Hi Jen,
After a torrid month or so of blundering around a web-design application and with the help of the team at Wild Lime Media, we have finally published (and hopefully de-bugged) our new website; complete with a ‘Rainforest Revelations’ weblog.
Now that that’s done, I can return to some semblance of a life. In my absence from your blog, I have captured some interesting images.
The Daintree Cape Tribulation rainforest is at its most vibrant in the wet. Some of its best-kept secrets are revealed in circumstances that are frustratingly uninviting to visitors. Nevertheless, we at Cooper Creek Wilderness carry on with our tours and share the wonder of the wet with a privileged few.
This image of a brush-footed trapdoor spider was captured two nights ago at the entrance to its burrow, deep within the buttress roots of a Javan Ash.
Primitive spiders lack trachea and have very limited respiratory capabilities. Their gill-like book-lungs confer a greater proximity to an aqueous pre-existence, than the more modern and mobile Araneomorphs. They are also less able to travel great distances from the protection of their burrows and tend to have more immobilizing venom.
Also known as whistling spiders, barking spiders or Australia’s Tarantulas, they are subject to concerning pressures from collectors who sell them as pets for around $400 each. In an attempt to control these impacts, their trade has become regulated by licencing requirements (I wonder if this is having any success).
The other interesting image is a magnification of a longicorn beetle’s head, Batocera sp., whose family includes Australia’s largest beetle.
Their powerful mandibles rip into timber and their large, white and fleshy larvae are favoured bush-tucker for Cape York bama.
All the best from Cooper Creek Wilderness,
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Hi Neil,
Thanks for the neat pix as always. Thankfully at least one company is now captive-breeding the spiders and this will hopefully be able to take over from the destructive wild-caught pet trade in them – hopefully. They pack a hell of a punch when they bite apparently. They are selling in many pet shops in Sydney for about $100 each. It is great to see inverts becoming known in households by kids, but I have seen a lot of neglect of animals like phasmids, so I think the spiders and giant burrowing bush cockies probably suffer similar fates. Maybe some of these kids grow up and become entomologists like Jennifer once was!
Libby,
I have never kept spiders … or snakes for that matter.
I didn’t start keeping insects until after I had my degree. Then rearing colonies of different species was my day job for some years.
As a child growing up I was variously responsible for feeding potty calves, horses, tortoises, monkeys (when we lived in Sulawesi), lorikeets, two koalas (for a brief period when we lived at Conondale) … and Mum (if she is reading this blog) can probably add to the list.
When I was at boarding school I talked them into letting me keep an aquarium of snails and another of earthworms for a brief period of time.
And now I feed the menagerie at this blog, some thought or other, almost daily. 🙂
Thanks Neil,
Nice to have a bit of reality back on the blog after all those turgid climate threads. The mugshot of the longicorn is superb. Another longicorn (Bardistus cerberi) lays its eggs in balga (grasstrees) in Western Australia, and the grubs (bardi) were (are) eaten by Nyoongars (and others!). You have to rap them on your thumbnail to knock the dirt off. Like chicken and peanuts. Balga groves belonged to particular Elders, and it was a spearing offence to quipple (steal) bardi. Maybe that’s why I limp a bit.
Hi Neil,
Nice site. Your Australian kingfisher is quite similar to our Scandinavian one.
Re keeping spiders as pets. I know one person who owns one, and he is not suitable as a pet owner, you know one who keeps pitbulls and spiders just to scare the neighbourhood. Maybe it is different in Australia.
Actually I have the biggest respect for big hairy spiders, but where I come from , a spider means luck!
Hey Neil,
I love the images and richness of colours juxtapose at your website and blog.
I wanted to leave this message there, as a comment.
I have logged in, I have a password, but I am incapable of getting the system to let me leave a message … all too complicated.
I don’t know if anyone else has tried?
Access issue resolved.
Sorry.
Hmm
I like the pictures. Could I ask some techie questions? What macro lens did you use for the close-ups? Did you use a magnifying rings?
Pet-trade is an issue for some tarantulas, but destruction of animals ‘as pests’ is a far bigger threat.
Chthonic regards
B
G’day chthoniid,
65mm F2.8 1-5x macro lens (no magnifiying rings). Very sensitive. I have more recently acquired a micro-adjustment rail as focussing is made by varying the distance between the subject and the front of the lens.
I was interested to read that you are ‘chiefly interested in wildlife conservation, and how economics can help provide solutions to management, habitat-loss and harvest problems’.
In Australia, the environmental functions and mandates of government land management agencies are not regarded as business activities; therefore, they are not required to maintain competitive neutrality.
As around 70% of the national landscape is held under private interests, this forms a major exclusionary influence to conservation on the majoritry of Australia (private lands).
I agree re: pets, but I also see that the artificial landscape that provides habitat value to the metropolitan multitudes yearns for some expression of contact with nature, which pets seeem to gratify in some kind of notional sense. Its measure of econjomic importance is indicated by an entire row in most major supermarkets devoted to pet food.
Neil
Hi Neil
Hmm, a macro that can do 5x magnification would do it- it sounds like a very expensive piece of ‘glass’ however. Are you using a DSLR or a film-SLR?
Widlife economics generates a lot of challenges- not the least of which is that most policy emanates from the public sector :-). A lot of people in the private sector, would like to do more.
Ownership of native wildife in NZ is also quite onerous. I think this tends to deprive people (as children) of contact with their own native animals. You end up promoting ignorance (and sometimes fear) about these animals- and who needs rabbits as pets anyway ;-).
I was a little proud of my 11 year old daughter, who in her last school field trip was identifying native birds in the bush for her classmates.
Chthonic ruminations
B
Hi B,
DSLR.
Because of the nature of our family business and the circumstances of their upbringoing, my kids regularly astonish visiting parents (particularly of similarly aged kids) with their interpretive knowledge and yet despite their upbringing, they are still motivated by peer pressure to ‘own’ a domestic pet.
A prospect that both the World Heritage Convention and the resident python population would not tolerate.
Hi Neil
thanks- I’m expanding my nature photography interests and have been playing with a DSLR quite happily. Hence the techie questions…
I get a little surprised when Australians or Kiwis manifest ignorance about their own wildlife. Unlike many countries, we’re not actually all that divorced from many of the more common species. You have to try pretty hard to ignore what’s around you.
Of course, your spot of the world sounds rather more unique…you must have some lucky children.
Hello, nice site 🙂