Thursday, 30 November 2006

A short Walkley off a long career

An unscheduled moment in the Walkley Award ceremony tonight. The Sunday Telegraph's Glenn Milne got up on stage as unsteady as a newt and assaulted Stephen Mayne, who was presenting the Walkely award for the best photographic essay or business something or other. (I wasn't paying that much attention.)

Which of the following reports sounds like the most plausible response from the journalists in the audience?

The Age says:
"You are an absolute disgrace," an outraged Mr Milne shouted, as an audience of the nation's media elite erupted into laughter.

The Sydney Morning Herald says:
Milne then began berating Mayne from the stage as the audience, which consisted of a representation of Australia's top journalists, looked on horrified.

If you missed the mess, Laurel has given the link to the YouTube video in her comment below. (Thank you!) Decide for yourself whether the audience was amused or horrified.

Database regained

I now have contact with the library databases. It took most of the morning to get the problem sorted but sorted it is.

Of course, it was a password problem compounded with a network error. I logged a job with the Helpdesk (who are extremely helpful). They called me back to say the Library had to deal with it. As the person in charge of Web access at the Library hadn't been responding to my 'phone calls and e-mails, I trotted over there. After multiple attempts at logging on, the duty librarian finally managed to get her username and password accepted but I was still in Limbo. (If Limbo remains. It might have been dismissed by now. Or was that Purgatory? Anyway, I was there.)

The duty librarian rang the Web librarian. Her admin officer answered.

'Oh,' he said, when I spoke to him. 'I know your name from somewhere.'

'The 'phone calls and e-mails to which you haven't responded, perhaps?'

'Yes.'

'Can you fix it?'

'No. You need to contact the Helpdesk.'

So back to the Helpdesk. They sent a techie over to show me how to change my password. (Sure, she could have given me the instructions over the 'phone, but they're all desperate to get out of the office.) And that's when the trouble started. I couldn't log on to the system and neither could she. We didn't exist.

Maybe it was my computer? So we trotted back to the IT office. No, she couldn't log on from there. Nor could the other IT personnel. One by one, we were all being excluded from the system.

What I wanted to say but didn't (because I couldn't remember the quote exactly):
Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

But we averted Judgment Day and I now have regained access to the Library database. Woo hoo!

Tuesday, 28 November 2006

Only 100 more words to go before I meet today's writing quota but it's like wringing those last drops of water from the washing.

Bugger! I can't even manage a decent simile. This isn't going well.

Eight-legged enigmas

AÖrstan at Snail's Tales has a great photo of a pseudoscorpion that arrived in to his lab in a soil sample. His post inspired me to write about some of Australia's less familiar arachnids. Sure, everyone knows what a spider looks like. And a scorpion ... well, even if you've never seen a real one face to face, you'll have seen them in newspapers and magazines. (Not convinced? Look under the horoscopes.)

You can tick off ticks from the list and chop out the harvestmen. Mites might be mighty .... Oh, I can't keep this going. Ditch the funnies (I use the term loosely). Here are the groups I want to talk about: amblypygids and schizomids.

Australia has a handful of amblypygids (also known as tailless whip scorpions). These remarkable creatures look like spiders that have been flattened with a shoe. The first pair of legs are long and impossibly thin. They sweep the surface in front of the animal to detect and herd prey towards the business end. And the business end sports a couple of scaled-down bear traps. Anything caught in those spiked pedipalps doesn't get a second chance.

Only three species are known from the mainland, two in NE Queensland and one in the Northern Territory. The first species recorded from this country was Charinus pescotti, which was described in 1949 from specimens collected in the Barron Falls area near Cairns. This is still the best place to see them. The other two species—Charon trebax from vine thicket around Cromarty, near Alligator Creek, and C. oenpelli from the sandstone outcrops of Kakadu—were only described in 1998. There are almost certainly more species out there. How many have been mistaken for funny-looking spiders and ignored?

Schizomids are even stranger. When you see them crawling through the leaf litter of rainforests, they look more like tiny crickets than arachnids. But get up close and count the legs. Some species have eschewed the wet debris of the forest floor and live in caves. Cape Range in Western Australia is the centre of the universe for troglobitic schizomids.

Almost fifty species have been described from Australia, which isn't a bad haul on a global scale. Every one of them has been named by arachnologist Mark Harvey over the past fifteen or so years, including Barrow Island's cave-dwelling Draculoides bramstokeri. Who says systematists don't have a sense of humour?

Monday, 27 November 2006

They come out at night

Max Schreck might have died in 1936 but his spirit lives on in Nosferatu, the sugar glider.

This fellow was caught out and about by daylight near Anakie in SW Victoria. Sugar gliders (Petaurus breviceps) are normally nocturnal, scampering up tree trunks and gliding between them in search of nectar, fruit and the sweet sap of wattles and gums trees. And (Renfield-like) they'll also chew on any animal small enough to subdue.

(Thanks to H & Q for the photo. I think their carotid arteries remain puncture-free.)

Computer says No

We've moved from one e-mail system to another at work. For about an hour or so, all my messages disappeared into cyberspace. They weren't accessible from the old system and the new system refused to acknowledge my existence.

I spent much of that hour thinking up new passwords that became obsolete immediately because of the problems with my new account. Can you imagine how difficult it was to come up with multiple passwords that fitted the criteria (alphanumeric, eight or more characters, mix of upper and lower case, memorable) while the lad from IT kept suggesting that I used my husband's name or those of one of my children? He was particularly insistent about this. Insistent to the point of almost ending up with the monitor around his neck. It was very strange.

But, apart from this peculiar password obsession, he was pleasant and helpful and the transition from one system to the other went well. Eventually.

I expect it will crash tomorrow.

The latest news from the e-mail front: No need to wait for tomorrow. I just tried to log on to Current Contents through our library catalogue but I can't because it depends on the e-mail username and password. The old e-mail username and password. Not the new one.

I'm not happy.

A wonderful bird is the pelican ...

King and Queen of the Pelicans we;
No other Birds so grand we see!
None but we have feet like fins!
With lovely leathery throats and chins!
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!
Edward Lear, The Pelican Chorus


I'm siding with Lear on this one. Few birds—if any—are quite as grand as pelicans*. Even the fashionably unkempt brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) of the Americas has a certain style about it, although it's nowhere near as imposing as its gleaming compatriot, the American white pelican (P. erythrorhynchos). Somewhere high up on the scale of grandness is the Australian pelican (P. conspicillatus). Dressed for dinner in black and white, it is a common sight in bays and harbours all around the coast. Its range extends into New Guinea and as far east as Bali and Sulawesi. It doesn't occur in the rest of Asia, except as a vagrant, which is a little baffling, considering the birds' ability to fly great distances and the extent of suitable coastal habitat. Maybe they're just not that adventurous.

Given their size and spectacular form, it's no surprise that pelicans have featured in myths and legends. Pliny commented on the bird's capacious beak and belly in his Natural History.
The pelican is similar in appearance to the swan, and it would be thought that there was no difference between them whatever, were it not for the fact that under the throat there is a sort of second crop, as it were. It is in this that the everinsatiate animal stows everything away, so much so, that the capacity of this pouch is quite astonishing. After having finished its search for prey, it discharges bit by bit what it has thus stowed away, and reconveys it by a sort of ruminating process into its real stomach.

As he had an eye for tabloid tales, he would have loved this park-dwelling, pigeon-eating pelican of London. (Not for those of delicate sensibilities.)



Some time between Pliny and the Middle Ages, the pelican underwent a makeover from ravenous diner to motherly martyr. The bird became a symbol of self-sacrifice—when the mother pelican is overcome with remorse at having killed her chicks in anger, she revives them with her own blood. As a symbol, it's lacking some logic. Still, with attention focussed on the noble surrender, no one seems worried about the multiple infanticide.

Except for Shakespeare who gave the morality tale an ironic twist when he worked it into Hamlet. On hearing of his father's death, Laertes, the fall guy, announces that he will exact revenge on his enemies but ....

To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms;
And like the kind life-rendering pelican,
Repast them with my blood.


He got that right.

_______

*I'm not so sure about their apparent jollity

Saturday, 25 November 2006

You know that summer's just around the corner when cricket's on the radio and Readings sends out its new book catalogue. Does it get any better? (Possibly. But I don't have much of an imagination.)

I should be getting some work done, of course. I've marked my exams and consolidated those results but I'm still waiting for responses from the sessionals in the other four subjects that I co-ordinate. It's difficult to get those results in on time because the multiple markers are all outside the university. We have interesting deadlines, by the way. Friday was the last day of exams and Admin are expecting the results on Monday.

Apart from the cricket (and England's all out for 157, trailing by ... well ... hundreds of runs), we're going to be enthralled by another contest this evening—coverage of the state election. Okay, so it's not quite as exciting as the Ashes but there's something very entertaining in the ABC's impish Antony Green's enthusiasm for elections. Any elections. Whoever's compiling the Age's television guide seems to agree:
6.00 Victorian State Election: Victoria Votes. Tune in and watch in awe at the talented and charismatic Antony Green—the Ricky Martin of election commentary. Check out his massive swing.

Friday, 24 November 2006

But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so
far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by
insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular
case, but by the establishment of general laws
.
W. Whewell

On this day in 1859, publisher John Murray released a book called On the origin of species by means of natural selection. The rest, as they say, is history.

Charles Darwin's complete works are available at the Darwin Online site, courtesy of the University of Cambridge. You can read his books, notebooks, papers and manuscripts. And if you haven't got time to read them, text-to-speech software will do it for you.
I spotted this number plate on my way home from work this evening.

The owner must be very fond of cormorants.

Thursday, 23 November 2006

You can lead a host to water ...

We've been talking about parasites and parasitoids recently. Among my favourites in the second category are the horsehair or Gordian worms (phylum Nematomorpha). I haven't seen very many of them but one encounter has stuck in my memory.

When I lived in North Queensland all those years ago, I put up with the cockroaches, even though they're so big that I'd get up in the morning to find they'd rearranged the furniture during their nocturnal wanderings. The bastards.

Anyway, since returning to Melbourne, where the only cockroaches I've seen have been native ones, I've become re-sensitised to the introduced Periplaneta. So when I went up to Lake Eacham last year, I wasn't prepared to share my space with them. I dealt with the first few incursions by catching the insects in a jar and chucking them out. But that generosity didn't last. When one of the buggers crawled across the carpet in broad daylight, I cracked. And so did the cockroach. Under my shoe.

Now I had a dismantled cockroach to deal with. As I watched, it started to writhe in just the way that dead insects shouldn't. But even live cockroaches don't writhe. And they certainly don't uncoil like a watch spring.



The cockroach was moving around by day because it was infected with two nematomorphan worms. The worms develop inside an insect or arachnid host, getting bigger and bigger until they are ready to emerge. But the adult worms are aquatic and the hosts terrestrial. They solve the problem by making their hosts seek out water. Once there, the worms emerge in a rather less dramatic way than the Alien but with much the same consequences. Mermithid nematodes manipulate their hosts in a similar manner.

Of course, a worm can lead a host to water but it must also make it think ... that it can swim. That's the key. Nematomorphans will not (or cannot) emerge until the host is immersed. But most insects won't voluntarily take a dip. So the worm has to encourage its host to fling itself lemming-like into the nearest pond, puddle, swimming pool or toilet.



How do they do it?

We still don't know the exact mechanism but there is evidence that they can manipulate the amount of neurotransmitters in the host's nervous system and increase the production of its nerve cells. That sort of disruption to a brain can only end badly.

So here we have it. An insect, driven mad by the worm inside, is forced to commit suicide but is ripped apart before it can drown ... Ain't nature wonderful?

The Neurophilosopher's Blog has a post on these (and other) mind-controlling organisms. There's also some beaut video footage.

And you know what, I hadn't read that blog before I prepared this post. Now I'm wondering whether we've both succumbed to the wiles of a brain-storming parasite ...

(Oh, you should know that I scooped up the worms from the carpet and put them in a plastic bag filled with water, so I could release them in a nearby creek. But they didn't survive.)

______

Images from Hanelt et al.

Top: Natural life cycle of Paragordius varius (modified from Hanelt & Janovy, 2004)

Bottom: Water-seeking behaviour of a field cricket Nemobius sylvestris followed by the emergence of the hair-worm Paragordius tricupidatus.

Reference
Hanelt, B., Thomas, F. & Schmidt-Rhaesa, A. (2005). Biology of the phylum Nematomorpha. Advances in Parasitology 59: 244 – 305 (+ plates)

Camera-shy cormorant

Australia has five species of cormorants and you can see them all along the south coast. As well as occurring in marine habitats, most of them* are also found on rivers and marshes. If there are fish around, you might see a hopeful cormorant.

Although pied cormorants (Phalacrocorax varius) are usually solitary, they will put up with one another when the food supply is good. They're also pretty mindful of tiger sharks ...

Cormorants follow the fish in shallow water. They love seagrass beds, which have an abundant supply, but will move into sandy areas if that's where the nosh is best. (They may be camera shy but they're not daft.) But although shallow water is where the food is easiest to find, it is a dangerous place when there are tiger sharks around.

A study in Shark Bay—named in 1699 by William Dampier for its most obvious feature—showed that cormorants move out into deeper water when the temperatures rise. High temperatures mean higher numbers of sharks. The cormorants would rather spend more time in the ocean where there's not much nosh around but it's relatively safe than in the seagrass beds where a meal is guaranteed—for the bird and almost certainly for the shark as well.
_______

*The black-faced cormorant (P. fuscescens) is the exception. It sticks to the coast and there's no convincing it to try something new.


Reference
Heithaus, M.R. (2005). Habitat use and group size of pied cormorants (Phalcrocorax varius) in a seagrass ecosystem: possible effects of food abundance and predation risk. Marine Biology 147: 27 – 35.

The new grebes

Spotted pardalotes (Pardalotus punctatus) are the new grebes. One of these stunning little birds landed on a branch a couple of metres from me. Before I could get over my admiration, it disappeared into its nest, where it stayed for longer than my patience. You'll just have to take my word.

The best location in the world for seeing pardalotes is Inala on Bruny Island*. You can see three out of four species on the property, including the rare Tasmania endemic, the forty-spotted pardalote (P. quadragintus). Even I managed to tick them all off the list (with host Tonia's help), so what are you waiting for?

For pictures of a spotted pardalote rather than its tunnel in a sand bank, check out these posts by Duncan at Ben Cruachan and Trevor at Trevor's Birding.

_____

*NOTE: Highly biased perception.

Wednesday, 22 November 2006

Computer says Male

This is odd. Researchers reckon they can tell an author's sex from their prose (link to PDF). Any sort of prose—fiction, non-fiction, greetings cards. (No, I made up the last one.) They do it by examining the number and type of pronouns and noun modifiers. Apparently, women use more of the former and men more of the latter.
Pronouns send the message that the identity of the "thing" involved is known to the reader, while specifiers provide information about "things" that the writer assumes the reader does not know

So it's the difference between discussion and instruction.

They examined the relative frequencies of more than 1000 selected characters in fiction and non-fiction pieces by male and female authors. Characters were specific words, pairs of words and three-word phrases (for example, a preposition – article – noun). From these, some fancy algorithm narrowed them down to fewer than 50 useful key features.

Male writing tends to be top-heavy with articles and quantities; female writing with pronouns.

Well, that's not quite the whole story. The pronoun thing is complicated. Obviously everyone uses them. Male authors employ a lot of plural (we, us, them) and male pronouns. Women employ second person (you) and female pronouns. Well, what a surprise. Men use 'he' and women use 'she'. Maybe—and I'm going out on a bit of a limb here—it's something to do with subject matter rather than the writing style.

You can test their claims at this site, which uses the same algorithm to determine sex. Give it a go. Eighty per cent accuracy? When I plugged in one of my blog posts the site confidently misidentified me as male. It came up with the same conclusion for a passage of non-fiction. And even with a big slab of my novel, which features a female protagonist, it still insisted that I'm male. It's my own fault. I shouldn't have used the definite article so many times. Not to mention my profligacy with 'to' and 'as'. I'm going to have to include more gerberas.

White ibis

White ibis (Threskiornis molucca) have done very well out of the city sprawl. Whereas many other native birds have suffered from the rise in human population, white ibis have boomed. Like the silver gull—another urban increaser—they've done well from the crap we chuck out. They've abandoned the hard work of hunting for grubs in grasslands in favour of pre-packaged take away. Rubbish tips are dotted with ibis using their long, curved bills to rip open plastic bags. They prowl parks in search of unattended picnics. Small children are subjected to their stand-over tactics. The bare black head and neck give the birds a sinister appearance. That beak does double duty as an offensive weapon.

And after a tough day of menacing and scavenging and generally behaving as if they're on the set of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the ibis return to rookeries on nearby wetlands. It's not difficult to locate a colony. The skeins of birds flying overhead are a bit of a give away but if you don't see any, just follow your nose. Hundreds of digestive tracts emptying their contents into shallow water give the area a distinctive odour.

White ibis are widespread in eastern and northern Australia and are becoming more abundant in the west. Two other species occur in Australia—straw-necked ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis) and glossy ibis (Plegadis falcinellus). All three occupy much the same range but glossy ibis are encountered much less frequently in the south. It's a treat to see them around.

It won't be long before the white ibis take over the country. They've mastered robbery under wings. And it seems that they've now worked out how to march in formation.

Tuesday, 21 November 2006

It's too darned hot ...

... to sit at the computer tonight. The thermometer is registering close to 30C in the house and not much cooler outside. There may or may not be a storm front on its way. If there is, I expect the rain will evaporate before it gets to this part of the city. I'm living in Melbourne's version of the Namib desert. All we need now are the kilometre-high dunes and those crazy, corkscrew-leaved Welwitschia and the transformation will be complete.

And it was hot at work today too. So hot that everyone was either flat or cranky or flat and cranky, which is difficult to achieve as you have to maintain enough energy for the bad temper while feeling as though someone has pulled out the plug. But we all managed magnificently.

So, what did I get done today? Nothing terribly exciting. A lot of data entry, consolidating assignment marks, photocopying exam papers to send off to sessional lecturers, suggesting that people can take responsibility for their own workloads, those sorts of mundane activities. A group of us also spent a fair amount of time trying to work out how to transform the new, impractical, one-size-fits-all assessment policies into ones that will be fair and equitable. (In an attempt to streamline the process, the policy-makers have assumed that all assessment is identical, whether in performing arts, Polynesian history or pathophysiology. This has created a lot of confusion for staff and students. And when I say a lot ...)

But it's going to be cooler tomorrow, so I might get a chance to leave the office and take a stroll around campus with my camera. Or—if I get up early enough—I'll pop down to the beach and see what's happening.

And the cricket starts on Thursday.

Monday, 20 November 2006

Snail's guide to snail guides

Here's a short list of books that are useful for identifying local land snails and slugs.

A field guide to the non-marine molluscs of South Eastern Australia by Brian Smith & Ron Kershaw is the handiest. Or would be were it not out of print. You might be able to get hold of a copy in a second hand book shop or on e-Bay.

Gary Barker's Naturalised terrestrial Stylommatophora in the Fauna of New Zealand series is also very useful, although it obvious covers a subset of species. (Those introduced to New Zealand that have also been introduced here.) There's plenty of technical stuff that might be more than you need but it includes more pictures than you can poke a stick at.

If you're in Queensland, the Queensland Museum's guides to the Wildlife of Greater Brisbane and Wildlife of Tropical North Queensland will help with some of the more frequently-encountered species. The taxonomy is a bit dodgy, though.

But anywhere else in the country and you're in trouble. It's the scientific literature for you!
All this exam marking kept me confined to the office and house. The one time I did nip out, I saw a pair of sacred kingfishers. Of course, I'd left the damned camera at home, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Otherwise, all the wildlife I've observed has been in my garden. And it hasn't been very exciting.

Which is just as well, because were I attempting to identify something unusual by using Melbourne's Wildlife, a guide published recently by Museum Victoria and CSIRO, I'd be completely flummoxed.

You know you're in trouble, when the only quote that appears on the cover is the following from John Landy.
Anyone who has ever wondered about the local animal world will want to own this book.

At least the Queensland Museum's Wildlife of Greater Brisbane (to which the MV book bears a strong resemblance) had an endorsement from David Bellamy.

So what's wrong with Melbourne's Wildlife?

Well, my main gripe is about the pictures. A book for non-specialists has to have good illustrations. This one doesn't.

For a start, they're too small (about 50 x 35 mm). Some are cropped unsympathetically (the pelican has no tip to its bill; the wood duck has lost its feet) or printed badly (the whistlers and paradise flycatchers bleed into their backgrounds). Others are of little use in identification. The eastern whipbird is a small olive green patch in the middle of the photograph. The pink robin is distinguished by a distinct lack of pinkness. And that's just the bird pictures. You've got no chance with the others. I tried to identify a butterfly today and didn't get anywhere, even though I knew to which family it belonged.

The John Landy cover quote was extracted from his introduction. It continues:
It will be used by parents trying to answer the questions of curious children, be thrown into the backpacks of bushwalkers and campers, and generally become invaluable to Melburnians trying to identify what is in their own backyards.

I don't think so, John.

I was hoping this might be a winer but I'm very disappointed. (And $39.95 poorer.)
I'm back.

Exams marked?

Tick.

My exams, anyway. Two sets remain but they'll be marked by sessional lecturers. (Some subjects are taught entirely by sessional staff. I co-ordinate, moderate and occasionally agitate but otherwise don't deal with the imparting of knowledge in those subjects.) I've collated the results so now I can see the gaps—who hasn't handed in which piece of assessment. All that's left to do is find out why.

I suspect some students play a numbers game. The on-course assessment is worth a measly 40% of the final mark, so if I ignore that and blitz the exam ...

If only.

The lowest final mark was 6%, which must have taken a special effort. The highest was 92%. What a spread.

But it's not over yet. Special considerations, special exams, supplementary exams, student progress committees ... It goes on and on.

Thursday, 16 November 2006

I'm afraid I'm going to have to abandon A Snail's Eye View for the next few days so I can complete both the exam marking and a small contract job with a precipitous deadline. I like to be professional—at least, I like to give that impression—so I'd better concentrate on that stuff rather than this.

I'll be back on Monday.

I'm going to miss you.

Another glass snail

I'm marking exams. They're endless. So here's a distraction.

I collect snails. Not only the occasional specimen shell but also snail ornaments. Here's the latest addition to the collection, presented to me by a friend who has just returned from a holiday in Italy.

Snail trailers

Snails have never been big in the movies. Oh yeah, there was Dr Doolittle's giant pink snail. That was big. Literally. But apart from that one, where are the gastropod monster movies? Where's Snailzilla? Attack of the Killer Snails? Night of the ... You get the picture.

I searched the International Movie Database for all snail-related titles. Almost every full-length film with snail in the title was a foreign language work. And almost none of them had anything to do with real honest-to-goodness snails.

Here's the whole sorry list. What a travesty.

1918
The Snail
An American movie with Shorty Hamilton and Ethel Terry.

1971
Shablul (The Snail)
An Israeli musical/comedy/documentary about the making of an album by Arik Einstein and Shalom Hanoch.

1977
Tin loh daai poh ng hang chan (Deadly Snail vs. Kung Fu Killers)
A kung fu movie (you don't say?) from Hong Kong. Interestingly, the Hong Kong English title used snail but the international title replaced it with snake. Are they saying that snails aren't sufficiently intimidating? Ha! That can't be right.

1992
Gde tvoy dom, ulitka? (Where's Your Home, Snail?)
A movie from Kyrgyzstan. Were I more enthusiastic, I would render the title in Cyrillic*. But I'm not, so I won't. You can read more about this movie on the University of Pittsburgh Russian film symposium site.

1993
La Estrategia del caracol (The Snail's Strategy)
A political comedy set in Colombia. This commentary makes it sound rather interesting even though the snail of the title is only metaphorical.

1996
The Paisley Snail
This is more like it. There's a real snail in this one. Unfortunately it was at the bottom of a bottle ginger beer and kicked off a great legal adventure that shaped modern negligence laws. According to the film's website, the film stars 'Neil Connery, of the famous Scottish Connerys.' So you can't miss it.

_______

*I did Russian for two years in secondary school but that was a long time ago. An awfully long time ago. It shaped my opinion about sociology though. (Stick with me here.) All classes did either French or German from first year. In third year, we were streamed. The top group did Russian, the intermediate group did Spanish and the bottom group sociology ...

Wednesday, 15 November 2006

Friars tuck in

I wasn't the only one out and about in the hail. At lunchtime, I spotted something that looked remarkably like a little friarbird (Philemon citreogularis). I suspect it was one of my standard misidentifications* because these odd-looking honeyeaters don't often pop up in this part of the world. But—with dry conditions encouraging rural birds to move into the urban areas—you never know. Anyway, my dubious sighting gives me the opportunity to talk about these lively animals.

Bald is beautiful in the world of friarbirds. Whereas little friarbirds have unremarkable bare faces, the noisy ones (P. corniculatus) have black-skinned, featherless heads that look as though they've been moulded from leather. Helmeted friarbirds (P. buceroides) sport an unlikely Mohawk of grey feathers on their pates. The silver-crowns (P. argenticeps) also have a smattering of feathers but they're much more refined (but still not elegant.)

When I lived in Townsville, every noisy friarbird in North Queensland gathered in my garden to feed on grevilleas (especially the cultivar Honey Gem). They'd cackle loudly as if laughing at their own jokes. (At night, the fruit bats would take over. My garden was a 24-hour party venue for the local wildlife.) You can't miss them when they're about.

Friarbirds are restricted to Australia, New Guinea and the islands of Wallacea. All regions have endemic species but the larger ones—noisy and helmeted especially—are widespread within the region.

_______

*Except for grebes. I'm good on those.

Not for the delicate reader

They're going mad in Yorkshire. Here's the evidence from Google Earth.



Vale Red Ben

We mourn the passing from Wikipedia of the notoriously tight-fisted pirate, 'Red' Ben McNevis.

All hail

What a day! Rain. Hail. Sun. Repeated in quick succession. I got caught in a bout of hail, which wasn't much fun. But at least I had a warm car. I drove past a cricket team practicing catches on an oval. They persisted despite the appalling weather. Never has the term 'flannelled fools' been so apt.

As on a completely unrelated note ... I'm thinking of getting a sweat shirt printed with the slogan Unsolicited advice met with deadly force. It'll go well with the You've mistaken me for someone who gives a shit signature at the bottom of my e-mail. And the Staple this to your face stamp.

(Only one of these is real.)

Tuesday, 14 November 2006

Back to 1983 ...

... with Street Café by Icehouse.

What a fluke!

You might think that your life is complicated but at least you're not a trematode parasite*. Trematodes have complex life cycles that involve anywhere between one and four hosts depending on the species. If they miss out on a host or mess up the sequence, they're in trouble. A fluke's existence is very precise.

Leucochloridium starts off life inside a snail and finishes it in a bird. That's rather straightforward for a fluke. It passes from one to the other when a bird eats an infected snail. But how many snails get snaffled by birds? Snails are cryptic by nature. Birds are visual hunters. That's not an auspicious combination for a trematode wanting to get on in life.

So, it changes the snail's behaviour. And then it hangs out a neon light to make sure the bird gets the message.

This is how it happens. The snail (usually an amber snail of the family Succineidae) picks up the fluke's eggs while feeding. The eggs hatch inside the snail and each larva (miracidium) undergoes a transformations into a sporocyst. This is an asexually-reproducing individual that generates multiple cercariae—the next stage in a fluke's life cycle. This all takes place inside the snail. But the cercariae can only develop into adults inside a bird. Somehow, the sporocyst (housing the cercariae) has to engineer the snail's demise.

First, sporocysts migrate to the snail's tentacles. Under the influence of the parasite, the normally light-shy snails start moving about by day. More than that, they climb up plants. Could they be more conspicuous?

Well, yes. The sporocysts are banded in white and shades of green. Not only are they brightly-coloured, they flash on and off. They'd sound a klaxon if they could. (View a Quicktime video of the display here.). It's bad news for the snail but it's another rung on the ladder of life for a Leucochloridium.

(I can't believe I just said that.)

_______

*And if you are, you're doing a fine job of operating your host. I, for one, welcome our new trematode overlords.

Monday, 13 November 2006

Mussel shows

As adults, freshwater mussels sit in the mud and that's about it. It's not a bad life, I suppose, for a mollusc. (It's not a bad life for a human, now I come to think of it.) But there is a problem with a sedentary existence. If no one moves anywhere, the place is going to get overcrowded very quickly. So even stick-in-the-mud bivalves have to disperse.

As adults aren't going to move much, dispersal is down to the larval stages. Most freshwater mussels have a specialised larva called a glochidium that moves around by hitching a ride on a fish. But glochidia don't swim very well, so to increase the chances of the larvae getting a lift, the adult mussels lure fish closer ...

How does a bivalve entice a fish? The same way that a plant brings in a pollinator. It offers something the fish wants—either food or a mate. And this is where it gets weird.

Mussel shells look like mussel shells. They're stuck with that. But the mantle—the folds of tissue that surround the animal's body­—can vary in colour and shape. Mussels can also flap the mantle to mimic the movements of another fish or wriggle it like a worm. What fish could resist? And when it comes closer, the glochidia latch on and hitch a ride.

So how good is this mimicry? That was Lampsilis reevesiana looking so much like a small fish in trouble that the predators are heading in for a good feed. If you're not convinced, here's an animated gif. Videos are available here.



The rainbow shell Villosa iris resembles a crayfish right down to the movements. Check out the video.



And what do you think these are? Larval fish, right? Well, no. They're the egg sacs of the Ouachita kidneyshell Ptychobranchus occidentalis.



Look, I could show you pictures of these all night. But have a look for yourself at the Missouri State University's Unionidae site put together by Chris Barnhart.

Be amazed.

Frogmouth prince

I spotted this tawny frogmouth (Podargus strigoides) near the You Yangs. If you've never been close to one of these fabulous birds, a resting frogmouth looks like a feathered football stuck in a tree. That's until it notices you noticing it, in which case it eyeballs you for a while then adopts a stretched-out I-am-a-branch pose. This one was still thinking about it when I took the photo.

The tawny frogmouth is one of three species of frogmouth found in Australia. It is by far the most widespread, occurring wherever there is suitable cover, including city parks and gardens.

Although plumage colour varies with age and sex, and also with locality, the birds are always unmistakeable. There's nothing quite like a frogmouth.

Or so you might think. But the large eyes and camouflaged feathers mean they are sometimes mistaken for owls. Both are nocturnal hunters but that's about as far as it goes. They are not closely related. The frogmouths (family Podargidae) of Australia, New Guinea and SE Asia are relatives of nightjars (Caprimulgidae), which are found worldwide. And both are a long way from owls.

The curlew's call part II

The ABC web site has a sound file of a bush stone-curlew (although the species name on the file is the beach stone-curlew). You can listen to it here. (Be patient—the download is a bit slow.) Imagine a dozen of these underneath your bedroom window at midnight and you've got a good idea of what it's like on Magnetic Island.
Well, I managed to extract the exams from the Faculty office but I didn't even get a chance to open the box. I spent a large portion of the day in a staff meeting. Three and a half hours. Three. And. A. Half. Hours. That's just plain daft.

Sunday, 12 November 2006

A-roving we will go

The Devil's coach horse (Ocypus olens) of Europe is the best known—and possibly the shirtiest—of the rove beetles (family Staphylinidae). It's a feisty animal, feeding on anything that can fit between its jaws and taking on all comers when it feels threatened. This tendency to aggro has backfired when it comes to human foe and the Devil's coach horse has ended up playing a central part in some rather negative folklore.
Wherefore the Darragh Daol should be killed whensoever met. But there is only one safe way of doing it, they say in Co. Wicklow, for if you kill it with your thumb, as is done in the south of Ireland, or crush it with your boot, a stone, or a stick, the slightest blow from the thing used for its destruction occasions a mortal injury to either men or animals.

But this is another species of staphylinid. I'm not sure which one as there are about 50,000 species worldwide, of which at least 1,000 occur in Australia. Unlike the Oxychilus snails mentioned in the previous post, they don't all look the same. But it still requires experts to tell them apart. The Austral Staphylinidae team would have a much better idea about it than I would.

Many staphylinids are predators but others feed on decaying matter, including corpses. (I found this one heading out from under my house, which worries me a bit.)

They have most of the features present in other beetles but look different because the hard wing cases (elytra) are reduced, so do not cover the abdomen. This makes them look a little like earwigs, although the two are not closely related. (They belong to different orders.) Despite the reduction in the elytra, the wings themselves are usually fully functional and many species are good fliers.

I'm always amazed at the diversity of even the smallest, most appallingly-maintained city gardens.


Reference
Leather, E.M. (1916) Notes on Irish folklore: insects. Folklore 27 (4): 419 – 420.

Glass snails

Most slugs in our gardens are introduced species. So, unfortunately, are most of the snails. That's right. Although you might only see the big Cantareus aspersus*, there are quite a few species of smaller snails that continue their activities in the mulch.

While I was weeding (an endless task in my garden), I found these two shells. They belong to Oxychilus, the glass snails of Europe, so named because the unworn shells are glossy and transparent. (Snail's Tales has a post on a Turkish species, O. urbanskii)

Three species have been recorded from Victorian gardens. They are difficult to tell apart, especially from worn shells. Even living specimens are tricky. Oxychilus cellarius and O. drapanaudi differ in size and in form of the body (last) whorl. Oxychilus alliarius smells of garlic when disturbed. Otherwise they're all very much the same, with those fine, featureless shells and blue-grey bodies.

These two individuals are probably O. cellarius, which is the largest of the introduced species. Like other Oxychilus, it feeds on soft material— invertebrates and decaying matter. Of course, that doesn't make it immune to attack from other predators. These might have fallen victim to other Oxychilus or, more likely, to snail-eating carabid beetles or flatworms.

_____

*It used to be Helix aspersa

Nessie is the mother of invention

Seventy-three years ago today, Hugh Gray took the first photograph of the Loch Ness Monster. He wasn't the first to see it. St Columba had a confrontation with the beast in the late 6th Century but was so busy scaring it off, he didn't think to take a picture. So much for miracles.
On another occasion also, when the blessed man was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Nesa the Ness; and when he reached the bank of the river, he saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who, according to the account of those who were burying him, was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water; his wretched body was, though too late, taken out with a hook, by those who came to his assistance in a boat ...

... But the monster, which, so far from being satiated, was only roused for more prey, was lying at the bottom of the stream, and when it felt the water disturbed above by the man swimming, suddenly rushed out, and, giving an awful roar, darted after him, with its mouth wide open, as the man swam in the middle of the stream. Then the blessed man observing this, raised his holy hand, while all the rest, brethren as well as strangers, were stupefied with terror, and, invoking the name of God, formed the saving sign of the cross in the air, and commanded the ferocious monster, saying, ‘Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed.’ Then at the voice of the saint, the monster was terrified, and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes, though it had just got so near to Lugne, as he swam, that there was not more than the length of a spear-staff between the man and the beast.

Since Gray took his snapshot of a lot of spray, many others have pointed their cameras and sonar equipment at floating debris and — more frequently — models. They've even cut out pictures of dinosaurs and stuck 'em onto photos.

The Museum of Hoaxes has a round up of the Nessie story. It also has some Loch Ness Monster haiku. Here's mine.

The surface broken
By a mysterious form.
Bugger! Just a log.

Saturday, 11 November 2006

X marks the spot

Building a web over the fan flowers has paid off big time for this Argiope. He's doubled his size in a week or so and shifted his web to intercept bigger and better prey.

This is one of the more sombre species of Argiope. Its web is equally restrained, decorated only with a vertical band of thickened silk that looks like clumsy darning. In contrast, the St Andrews cross spider (A. keyserlingii), with a body enamelled in bands of yellow, black and white, adorns its web with a big, bold X. Other orb weaver species add characteristic embellishments. Its not a matter of arachnid aesthetics, so what is the purpose of these fancy bits?

That's still a subject of debate. Matthew Bruce (2006) summarised the hypotheses
proposed to explain the decorations (called stabilimenta), which occur in a range of webs.

The stabilimenta may:
  • deter predatory wasps (but unfortunately attract predatory spiders)
  • provide a barrier to hide behind
  • make the spider look bigger
  • reflect UV light so they resemble flowers or the gaps between foliage and so lure in prey
  • advertise the web so birds don't blunder into it
... and a host of other possibilities

Bruce suggested that they might have different functions under different conditions. In some species, the patterns change when the juveniles become adults. Presumably the role changes too.

Whatever the reason, my eight-legged pal is doing okay with his web.


[Diagram from Bruce (2006). Webs produced by (a) Argiope versicolor; (b) 'Araneus' eburnus; (c) juvenile Argiope versicolor; (d) Zosis geniculata; (e) Octonoba sybiotides; and (f) Gasteracantha minax.]


Read more
Bruce, M.J. (2006). Journal of Zoology 269 (1): 89 – 97.

Glorious Graptophyllum

The Mount Blackwood holly (Graptophyllum ilicifolium), which isn't a holly but does come from Mount Blackwood, is almost in full flower. Here's the latest shot of the potted plant. The one in the garden bed is doing almost as well—lots of flowers but fewer leaves. Every garden should have one.

Friday, 10 November 2006

Why you should never rely on Wikipedia






Suspected hoaxThe truthfulness of this article has been questioned.

It is believed that some or all of its content might constitute a hoax.


Please add reliable sources for the claims in the article or comment on the article's talk page.

Red Ben McNevis the kilted killer of the Caribbean

Red Ben, aka the kilted killer (c. 1678- 1712) was the nickname of Ben McNevis, the only known Scottish pirate who enjoyed infamy in the Caribbean Sea between 1712 and 1716.

Little is known about his early life, though it is believed he was born around 1678, in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, a group of small islands north of Caithness in northern mainland Scotland. Originally a shepherd, the introduction of flax led to the collapse of the wool trade on the impoverished islands and many of the Islanders took up smuggling.

His career on the sea began smuggling contraband between Scotland and France, and later as a seaman on English privateers sailing between England and Jamaica. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Red Ben, an intelligent and physically imposing man described by contemporary’s as “seven feet tall with arms like tree trunks and eyes like steel, cold, hard. Had a shock of hair, red like the fires of Hell” [citation needed] led a mutiny aboard the captured French ship La Téméraire and renamed it The Bonnie Prince. She was a two-hundred-ton frigate armed with twenty cannons, and he and its crew of 250 men ranged the west coast of Africa where Red Ben started in earnest on gaining a reputation as a fierce, unforgiving and exceedingly tight fisted pirate.

Red Ben wore a kilt and many an incredulous ships Captain was rendered fightless and impotent at the sight of his bulk arising out of the smoke of battle wearing what they assumed was a dress. To further the shock value as he assaulted a ship he would play his bagpipe, only reaching for his twin claymore swords as the battle closed. This image, which he cultivated, has made him the premier and only image of a seafaring swashbuckling Scottish pirate. In the following years Red Ben acquired a fearsome reputation for cruelty after repeatedly preying on shipping and coastal settlements of the West Indies and the Atlantic coast of North America. A running duel with the British thirty-gunned man-of-war HMS Warthog added to his notoriety.

Unlike other contemporary pirates, Red Ben preferred to diversify, he did not believe in a single buried investment where capital was held in littoral environments, for later recovery, with securities of dead shipmates bones and single issue prospectus written in blood that detailed procedures to track the recovery of the plundered treasure.

Red Ben preferred to bank monthly, paying creditors on a 60 day merchants cycle ensuring he maintained maximum exposure to interest in his hard won doubloons and held various stocks including hedges. Red Ben would on Sundays take a form of ships pulpit and lecture his crew on the benefits of savings and thrift and impress upon them the value of investments. It was this habit that led to his downfall and the end of his swashbuckling days.

Red Ben was eventually poisoned by the ships cook, with an arsenic laced Haggis.

Fan mail for a fantail

A friend, who lives in the outer NE of Melbourne, was supposed to be working on his PhD thesis this afternoon but found the perfect way to procrastinate—birdwatching from his computer.

This grey fantail (Rhipdura fuliginosa) is nesting in the eucalypt outside his office. What a view, eh? For him, that is. I don't know what the bird thinks. That exquisite nest is made of moss, strips of bark, straw and other fibrous material finished off with a coat of spider web. Fantails are terribly House and Garden.

They are abundant in eastern and south-western Australia, but also occur in New Zealand and some islands of the western Pacific.

[Thanks to RR for the photo. Lucky duck.]

Continuing the tradition ...

... of indistinct grebe pictures. One day I'll get a close up of one of the little suckers. If only I'd had my camera when I rescued a grebe from the car park at work. That was a close up worth having.

The other crummy grebe pictures are here and here. Hmmm. Looks like they're getting worse.

The sting is the tail

I spotted this wasp in a garden bed at work. It's either an ichneumon or a braconid. (I'm still not up to speed on wasp systematics but maybe Amegilla can narrow it down.) Either way, it's a parasitoid, one of those wasps with the grisly and fascinating life cycles.

The female lays her eggs on or in the host, using the long ovipositor to position them just so. The host remains alive, which means that the larva is living in a larder that never runs out of fresh food.

These wasps have several interesting adaptations. There's that whopping great big ovipositor—the hypodermic needle at the rear end—which penetrates the host's exoskeleton and deposits the eggs with surgical accuracy. And the underside of the abdomen is less heavily armoured than in other types of wasps, so it is extremely flexible. This helps in egg-laying. For a similar reason, the legs also have an extra joint, so the wasp can raise its body high over the host.

They 'parasitise' a wide range of species and are not above attacking their cousins, the sawflies.

Ha! Alien schmalien.
Another gorgeous day in Melbourne. Sure the weather was fine and mild but that wasn't the only reason for the general wonderfulness. The main reason was the exams.

Now, that might come as a bit of a surprise because ... well ... I hate marking exams and there's rather a lot of them to mark. But here's the thing. They were delivered to our Faculty office today but, as the Faculty officer only works part time, they're locked in a cupboard so no one can get to them.

And I was going to bring them home to mark over the weekend. Damn!

Still, I have plenty of stuff to keep me occupied, most of which isn't exactly riveting. In fact, it’s not even mildly interesting, so I'll talk about biology instead.

Thursday, 9 November 2006

I and the Bird #36

While you're having breakfast at the bird table, dip into the latest edition of I and the Bird, which is hot off the press at Words and Pictures.

Brussels slice

A Belgian tourist near Cape Tribulation in Far North Queensland spotted a crocodile in a creek and wanted to get a photo of it. As you do. Unfortunately, the croc was playing hard to get. As they do. So the tourist waded into the creek and started slapping the water's surface with a stick to attract its attention.

You can guess what happened next.

Luckily for the tourist, the croc was only a tiddler (two metres) and pissed off rather than hungry. Now National Parks and Wildlife is relocating the animal for public safety. Locals would prefer they relocated the tourist.

'I just wish they would leave him alone,' Alison Gotts, president of the Daintree Cape Tribulation Tourism Association, said. 'I don't think being tormented by an idiotic tourist warrants his removal. I am annoyed by the decision that the crocodile is the one who is punished.

'If you were being taunted by that tourist you would bite him too.'

Read the whole story (and see the pictures) here.
So what's been happening in my brief absence from A Snail's Eye View?

Surprisingly little.

Two exams down and one more to go. I haven't started marking yet—they're yet to be rubberstamped and sent through the system. No doubt they'll all arrive together in one great big pile of paperwork.

The undergraduates have been uncharacteristically quiet* but the postgraduates have been keeping me on my toes. They face a wider range of issues than the undergrads, so solving their problems can take a lot more time and effort. The rules and regulations— I think they're called policies now—governing their paths through higher education are Byzantine. No wonder the students are confused. I've given up trying to understand the policies and simply ring up the unit responsible so they can explain it to me.

And now for something completely different ... It was Oaks Day at Flemington, which meant that the racecourse was packed with people in fancy garb and the sky was packed with advertising. This sky writer seemed to go bonkers at lunchtime and made a religious statement (it says Jesus Lives), followed by BOSE (presumably referring to atomic physics) and the cryptic Donut King wins Oaks. At least, I think that's what it said. It was a bit difficult to read. And Miss Finland won the race, anyway. So maybe Donut King was catering. Go figure. I need more coffee.

________

*Perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate.

Tuesday, 7 November 2006

Hiatus here

I won't be blogging for the next couple of days because I have to focus my attention on other stuff—not least of all, the exams. I'll defintely be back on Friday. Maybe before. See you then.

As good a method as any

So based on nothing at all except the names, I'm going for Yeats and Delta Blues.

What do you know? It worked. Well, 50% of the time.

No need for (a car) alarm

Some [expletive deleted] has parked their brand new, big-arsed Toyota people mover in our small (but perfectly formed) street. I’d imagine they've gone to the races, which is only a short tram ride—or rather longer stagger—away. Of course, this [expletive deleted] has a vehicle with a faulty car alarm. So the sodding alarm has been going off every two minutes for ... well ... quite some time now.

I called the police. (An adventure in itself because the station has changed location and phone number three times in the past couple of years. Call the old number and the message tells you to ring another one. But ring that and a message gives you another ... Honestly, they might as well hand over a treasure map with a set of clues in rhyming couplets.)

Anyway, the officer on desk duty was very helpful. Not that he could do much because the vehicle was registered to a business rather than an individual. But he commiserated and we both hoped that the person responsible for the vehicle did his/her dough at the Cup. (Because we were in the fun-lovin' spirit of the day.)

(Update: I can now report that the car alarm has stopped. Maybe the cop did get hold of the owner. Maybe it was because someone saw me taking a photo of the offending vehicle with the camera in one hand and a brick in the other*. Or maybe the owner found out that the lad down the road is newly out of clink having done time for stealing cars. And not for joy riding, either. Who knows? But that brain-lasering noise has ended.)

_________

*One part of this statement may not be true

Monday, 6 November 2006

Cup galah

Snapped while I was waiting at the traffic lights on the way home this evening. Sure, galahs (Cacatua roseicapilla) aren't exactly rare* but they're still nice to see around the place. These two are feeding on grass seeds turned up when the council were laying new water pipes. (The pipes for grey water are an attractive lavender, by the way.) This corner is next to a paddock full of wallaby grass, which has somehow survived all attempts to turn it into weeds.
_________

*On my field trips, they're known by the affectionate abbreviation of MFGs. More ... fnerking ... galahs.

The Cup runneth under

A very quiet day at work with only a few academics and one admin officer in our building. The postgrads outnumbered staff by about two to one.

Not much to report. I tried to catch up on the latest journal articles but the intranet had slowed down so much it was almost moving backwards. Just as well we supersized the network, ain't it?

We've all been trying to avoid the Melbourne Cup fuss but are failing. Really, when you get a day off work, it's a bit churlish to ignore the reason behind the holiday. I'm not sure what's running but I'll no doubt be familiar with the field by the time they're in the mounting paddock tomorrow afternoon. Right now I'm with the ABC newsreader who, when pressed to pick a horse, asked if there were any with funny names.

Here are snippets that caught my attention.

Favourite Tawqeet had a small mishap today. 'The silly bugger trod on himself,' trainer David Hayes said on Channel 9 News tonight. Now that's my sort of horse.

And you know the Spring racing carnival is underway when jockey Frankie Dettori gets his well-groomed mug on television. I remember him talking on the ABC's now defunct sports program The Fat about the special ambience of the Melbourne Cup. (It was a long time ago and I'm paraphrasing here.)

They were all yelling 'Frankie, Frankie, we love you' when I left the mounting yard. When I came back they yelled 'Piss off, Frankie, you wanker'.


And there was an inflatable doll on a stick, apparently. But he didn't go into details.

What are my tips for the Cup? Well, I haven't looked at the form guide, so I know nothing about performance or their colours. (After all, livery is always a good reason for picking a horse.) So based on nothing at all except the names, I'm going for Yeats and Delta Blues.

Not that I'm going to put any dosh on them. The last time I picked a winner was in 1983 when Kiwi came in at 10/1, if I recall correctly. Don't trust my judgement.

The Kraken wakes, scratches itself and panics

The decks and even the foot of the head sail were covered in what looks like squid ink, and there’s an awful lot of it. It looks like it was shot from ahead. Whatever it was, it was pretty big, but I’m not worried—I’m bigger.

British yachtsman Mike Golding on a close encounter of the tentacled kind during the Velux 5 Ocean race as reported in Yachting World.

Obviously, this Architeuthis dux for no one.

Sadistic snail sex surprises scientists*

*Warning: may be outrageous overstatement for sake of alliterative headline

Garden snails (Cantareus aspersus) are sado-masochists. During mating, they whip out darts made of calcium carbonate and stab each other through the nearest bit of flesh. Although it sounds unlikely, this behaviour helps in fertilisation.

Garden snails (and most other land snails) are hermaphrodites—Arthur and Martha—and indulge in simultaneous reciprocal mating. Both individuals in a pair swap sperm during copulation and use it to fertilise their eggs. Sperm is transferred in packages (spermatophores), which are placed in the partner's bursa copulatrix.

You might think it was safe, all neatly bundled in a spermatophore and tucked away in the right place. But it isn't. The bursa copulatrix is a dead end off the reproductive tract. It releases enzymes that digest the sperm. If the little fellas don't wriggle fast enough, they are recycled into nutrient.

But the dart helps to slow down the enzymes. Before it is stabbed into the partner, it is coated in mucus that retards the digestive process. This means that more sperm escape and make their way along the reproductive tract to fertilise the ova.

Although the garden snail is the most-studied species, it isn't the only one that uses a dart in mating. Among the others are the Bradybaenidae, including the Japanese Euhadra subnimbosa. Copulation in this species has left those studying it almost speechless. Forget the sluggard garden snail, which discards the dart after a single use. Euhadra subnimbosa stabs its partner 'a staggering 3311 times' on average. That's just over 2.5 times per second. Even Bradybaena similaris, the increasingly accurately named tramp snail, stabs its partner 900 times during copulation. Sometimes the action is so violent, the dart passes right through the body and emerges from the foot.

A snail's pace, indeed.

Authors Joris Koene and Satoshi Chiba suggest that the repeated stabbing and associated transfer of mucus improves the chances of the sperm getting to their intended destination. If the strategy works well in the garden snail, it should be even more effective in Euhadra and relatives.

They have even captured it on video. (Not surprisingly, you need a subscription to the journal to view the flick.)

Read more (if you dare)
Koene, J. & Chiba, S. (2006). The way of the Samurai snail. American Naturalist 168 (4): 553 – 555. (PDF about 850kB)

Sunday, 5 November 2006

Mr Sandman

The New York Times has a review of Neil Gaiman's latest collection of short stories, Fragile Things, and a new compilation of his Sandman tales. This prompted me to take Season of Mists, a Sandman story, into the garden and sit in the sun with a cup of tea to re-explore the strange and sometimes disturbing world of Gaiman's imagination.

If you're not familiar with the Sandman, he's neither Steve Abbott nor a benign dust-sprinkling imp. Gaiman's Sandman is Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, one of the family called the Endless. His brother is Destiny, his sisters are Despair, Delirium and Death, and Desire is brother, sister, both and neither. And, although Morpheus is a romantic figure, you really wouldn't want him to visit you if you're having problems sleeping.

Anyway, before I started the story, I read Harlan Ellison's introduction. Ellison is acerbic and incisive and very funny at times. In his introduction to Seasons of Mists, he careers from point to point like a pinball until he cannons into the conclusion. But before he get there, he makes a number of astute comments on writing. Here's his observation on the 'what if' of story-telling. He's referring to speculative fiction but it applies to all novels. After all, even the slice-of-life, mimetic works take place in non-existent worlds.

... every fantasist builds a new universe each time s/he creates a new story. It's the way the game of "what-if?" is played. Some people do it better than others; and most people can't do it at all (which is why there are folks who believe that actors make up their own lines, that truth is stranger than fiction, that one picture is worth a thousand words, and that we are regularly visited by far-travelling malevolent incredibly intelligent aliens in revolving crockery, who have nothing better to do with their time than snag couch potato humans so they can have unfulfilling sex with them and just for laughs give these lousy sex partners rectal examinations with mechanical appendages the size of oil pipeline caissons); and every once in a while a person does it so splendidly that it raises the high water mark and puts more sunlight in the world.

Ain't that the truth.
Back to the 80s. It's twenty-two years later and he still doesn't look much older. In an attic somewhere, the portrait of Neil Finn is peeling off the canvas ...

A moth ruins

I found this moth on my curtains the other morning. Wanting to give it a chance, I caught it in a jar and put it aside for release that night. While captive, the moth laid a batch of eggs so green I thought they might be fluorescent. Now I was responsible not only for the welfare of the moth but of her scores of offspring as well.

I released her late in the afternoon. But what about those bloody eggs? I didn't know what sort of moth it was—entomologists have described more than 10,000 species from Australia and they all look the same. (The moths, not the entomologists.) So I didn't have much chance of identifying this mid-sized, nondescript, unassuming sort of moth. Well ... maybe it was a geometrid. Then again, maybe not.

Then I forgot about the candy-green eggs for a few days. When I looked again, they'd all turned white. Were they mouldy? I opened the lid to check and about a hundred tiny caterpillars inched out. Yep, the were geometrids. Their looping head-and-tail movement was characteristic. And the poor little devils must have been starving.

I took a punt and tipped them onto the most productive Proteaceae in the garden, a small firewheel tree (Stenocarpus sinuatus). It was all I could think of doing. Now the leaves are looking mighty ragged. You just can't win, can you?
Was this really in the Sydney Morning Herald? That rag's gone way up in my estimation.

Blog round-up

I've just looked in the fridge. Do sauerkraut, coffee and a cantaloupe constitute a balanced diet? Hmmm. Maybe I'd better get down to the shops to find something to pad out those ingredients into decent meals.

Here's an entirely subjective round up of the latest in some my favourite natural history and science blogs.

Amegilla at Mixed Metamorphs has a fabulous, furry bee fly*, the trigger plant it pollinates and the fraught relationship between the two.

The nest box has proved more than satisfactory for the sugar gliders at David Nelson's place. David caught the next generation on camera. There's also a follow-up post on the not-so-cute paralysis tick.

Trevor of Trevor's Birding has been out photographing Cape Barren geese, which are favourites of mine. They look as if they've had their beaks coloured in with fluorescent markers. He also spotted a golden-headed cisticola, a little bird that has something of the street urchin about it.

Duncan at Ben Cruachan Blog has been checking for new arrivals in his part of Victoria. He wasn't the only one interested in all the activity. The cuckoos are also back in town.

The Neurophilsopher's Blog has an excellent post on Alois Alzheimer and his discovery of the disease that now bears his name.

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*Hands up who thought I was going to write something about the Freak Brothers?

Saturday, 4 November 2006

Doing her block

There's a latex cast of a fish on Rhyll's work table. Not to mention a goat moth, a fossilised freshwater mussel and a notebook fashioned from brown paper and a Monopoly board. (Monopoly boards make good covers, Rhyll told me. Now the ladies at the op shop keep them for her. The only problem is she's started a collection ...) And there are prints and paintings everywhere. Of course.

Rhyll Plant is a biological illustrator and print maker. The biological illustrations—mostly zoological—are absolutely accurate. At the moment, she's producing a series of line portraits of brown snakes for a scientific publication. Those works for a specialised audience but the prints are for everyone.

Squid Row is one of a series of prints with the theme of collective nouns. There's a scuttle of crabs, a frieze of penguins and a range of others that will make you groan at first and then wish you'd thought of them. (Puns are Rhyll's forte. She has also produced an exhibition of fish prints called Moray Patterns. A couple of years ago, she won the Swan Hill Print & Drawing award for Cod Pieces, a life-size depiction of a Murray cod printed from several blocks. The work will be on display at the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery from December as part of an exhibition about the Murray cod.)

The Squid Row cephalopod is Sepioloidea lineolata, a handsome little animal that looks as if it's wearing striped pyjamas. The block on which it is engraved is a round of Huon pine. Rhyll carved the image using a set of tools that she bought from a friend of a friend who wanted to get rid of his grandfather's belongings. He told her she could have whatever she liked. Although a lot caught her eye, Rhyll restricted herself to some books and the tools, which were orange with rust. She didn't know what they were but they had a good feel.

When I ran my fingers over the surface of the block, I could barely detect the texture. That's part of the artist's secret business. The ink is applied in a very fine layer that has to be just right. There's little leeway. Too thin and it's patchy; too thick and it's like pasta sauce. Rhyll's Monopoly-bound notebook contains the recipes for inks used at different temperatures on different blocks of wood. What works on boxwood on a warm day won't work on Huon pine of a cool day.

It's a combination of creative art and precise science. Few other artists have the skill to mix them successfully.

For another squid print see this earlier post, Wooden 'art.

(And thanks to Rhyll for the title.)

Friday, 3 November 2006

Feeling choughed

A flock of white-winged choughs dropped in to feed the other day. A friend remarked that choughs had an interesting disjunct distribution. (Yes, these are the sorts of conversations I have. These and the very undergraduate ones. And both are punctuated by not very well thought out rants.) He meant worldwide—they're found in Australia and the Himalayas.

'And Europe,' I said.

He looked at me doubtfully.

'Oh, yes, they're found in the Alps and along the western sea cliffs in Britain,' I said. 'I've got a book on crows, I'll look them up.'

'But they're not crows,' he said.

And there's that common name problem again. Choughs of all types belong to an evolutionary lineage (clade) of birds that includes birds of paradise, crows, ravens, jays and shrikes. The birds in this clade are clustered into three groups:
  • birds of paradise
  • crows, ravens, jays, shrikes and non-Australian choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax and P. graculus)
  • white-winged choughs (Corcorax melanorhamphos) and apostlebirds

So the choughs are all related if you trace their ancestry back far enough but the two modern groups (Pyrrhocorax and Corcorax) are not the same. They share a common name because they look similar: they're mid-sized black birds with curved bills.

Pyrrhocorax choughs live on cliffs and mountains in the more remote parts of Europe and Asia. Their closest relative is a strange black bird, the ratchet-tailed tree pie (Temnurus temnurus) of China, which has a long tail like a row of fish bones.

White-winged choughs are restricted to SE Australia, where they live in open woodland. Unlike the others, they are sociable birds that hang around in parties of up to a dozen individuals. They share this behaviour with their equally gregarious relatives, the apostlebirds Struthidea cinerea. (The Australian Museum has an MP3 file of the white-wings calls.)


Read more

Barker, FK, Cibois, A, Schikler, P, Feinstein, J. & Cracraft, J. (2004). Phylogeny and diversification of the largest avian radiation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101 (30): 11040 – 11045.

Ericson, PGP & Johansson, US. (2003). Phylogeny of Passerida (Aves : Passeriformes) based on nuclear and mitochondrial sequence data. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 29 (1): 126 – 138.

Jonsson, KA & Fjeldså, J. (2006). A phylogenetic supertree of oscine passerine birds (Aves : Passeri). Zoologica Scripta 35 (2): 149 – 186.