Mussel on the half shell

If you're wondering what a mussel looks like between being ripped from its mooring and cooked in a paella, here's your answer*. This is one of the mussels (farmed Mytilus edulis) from yesterday's lab class. I opened it with that well-known fine dissecting tool, the Stanley knife. All I did was cut through the posterior adductor muscle and then, once the shells started to gape, through the smaller anterior adductor as well. Luckily, it's not brain surgery.

(Bivalve shells are hinged with a band of protein and held closed by the adductor muscles. When the muscles relax or are damaged or when the animal dies, the shells open.)

Mussels glue themselves to rocks and timber with the byssus. This is a skein of protein threads, which adhere to hard surfaces. The byssus is produced as a liquid by the byssal gland and sets into strands as it is manipulated by the foot. (The byssal threads of the Mediterranean Pinna have been used to make cloth. When cleaned they have a golden sheen.)

The mantle is a layer of tissue with more functions than you can poke a scalpel at. One of them is secreting the shell. Different regions of the mantle produce different parts of it—the nacreous (mother-of-pearl) lining, the main part and the thin outer covering of protein (periostracum).

Ctenidia (gills) serve double duty as respiratory and feeding structures. Respiration is straightforward but feeding is a little more complicated. Mussels, like many other bivalves, collect suspended particles in the water. These form the biggest part of the diet. But there's a touch of Goldilocks about these animals. The gills are covered in millions of cilia that sort the particles, rejecting those that are too big or too small and keeping only those that are just right. Unsuitable material is ditched in the form of pseudofaeces (you don't want to know), whereas the good stuff is passed along a food groove to the mouth.

Each ctenidium is a sheet of filaments folded into a W. The filaments are connected to each other laterally by tufts of cilia and across each V by tissue. Under a microscope, ctenidia look like loosely-woven cloth. (You might be able to get an idea of this on the close up photo.)

Of course, there's more to a mussel than gills and byssus. There are guts and gonads, kidney, heart and ganglia—all too delicate to dissect without the proper gear and too tricky to photograph without an SLR. Next time, maybe.

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* I'd like to make an important distinction here. This mussel is dead. The ones that go into paella aren't.

Orb interceptor

It's only a matter of time before "knowing every slug in the garden" becomes an entry in the forthcoming DSM–V, so I won't mention that I've been out checking on them*. But while I wasn't checking on the slugs, I saw something delightful—an orb weaver spider packing up her web.

Another orb weaver (Eriophora biapiculata) has adopted the clothes hoist as scaffolding for her web. Tonight was her first appearance. For some reason, she constructed a semicircle rather than a complete wheel but the execution was just as neat and measured.

I took photos but the gusting wind played havoc with the focus. After a couple of minutes, the spider seemed to get irritated by the flash (quite understandably). So she packed up her web. She crawled down the anchoring thread until she reached the bottom of the web. Then she grabbed the lowest strands and gathered them as she scuttled back up. The process took a few seconds—certainly not long enough to get decent images with a point and shoot digital camera. But I took 'em anyway.

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* It's a quiet night, so only a couple of Limax are out on their evening glide.

Full to the gills

We had great fun in the laboratory this afternoon. It's surprising how much entertainment you can get from dissecting mussels. Despite having rudimentary dissection gear, the students managed not only to remove the gills but also slip them onto slides for examination under the microscope. Okay, it doesn't sound like much but this were fresh specimens not fixed and preserved material. The gills were horrible to manipulate—they tore and ruptured, creased and folded—but the students got enough tissue to look at the gross and fine anatomy.

If I get some time tomorrow, I'll do a (quick) dissection and take some photos to post here. After all, every blog needs an image or two of a dissected mussel ...

A morning with rain and binoculars

I went on a field trip this morning. Well, field trip is overstating it a smidgeon. A more accurate description might be a drive around the coast to Corio Bay. I was sussing out likely sites for a study and sneaking in a spot of bird watching as well.

Limeburners Bay (aka Limeburners Lagoon) at the north end of Corio Bay is a Ramsar wetland. The sun was shining when I got out of the car but by the time I'd walked down to the water's edge (about two minutes) the clouds had gathered and it was raining. Not heavily. But every drop was a hailstone in the making. It wasn't long before I retreated to the car so I didn't get any pictures. Oh, except this one below.

But before I made a bee line back to the vehicle, I scanned the water and opposite shoreline for birds. The tide was in, so the waders were out. Still, the usual suspects were hanging around in substantial numbers.

Crested terns gathered in a flotilla in the middle of the bay, trying to avoid the boisterous silver gulls. A couple of delinquent gulls broke away from their group and mobbed a juvenile Pacific gull that had caught a squid before turning their attentions to a small flock of pelicans. The pelicans eventually moved off to calmer waters, leaving the thugs to find other victims. They tried it on with the little pied and little black cormorants, but the cormorants dived to avoid them. For some reason, the gulls didn't push their luck with the black swans. A group of chestnut teals took advantage of the sanctuary offered by those beautiful birds and stuck close to them like tiny glossy shadows.

There might have been more but they lost out to the rain. Next time, I'll check the tide tables and the weather forecast before I head south west again.

Fabulous furry snail

Lots of snails have hairy shells. No, really. We even have a few in Australia. But none of them is quite as spectacular as Alvinoconcha hessleri, a marine snail from hydrothermal vents in the western Pacific and central Indian Ocean. Deep Sea News has the goods on this magnificent mollusc, which can grow bigger than a softball. (Is that the same size as a cricket ball?)

Slugs in my garden III

The slugs have never had it so good. Nights are mild, the ground is wet and there's more nosh for them than they can poke their radulae at.

Last night, I found a third limacid in the garden—a species of Lehmannia. I'm not sure whether it is L. nyctelia or L. valentiana. They're difficult to distinguish without dissection and I'm not going to kill the first one I've seen here. (It might be different if I find half a dozen or so.) For the moment, it's just Lehmannia sp. I'm happy with that.

The racing stripes separate it from the olive and yellow Limacus flavus and the handsome black and silver Limax maximus. They're not very well-developed on this individual but those more strongly marked have three stripes—two lateral bands and a median one.

Both of our introduced Lehmannia species are world travellers. Lehmannia nyctelia is native to eastern Europe but has been spread, presumably inadvertently, to Australia, New Zealand, Africa, North America and much of Europe (although it is mainly found in greenhouses in cooler locations). Lehmannia valentiana, which originated in the Iberian Peninsula, has an even wider range, including parts of South America.

If, like me, you're fed up to the back teeth with committee meetings, make I recommend Bullshit Bingo as a way of surviving the tedium. Just remember not to yell out 'Bullshit!' if you get a full house.

Are you a TV executive on the look out for the Next Big Thing in crime series? This will help you to come up with your new crime-fighting duo.

He's a one-legged misogynist hairdresser plagued by the memory of his family's brutal murder. She's a cynical Bolivian safe cracker from out of town. Together, they fight crime!

Sounds good to me.

I'll return to blogging about nature very soon. Work has been consuming most of time and draining all of my energy for the past few weeks. I'm hoping this will settle down. (Or I could just ignore it.)

Friday's morning out in the car and afternoon in the lab should reinvigorate my spirits. And then there'll be sooooo much nature blogging ... wait and see.

On Friday afternoon, I'll be showing a bunch of students how to dissect a mussel. They've never done a bivalve dissection before and—now I think about it—neither have I*. This is going to be fun.

These students will be looking at the biology of a native marine bivalve. Their projects will require them to look at the gross and fine anatomy of the gills (easy), guts and gonads (not so easy). Rather than sacrifice a bunch of wild-collected animals, they'll be practicing on farmed Mytilus. This makes life easier for a number of reasons, not least of all because the mussels are about three times the size of the species we'll be looking at and there are plenty of decent dissection guides.

While the undergrads are getting used to working their way around any old bivalve's innards, I'll be spending time familiarising myself with the species that will form their study. We'll be heading down the western side of Port Phillip Bay on Friday morning to check on some prospective research sites. I'll make sure I get photos. And I'll keep you informed about the project's progress.

Depending on how the students go, we might be able to squeeze out a paper. That'd be cool.
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* Okay, I have. But it was on the other side of the iridium anomaly.

My local supermarket stocks an eclectic range of goods. Some might even say eccentric. Yesterday I discovered that whoever selects the stock has bought up big on Dutch and Belgian biscuits. The shelves are stacked with European delights, including one brand of 'cinnamon biscuits enrobed with chocolate'. Who could resist? Not me.

And they're in the refrigerator so the moths haven't got to them yet. Of course, it'll only be a matter of time before the little beggars work out how to open the fridge door ...

The battle lines are drawn. Me versus the Indian meal moths. I am about to launch an assault on the insects and I'm calling in the SWAT swat team.

Bloody things are everywhere. Still. I removed all the cereals in the pantry—and ditched every other dry good, just in case. My cupboard looks as though it's owned by Old Mother Hubbard. (Memo from MH: A little less of the old, if you don't mind.) And those blasted moths keep coming.

Tonight I found a couple of caterpillars in long-grain rice that I'd recently bought. As soon as I'd opened it, I decanted it* into a screw-top plastic jar. And still the buggers managed to lay their eggs in it. How? These moths aren't octopus. They can't unscrew lids. Do they band together in a working ... er ... bee? Do they all line up with their feet against the lid and flap like crazy until it turns? And if so, why don't they loosen the lids on the jam jars for me? Selfish beggars.

Needless to say, a couple of creepy crawlies weren't going to stop me from having dinner. I picked them out and cooked the rice anyway.

And now the bastards are throwing themselves into my tea. I just took a sip and realised that there was something drowning in it. Something with scaly wings and six legs. A whole mothful, you might say.

I think I'm going to lose the battle and the war..

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* Can you decant grains?

Not exactly Manderley

After a night of interrupted sleep, I had a couple of dreams in which I was given 'news'. (Not real news, obviously. I'm not a believer in prophetic dreams.) What entertained me were the differing ways in which I received this news within the dream.

The first one I accepted with equanimity. Apparently, I'd won first prize in the lottery—about $2,000,000. I guess the whole point of entering games of chance is to win, so why make a fuss if your numbers come up? That's how I rationalised it, anyway.

But my response to the second dream was quite different. I was absolutely appalled and outraged that we had no slide-mounted specimens of Hymenolepis diminuta cysticercoids. How could we not have them in the laboratory? Think of the humanity.

I understand why I was dreaming about the lottery but ... tapeworms? I haven't lectured on tapeworms for a couple of years. I mean ... really. I seriously need to get out more.

Hannibal Lecterpillar

Snails and slugs are on the menu for many species of predators. Let's face it, they're juicy, easy to catch and chock-full of molluscy goodness. The only real question is why doesn't everything eat them?

I can't answer that. So ...

Ooh look ...

What's that over there? A snail-eating caterpillar?

Adults of the Hawaiian moth Hyposmocoma molluscivora (Cosmopterigidae) are small, grey and largely nondescript—except for luxuriant feathery fringes along the trailing edges of the hind wings. Their larvae appear about as unremarkable. They are small, brown and largely nondescript. But whereas the caterpillars of other Hyposmocoma feed on the usual fare of plant material, those of H. molluscivora prey on snails.

When a snail is attacked, it retreats into the shelter of its shell. A predator's only options are to break the shell or follow the snail. If the snails seals the opening of its shell by sticking it down to a leaf or stone, that's pretty much it for the smaller predator. Time to move on and find a less alert potential meal.

The caterpillar of H. molluscivora maximises its chances of getting dinner by trussing up the snail with silk. Most caterpillars produce silk, which they use for a variety of purposes including building retreats, but only the Maui snail-killer also employs it to tether prey.



On encountering one of the small native Tornatellides snails, the caterpillar crawls onto the shell and swathes it in silk. Then it follows the snail as it retreats as far as it can. When there's nowhere left for the snail to go, the caterpillar dines at leisure.

Some caterpillars add the empty shells as ornaments to their transportable cases. But I don't think it's in some weird serial snail-killer sort of way.

[Image from Rubinoff & Haines]

References
Rubinoff, D. & Haines, WP. (2005). Web-spinning caterpillar stalks snails. Science 309: 575.

Rubinoff, D. & Haines, WP. (2005). Hyposmocoma molluscivora description. Science 311: 1377.

First the bad news. After a ridiculously warm night for late March, it reached 37C (99F) in Melbourne today with wind gusts to 100kn/hr. There's a total fire ban. And a horrific vehicle crash in the Burnley Tunnel had serious ramifications for traffic across town.

Now the good news (although there's a difference in scale). I stayed at home to examine a PhD thesis, so I've avoided the traffic chaos and most of the work stress. I took the thesis to a local café, ordered breakfast and asked them to keep the coffee coming. Such a pleasure to be away from the office and out of direct content with people who want stuff. All to a soundtrack of Van Morrison and early Stones.

And now it's raining.

I and the Bird #45

The latest edition of I and the Bird is up at Journey through Grace. Have a slice of Jayne's birthday cake and settle in to read the bumper collection of happy birdy posts. You won't be disappointed with your presents.

The biennial air show at Avalon is a big deal. Industry displays occupy the first few days and then it's aerobatics and afterburners on Friday and Saturday. I don't know anything about aircraft and I feel I should be appalled by the whole display but I'm actually fascinated.

I won't go to the show. I don't need to. Just about everything has flown over the city at one time or another. (Although I haven't seen a Catalina. Sure, I'm not that well-versed on aeroplanes but I do have a soft spot for flying boats. Flying boats and jump jets. But that's it. Honestly.)

Many years ago, when I lived in Townsville, I was on my way to work when a massive shadow crawled across the road ahead. I peered up through the windscreen to see a USAF B-52 coming in to land. I hadn't seen one before but there was no chance of mistaking it for a Lear Jet or a Cessna out on a joy flight over Magnetic Island. It was huge. And it was scary.

The B-52 flew over again later in the Townsville air show. One of the local DJs did a live cross to the pilot, a charming, polite and unflappable man. Which was more than you could say about the DJ after the following exchange.

Pleasantries

DJ: And what exactly is the role of a B-52?

Pilot: Well, sir, we carpet bomb.

Dead air.

Well, really, what did he expect?

From my office window

A trio of international students making a video of themselves to send home to their families. Much of the footage involved the three men being very laddish and shoving each other off their pushbikes. They were having great fun, lying on the ground, helpless with laughter.

A flock of about forty or fifty ravens flying across campus. They came over the roof of our building and dipped down to the level of my window. I didn't think there were that many ravens in the whole area. It was like a scene from The Birds. (Except they didn't settle and no one got their eyes pecked out. But apart from those small details, it was absolutely identical.)

A rather smaller number of helicopters zipping backwards and forwards between the greater metropolitan area and Avalon, near Geelong, which is hosting an air show this week. It's hard to ignore helicopters, especially when they're flying low, so I've been watching them from my office window. But when someone made an unkind reference to Ray Liotta's cocaine-fuelled obsession in Goodfellas*, I decided to keep quiet about the bright red chopper that flew along above the freeway as I drove to work this morning ...
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* You know who you are.

Spot on snails

I posted an image a few weeks ago showing a Morse code of mucus trails laid down by what I presumed to be introduced garden snails (Cantareus aspersus). I attributed the dashed lines to the snails because they were the only molluscs active at that time. (The slugs were keeping a rather lower profile then than they are now.) This led to a brief discussion about the source.

It's taken all that time for me to catch a snail in the act but I found one last night. Yep. The snails are responsible.



I knew you were waiting for the answer.

I realise that reading this blog has been the equivalent of watching paint dry lately*. I've been a bit occupied and haven't quite got work and life balanced yet. It will fall into place soon.

In the meantime, here's something that might make you smile. In a recent comment, Lynsey of Marginalia pointed me in the direction of the White Island crater web cam. Check out the shots from lunchtime, when the shadows are short. Those vulcanologists are wags.

Thanks, Lynsey. That really cheered me up.

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* I was going to say watching the grass grow, but that would be interesting.

As usual, I printed off a whole stack on the latest articles on the topic du jour (endosymbiosis*) and haven't had a chance to read them this weekend. In fact, I don't seem to have achieved anything since Friday**. Possibly not since the Friday before. (I don't suppose cooking a very fine okra curry counts.)

And, as usual, I'm finishing off some paperwork for tomorrow. Haven't written anything for a while. I once watched an interview with Christopher Koch (Year of Living Dangerously, The Doubleman and others) in which he stated that it's impossible to write and work full time. After resisting the idea for years, I'm beginning to think he might be right.
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* We've got some students working on this at the moment. There was a battle for their hearts and minds between the endosymbiosis faction and the saving babies faction. In the end, the split was pretty much even, with a maverick breaking away to study yeast.

** While I failed to do things in Melbourne, elsewhere in the city people were racing fast cars and having swimming contests. There might have been some footy too. And cycling in Geelong. It's just me.

Say "cheese", crater

Mount Ruapehu on New Zealand's North Island belched today and sent a mud flow (lahar) out of the crater lake and down the Whangaehu River. Fortunately, no one was injured. Mount Ruapehu's activity has not always been so mild.

New Zealand's Geonet Data Centre has a web cam trained on the volcano, with shots posted every hour. Horizons Regional Council has a web cam too, but that one is pointed at the river—where the action happens.

If, like me, you've got a soft spot for volcanoes, check out the United States Geological Survey's web cam on Kilauea's Pu'u O'o vent. Kilauea, on Hawaii, is one of the world's most active volcanoes. The web cam updates at 5 minute intervals. More leisurely is the Mauna Loa web cam, which refreshes every 10 minutes. But Mauna Loa isn't quite as lively as its coastal cousin.

I've got a couple of boxes of slides from a trip there in April 1996. Don't know where they are but if I find them, I'll scan a few and post them.

First the sewer, then the water heater and now—the element in the grill of my dual fuel cooker. It treated me to a rather delightful display of white sparks and crackles before I managed to switch it off. Unfortunately, the toast was toast.

So that's another call to another tradie on Monday. At least this time it's not a plumber.

Humphrey the icon

What a funny old fellow is Humphrey,
He gets in all manner of strife ...

Bear by name, almost bare by nature, Humphrey is an Australian institution. He's been on television since 1965, saying nothing, just wandering around in his waistcoat, tie and boater (no pants) and gardening without sharp implements. Just like real bears.

Anyhoo ...

On Friday, I drove past a medical centre that has an image of Humphrey in its window. It's next to a picture of the Bananas in Pyjamas in the children's section of the waiting room.

But it's not the usual portrait of our Humphrey B. Bear ... The funny old fellow is standing with his feet together and his arms outstretched. His head is slightly angled and the little yellow boater rests on top. Perhaps he's about to hug a small child. Maybe he's pressed up against the window, trying to get out. Or ... You make up your own mind.

(I had to take this photo today when the centre was closed. I didn't think people would be at all amused by my posting a picture of a full waiting room. Unfortunately, that meant a reflection of the town houses and 7-11 across the road. But you get the idea.)

Wishful thinking?

I wouldn't mind being there too.

Here's the Haemanthus coccinea bud I mentioned in What's in flower this month. Something's already had a nibble at one of the petals. Unfortunately, the roots have escaped from the base of the pot and have anchored the plant in the soil beneath, so I can't move it to somewhere safer.

Slug census

You know, I reckon it is possible to tell one leopard slug from another. These are mugshots of the three slugs I found last night.

The first was in the dried up bird bath. (I'll be getting complaints from the sparrows.) This one has plenty of black on the mantle, including a distinctive serpentine squiggle near the front. I'm not sure that I've seen this individual before but the stretched out W might be a good diagnostic character.

The second was next to the bird bath. This one has patches of buff on the mantle and some of the black markings are joined up by smudges of grey. You can see that in the two lateral blotches towards the rear of the mantle. I've seen this slug before. I think it's one of the individuals in this post. (It's on the bottom right.) And you know what, I suspect it was one of the slugs entertaining themselves on my potted plants the other night.

The third slug is a shade darker. And, after munching its way through the discarded cereal, a whole lot fatter. This individual also has greyish smears connecting the dots but they're more frequent and larger than in slug number two. I have no doubts that this well-fed animal appeared in the Slug World post. (It’s on the top right.)

So that's ... what ... five or more leopard slugs in the garden?

I can't go on calling them by numbers. ('I am not a number: I am a free mollusc.") And as dubbing them Ralph-n-Lisa caused tummy troubles (sorry, Lynsey), I'm open to any suitable names. Whether they are is another matter.

Weird Pal(indromes)

I hadn't heard this song by Weird Al Yankovic until it was played on Spicks and Specks tonight. Each line is a palindrome. Were I smarter, I'd have come up with a better title.




Bob
I, man, am regal - a German am I
Never odd or even
If I had a hi-fi
Madam, I'm Adam
Too hot to hoot
No lemons, no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Rise to vote, sir
Do geese see God?
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
Rats live on no evil star
Won't lovers revolt now?
Race fast, safe car
Pa's a sap
Ma is as selfless as I am
May a moody baby doom a yam?

Ah, Satan sees Natasha
No devil lived on
Lonely Tylenol
Not a banana baton
No "x" in "Nixon"
O, stone, be not so
O Geronimo, no minor ego
"Naomi," I moan
"A Toyota's a Toyota"
A dog, a panic in a pagoda

Oh no! Don Ho!
Nurse, I spy gypsies - run!
Senile felines
Now I see bees I won
UFO tofu
We panic in a pew
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
God! A red nugget! A fat egg under a dog!
Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog

Duncan at Ben Cruachan Blog had a great sighting today: a pair of powerful owls that survived the summer's bushfires.


This is the latest image of eastern Victoria from NASA's Aqua satellite. The area burnt by bushfires in December and January is clear on the photograph. (Previous posts with satellite images of the fires: Dec 7, Dec 9, Jan 9 and Jan 10.)

What's in flower this month

While the plumber fixed the hot water system, I did the rounds of my yard. The short burst of rain a few days ago has encouraged weeds to grow but the other plants—the ones I brought into the garden—are giving them stiff competition. Few of my plants produce flowers at this time of year but a small number are putting on a show. Of course, I've left the camera cable at work so I can't download any images. I'll put up pictures tomorrow.

The green-flowered correa is doing its thing, much to the delight of the wattlebirds. A prostrate Brachysema is also sporting a scatter of tiny scarlet and yellow blooms. And, despite being savaged by snails, one of the trio of Haemanthus coccinea has started to push up a flower. Haemanthus, a South African amaryllid, bears a single blossom on a stalk patterned like snake skin. So far, only a semi-circle of red petals has emerged from the soil of the plant pot. I'm really looking forward to this one.

Draining resources

Just when I thought I was going to clear the inbox at work, I had to come home to let the plumber into the back yard. No, not the drains again. The water heater. And this was a different plumber. I'm now $93 poorer but I do have hot water. (That's after I was charged $176 for the sewerage problem that affected all four households. I paid the plumber and now have to recover the costs from the other three. One has paid up. I'll see what happens with the other two.)

I can't wait to see what goes wrong next.

No, that's not true. I can wait. I can wait for a long time.

It's only Tuesday but it feels as if it's 2012. Yesterday's Labour Day holiday didn't extend to universities, so we all had to trot into work while much of the state had a long weekend. When I say all, the car park was remarkably free of vehicles. I'm not suggesting that people were skiving off, you understand. I'm just saying.

I haven't been blogging much because I've been doing little other than work. (And cataloguing the vehicles in the car park.) Unfortunately, although the sheer nuttiness of the Academy is a rich source of material for blog posts, I reckon there's a limit to how much anyone wants to read. So I'll leave it for now. But I'm sure you can hear my teeth grinding, wherever you are.

I heard a great story on the ABC news this morning* but I can't find it on the intaweb. Somewhere in Gippsland, a wombat tunnelled into the bank of a settlement pond and released a sh ... edload of effluent. I'd like to have seen the look on the face of that wombat as it broke through ...

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* While I was waiting for the gas heater to warm up the water for the shower. The blasted thing had gone off in the middle of the night.

Bugger! I've just lost today's writing. The first time I've managed to get a good run and it all disappears into cyberspace at the touch of a mouse button. Having saved the files into different folders, I decided to line them all up in one place. My mistake. And now I can't find one particular file, which contained the bulk of today's work. Only about 750 words but they were all very fine ones ...

I'm not going to bed until I get them back again. Because I'll never locate them on the computer, that means I'll have to recreate the three MS pages. Will it be easier the second time around? Ha!

And I just got soaked when I went out to take the leopard slug census. Just as I was leaning over the bird bath with my camera focusing itself on the wallowing slug, the skies opened and a 20-second cloudburst rained on me. It's stopped now, of course.

... but it pours.

Yet another bad idea from the Snail: starting a collection of rainforest figs when you live in a cottage on a very small urban block. The good news is that the sandpaper fig (Ficus coronata) only grows to 12 m. But let us not speak of the small-leaved fig (F. obliqua). Or, if we do, let us avoid mentioning that it grows to 35 m and not in a telegraph pole way either. The leaves might be small but the rest of it makes up for that inadequacy.

I really do need to get a bigger place.

The advantage of this one is that no one is likely to nick the plants. A friend had the unfortunate experience of coming home from holiday to find that some thieving bastard had made off with the best of his orchid collection*. What is it with some of the orchid fanciers? I don't get Casuarina collectors nipping over my back fence and legging it with armfuls of saplings. Perhaps I would if I moved to a house with a more spacious garden. I dunno.

Losing a plant to the drought is unpleasant enough. I'd be really pissed off if I lost one to a light-fingered collector.
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* But only the labelled specimens, so maybe they were filling an order.

Listing the ports

Saturday night is party night in ... Oh, who am I kidding? I just watched Around the World in 80 Treasures. The problem with this program is that it makes me want to hop onto an aeroplane and head for exotic places. I have a long enough list of destinations—I don't need any more to add to it.

This week the affable Dan Cruickshank was in India and Sri Lanka. I haven't travelled to either country. (Well, I was in Sri Lanka for a few hours when I was three but I'm not sure that counts as a real visit.) Both are on my list. Cruickshank went to Cochin, the Taj Mahal and Red Fort at Agra, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth in Kandy ... He also went to Jaipur.

Jaipur is on my list for the water palace and the forts. But I didn't know about the observatory*. Built between 1727 and 1733 by Maharajah Jai Singh II, it is the largest astronomical observatory of its type. It includes a sundial with a gnomon the size of a ski-jump** that measures the time more accurately than my bedside clock. The complex looks like an astronomical Disneyland.

Next week Cruickshank is off to explore Persepolis and Tamerlane's Mauseoleum in Samarkand. The week after he's at Petra, Burgon's "rose red city half as old as time". I might have to give up watching television. Either that or earn more money, so I can visit all these places before I enter my dotage.

Where did I put that plaid rug?

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* Because I seem to have lived much of life without knowing very much at all

** For wimps

How did they know?

I just tried to show someone at work the leopard slugs photos and only two of five images loaded. The reason?

[image] is not permitted from the [university] network, as it falls into the Adult/Sexually Explicit category

Apparently images 3 and 4 in the sequence are acceptable.

I and the Bird #44

I should be on my way to work but the latest edition of I and the Bird is out at The Greenbelt ...

Deep sea worm

Deep Sea News has a terrific story about a marine worm that looks like a horse's pig's arse posterior. It's a new species. What took people so long to find it?

Mucus by moonlight

A friend sent me a series of text messages last night. He was spotlighting for wolf spiders on remnant grassland in Melbourne's west but was having no luck. What the area lacked in lycosids it made up with vertebrates. The first message mentioned a striped legless lizard (Delma impar). The next few, owls and nightjars.

So I went out into the back garden (which is overrun with wolf spiders) and did some spotlighting of my own. Never mind that I didn't have a spot light. A minor detail. I was on a mission to locate and identify leopard slugs and picking them up by the glint of mucus in moonlight would have to do.

I saw the first slug on the compost heap but its head and part of the mantle were buried in cereal. I photographed it for the record and then moved on. The second was in the bird bath (above). This one had clear and distinctive markings. The configuration of black dots at the posterior margin of the mantle matched those of a slug I'd photographed the night before (below). I'm pretty sure that the same slug was back for its evening paddle.

But the slug was showing signs of having recently indulged in more than a paddle. That pale projection on the right side of its head is its penis in the last stages of retraction. (No wonder the birds give the bath a miss.)

And then I noticed a couple more leopard slugs. They didn’t bother to climb up a tall object but engaged in their mid-air activity* from the rim of a plant pot.

The pictures tell the story. (I just wish the slugs had done it against a better backdrop than mulch made from old copies of the Age.)






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* I've named them Ralph and Lisa.

I'm going to bed early tonight. I know that every time I say this, I end up staying up into the small hours but tonight will be different. I will definitely be asleep before 9.30 pm.*

Today was one of those WTF? days. You know, the sort of day when every phone call and knock on the door leads you to utter that question. But I saw an Australian hobby (Falco longipennis) while I was driving home. And—even better—the sewers are now clear. The drains are flowing like mountain streams. I'm almost tempted to invite passing strangers to use the toilet so I can share with them the joy of free-draining plumbing. Maybe the Aussie cricketer who tried to flush his pads and bat on returning to the dressing room after a pretty ordinary innings. (Michael Slater, perhaps? Sounds plausible.)
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* Or not, as it's almost that time now.

The accidental birder

I haven't had a chance to go birding recently. It's been too darned hot and I've been too darned busy/tired/cheesed off at life. So for a while now my bird watching has been restricted to seabirds at Williamstown and the more tolerant species around campus, in my garden and along freeways. Mind you, as that list includes pelicans, black-shouldered kites and the occasional wedge-tailed eagle, I'm not too despondent.

Although accidental birding has its moments in the temperate south-east, there's nothing quite like the tropics for spectacle. Here are a few of my favourite accidental bird watching episodes from Far North Queensland.

I was wandering around Tam O'Shanter State Forest near Mission Beach at night, looking for snails. As you do. I had a torch. I had a permit. I heard a rustle. Thinking that it was a small, ground-dwelling mammal, I followed the sound to its source. Not the paws of a bandicoot or pademelon but a very large pair of bird feet. One toe on each foot carried a big claw. A claw that was waaaaay longer than my index finger. I looked at the cassowary. The cassowary looked at me. Then we both pretended we hadn't seen each other and sauntered off in different directions.

A tropical low dumped vast amounts of rain on town, flooding roads and shopping malls and swamping parks and playing fields. The magpie geese had never had it so good. They took over the local oval, blanketing it in a honking, hooting black and white mantle. Every now and then, they'd rise in splendid disorder. All fun and games unless they were nesting within earshot.

I was on holiday with a friend on the Atherton Tablelands. While ambling around the back roads, we spotted some brolgas in a paddock. We parked at the side of the road. The cranes took off. What we had thought were half a dozen birds turned out to be about forty. And they were sarus cranes not brolgas, an even bigger bonus. We watched them until they disappeared into the distance. And then we had a celebratory beer at the Lake Eacham Hotel.

Crossing the Whitsunday Passage to the islands, I glanced up from the water (which I was scanning for dolphins) to see a frigatebird soaring above the boat. That more than made up for the absent cetaceans.

And the bustards at Fossilbrook. I think I've mentioned those once or twice.

When the birding is a bit sparse, I can always remember these moments. None of them planned but all of them prized.

So much for spending the day writing.

I've discovered why the kitchen periodically smells of raw sewage and it's not my cooking. Well, not directly. Either my next door neightbour or her neighbour on the other side has a blocked drain. As the three drains join, we're all getting our own back ... and then some. First thing tomorrow it's a call to the plumber. (Lucky I've got all those fridge magnets, isn't it?)

1974. Live at the Rainbow.

(Don't mind me, I'm just reliving my childhood. Again.)

Fridge magnet meme

Malacological fridge magnets aren't easy to find. I can't imagine why. Who wouldn't want these cheerful chappies or that handsome snail holding newspaper cuttings on the refrigerator?

I don't know if someone's already suggested this as an internet meme but I'm offering it now. This is the door of the freezer section on top of my refrigerator. (The fridge door is much more boring. It's covered almost entirely in advertisements for plumbers.) Because the space is small, I've been judicious with the decorations.

Apart from the water company's guidelines for water efficiency (this house comes in at 70% of the recommended usage, so it's no wonder the drains are drying up), there are newspaper clippings from the Melbourne broadsheet, The Age. The first is a cartoon by Michael Leunig on the subject of journalists. The other is a photo of Monica Lewinsky.

Slug world ™

The leopard slugs (Limax maximus) haven't been around for a while. I thought the drought might have finally achieved what the neighbours' snail pellets and beer traps have failed to do. But last night—on a very late wander around the garden—I found not only leopard slugs in abundance but also Limacus flavus. They were stuffing themselves with the caterpillar- contaminated cereal products that I'd emptied onto the compost heap. Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch?

Cetacean biologists can identify individual whales by the shape of their tail flukes*. I wonder whether similar criteria can be applied to leopard slugs? The markings on the mantles of these three are different. I'll go out again tonight and see whether I encounter the same individuals again. This time I'll photograph the mantles from directly above, so I can make useful comparisons between them. (Useful, of course, being a relative term.)

And then I'll have to give them names.
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* Which once led me into a very strange conversation with a whaleologist. I thought he was talking about intestinal worms ...

The Neurophilosopher has done all the leg work. Here's another way to spend your free time—reading natural history blogs.

The garden fights back

Having not had the time or inclination to work on the garden over the past week, I made a sortie into the back yard. The Kennedias have taken over. The side fence has disappeared under a mass of green. It'll take hours to get the plants under control. I should have planted triffids instead, They would have been easier to manage.

Not that the rampant Kennedias are ugly. I love the glossy bottle-green and bronze of the black coral pea (K. nigricans) and the velvety pale green of the K. retrorsa. But when they roll out of the garden bed like a breaker and threaten to swamp the rest of the yard, it's time to wield the secateurs with extreme prejudice.

I started on the black coral pea but succumbed to the heat and humidity after a few snips. Not before I'd uncovered a bunch of insects that had been hiding among the leaves.

Margarodidae is a family of scale insects with 40 or so species in Australia, The most well-known species, Icerya purchasi, has been exported (inadvertently) to other countries, where it has become a pest of cultivated plants. Most adult Icerya are hermaphrodites. They are able to fertilise their own eggs, in which case they always produce hermaphroditic young. If eggs are fertilised by one of the rare winged males, then some of the young are also male. The egg are laid in white quilted sacs, which remain attached to the adult. This gives the soecies its common name of cottony cushion scale.

The camouflage of this noctuid moth would be very effective on tree bark or among dead leaves but when the disturbed insect settled on living foliage, even I could spot it. The white blotches on the forewings were so bright that I thought they were either fluorescent or reflective. When I got the moth under the microscope, I saw they were silver with beaded edges. These photos don't show their real beauty. But they do show the extraordinary form of the wings.

There are wonderful animals in the garden.

The only day in the village

And on the subject of all things Welsh, happy St David's Day!

St David's most celebrated miracle was pretty low key. When preaching in a small town in mid-Wales, his audience complained that they couldn't see him. So, instead of him having to shift to a higher spot to accommodate them, the ground grew under his feet and raised him up. And that was just what Wales needed—another hill.

And the small town in which this miracle took place? Why, Llanddewi Brefi.

Size of Wales

No blogging tonight as I'm trying to dig my way out of a pile of paperwork. (I'm doing it now because I'm determined to spend the weekend writing—something I haven't managed to do for ages.)

If you're looking for a way to waste time, may I recommend the Size of Wales. After reading a post on the incredible shrinking giant squid, a reader (sorry, I don't know who to credit but you know who you are, so thank you) posted the link to this site, which allows you to calculate lengths/heights/weights/areas of items against standard measures—Wales, whales and ... er ... HRH the Prince of Wales.