by pictures isn’t a good idea. In 2024 when pictures on this page were uploaded to iNaturalist, another user suggested a different species in the genus Leidyula, and then user “deneb16,” a mollusk specialist at UNAM, Mexico’s main university, added the comment that all Mexican species of the family this slug belongs to can’t be identified without dissecting their sexual organs. The family, she agrees, is the Leatherleaf Slug Family, the Veroncellidae.

So, I am not 100% of the species, but it is a leatherleaf slug.

Found many of these frogs under a wet trash bag in a back yard in Mérida, Yucatán. I made use of a handheld flash with a remote trigger for lighting, and a Sigma 105 mm as my macro lens.

These frogs do not seem to match with any of the local frogs reported in Julian C. Lee's field guide to the amphibians and reptiles of the maya world.

From a reverse image search, I mostly found images of the green house frog Eleutherodactylus planirostris. Eleutherodactylus planirostris is native to Cuba and the Bahamas, and is often introduced with plants that come from green houses in those areas. These frogs go from tadpole to frog while still inside of the egg, which explains why the baby frogs are so small.

The visual aspect, the incredibly small baby frogs, and the fact that they were found in a back yard in the city with greenhouse plants, all lead me to conclude that it is likely Eleutherodactylus planirostris.

Cross-posting to the OpenSource community as I think this topic will also be of interest here.

This is an analysis of how "open" different open source AI systems are. I am also posting the two figures from the paper that summarize this information below.

ABSTRACT

The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are ‘open weight’ at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions.

Figure 2 (click to enlarge): Openness of 40 text generators described as open, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (bottom) as closed reference point. Every cell records a three-level openness judgement (✓ open, ∼ partial or ✗ closed). The table is sorted by cumulative openness, where ✓ is 1, ∼ is 0.5 and ✗ is 0 points. RL may refer to RLHF or other forms of fine-tuning aimed at fostering instruction-following behaviour. For the latest updates see: https://opening-up-chatgpt.github.io

Figure 3 (click to enlarge): Overview of 6 text-to-image systems described as open, with OpenAI's DALL-E as a reference point. Every cell records a three-level openness judgement (✓ open, ∼ partial or ✗ closed). The table is sorted by cumulative openness, where ✓ is 1, ∼ is 0.5 and ✗ is 0 points.

There is also a related Nature news article: Not all ‘open source’ AI models are actually open: here’s a ranking

PDF Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3630106.3659005