How do mussels move upstream?  Some go fishing.  The female Higgins eye has an elaborate minnowlike lure (complete with eyespot), which is filled with thousands of its microscopic young.  It wiggles and undulates the bait until a fish strikes at it, exploding the baby mussels into the fish’s gills.  A few of the youngsters manage to hang on for a couple of weeks, then they fall off in a new part of the stream.  It’s ingenious, really.  The only hard part: photographing this nocturnal species’ display, which in this case happened at about 3 a.m.  No sleep for me.

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I’ve photographed some frightening things in my time — charging musk oxen, poisonous snakes, and angry drunk people to name a few.  I never thought I’d add an amphibian to that list, but I met one in a back room at the Baltimore Aquarium.

This was a frog with an attitude. He was about the size of a softball, quite mad and growling like a cat, believe it or not. He could also bite — there’s a single tooth-like protrusion in the roof of his mouth that can draw blood. He started snapping at us, so we put him back in his enclosure. I never thought I’d be scared of a frog. First time for everything.

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To make up for the lack of posts around here lately, we’re also going to include links to desktop wallpaper downloads with each Rare post.  We’re also going to make blogging a team effort — you’ll still hear from Joel, but we’ll also have others on Team Sartore (including a family member or two) do posts from time to time.  Enough of me, though.  Here’s a story from Joel:

Rare Story: The Ocelot

The key in photographing anything is having time and good access.  In this case, we had access to the only ocelot I know of that is trained to walk on a leash, at the San Diego Zoo.  Time was the real issue, though.  Many of these animals will stand still only for food.  The moment they get full, the shoot is over.  We got eight minutes.

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Get free shipping on signed copies of Rare until March 16, 2010 — visit rarethebook.com.

Of all the characters I met while doing State Fairs last summer, none impressed me more than Greg Carpenter, aka ‘Dr. Danger’. One of the last of the true dare devils, Greg made his living going from town to town and doing death-defying feats at public venues. At the Iowa State Fair, Dr. Danger not only lit himself on fire, but also jumped a car through a wall of fame, crashing into a stack of cars on the other side. Sound dangerous? It is.