Crater expectations

I had intended to catch up with a friend in Missoula, Montana, but got stuck in Idaho. I knew only three facts about the state.

1. Idahoans were big on spuds. (The number plates boasted of 'famous potatoes'. Those in neighbouring states clearly did not attract the same level of public interest.)

2. The volcano movie Dante's Peak was filmed at Coeur d'Alene in the far north-west. As a disaster movie it was ... well ... disastrous.

3. Vicki Lester claimed that she was born in a trunk at the Princess Theatre in Pocatello, Idaho. Of course, she was only lowly Esther Blodgett then.

But Idaho isn't all spuds and movies. There's more pioneer history than you can poke a stick at. In the mid-1800s, over 50,000 people crossed the state on their way to Oregon's Willamette Valley.

From Fort Hall (near Blackfoot) in eastern Idaho, the Oregon Trail followed the Snake River west on a relatively easy track. But it wasn't the most direct route, swinging south in a shallow curve before heading north again to what was then called Fort Boise. Ferry owner John Jeffrey encouraged the wagon trains to cross at the Blackfoot River (on his ferry, naturally) and travel a shorter route along a trail traditionally used by the Shoshone people.

In 1862, a massive wagon train led by guide Tim Goodale travelled along the straight track, which became known as Goodale's Cutoff. From then on, this was the route taken by most of the settlers, who were afraid of the increasing resistance by the Shoshone and Bannock people along the Snake River. But although it was a more direct route, it passed across the northern edge of a massive lava flow. Not only did the jagged surface slow down the wagons but the summer heat desiccated the wood of their wheels and frames. They fell apart as they crossed the flow.

Even without the wagons, that lava flow (now part of the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve) is tough going. Like all flows, it's hot and desolate. Yet there is no great volcano. Nothing like Mount St Helens or Augustine. Here, lava welled up along the Great Rift, an 80km fracture zone that split the earth.

Much of the flow is less than 15,000 years old—some of it less than 2,000 years old—cinder black and sharp as shark's teeth. Even in summer, snow persists deep inside the largest cinder cones, insulated from the sun by the dense walls.

Melbourne: the write place

Don't bother to say it. I'm slightly embarrassed by that title but it's too late at night for me to think of anything better. (And Aragorn has just led the Army of the Dead into battle on Channel 7, so that's taking up most of my attention.)

Just thought I'd draw your attention to the Melbourne Writers' Festival, which runs from 25th August until 3rd September. Looks like it's packed with goodies. Tim Flannery is giving the keynote address on global warming, but that sounds a little too much like work stuff for me to shell out dosh for it. But there's plenty of other speakers to keep us all entertained.

Of course, the danger is that people who can express themselves eloquently and imaginatively on paper may not necessarily be able to do it in front of an audience. That's the risk you take. But a glance through the program shows that there's a stack of good 'uns: Linda Jaivin, Kate Grenville, Gideon Haigh, Nick Earls and—of course—Peter Temple. I haven't heard Dava Sobel, Stella Rimington or Barry Maitland speak but I imagine they'll be interesting. And the list goes on.

Oh, and guess who I'm putting my money on to win the Ned Kelly Award for best novel?

Another quick pictureless visit

I'll make this one brief as I'm supposed to be writing lectures. Had I been more organised, I would have them all written and ready to go for tomorrow morning. Well, to be fair on myself, they are written and ready to go. What I'm doing is polishing them so they shine like pearls ...

I've had too much coffee.

On Monday, I'll be lecturing the first years in the morning and then sorting out the postgrad coursework students in the evening. (There'll be plenty to occupy my time in between. Don't you worry about that. I've got Honours theses to mark. Still. Not to mention sorting out the lab classes.) As the p'grad subject doesn't start until 6pm and is on another campus, Monday is going to be a hoot. Add to that the students and the timetabler have completely different ideas about which lecture theatre they'll be attending ... So why didn't I win the lottery on the weekend?

Despite all this nonsense. I'll be back on Monday with more stories and pictures from the wonderful world of malacology, biogeography and/or other stuff. I might whinge a bit too. Be warned.

Procrastination is my hobby ...

... and is second only to schadenfreude on my list of fun things to do. Can you 'do' schadenfreude? Maybe you experience it? Oh, well, it doesn't matter. It's entertaining.

Instead of writing lectures and lecture notes, marking honours theses and—good grief—editing the non-work manuscripts, I'm toddling off to the really good bottle shop in Yarraville*, buying up big and heading over to catch up with a friend for dinner. (Not in the Hannibal Lecter way.)

Bloody hell, it's Saturday. If I can't escape work on Saturday, what's the point?

So, I'm off for the evening. Here's another picture of the Borneo trip. It may not be obvious from this photo but that road was covered in clay as slippery as a tadpole. It also sloped towards a steep drop. Those were the days.

I hope you enjoy your night.


*The one on Anderson Street. I think it's called Yarraville Cellars.

Pilgrim's (snail's pace) progress

John Bunyan lived a dissolute life of swearing, dancing and bell-ringing before becoming a Baptist in 1653. During his later and rather more pious life, he wrote Pilgrim's Progress and got up the noses of the Quakers and the authorities. (Not necessarily in that order.)

He also wrote poems. Upon a snail was published posthumously in A Book for Boys and Girls: or Temporal Things Spiritualized. The poem is composed of two stanzas. Here's the molluscan bit. (The second stanza illustrates the religious significance of the snail's behaviour. If you desperately need to know the moral punchline, you can find it at any number of religious poetry sites.)

Upon a snail

She goes but softly, but she goeth sure,
She stumbles not, as stronger creatures do.
Her journey's shorter, so she may endure
Better than they which do much farther go.
She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on
The flower or herb appointed for her food,
The which she quietly doth feed upon
While others range and glare, but find no good.
And though she doth but very softly go,
However, 'tis not fast nor slow, but sure;
And certainly they that do travel so,
The prize they do aim at they do procure.

A Snail's Eye View has mail

E-mail, that is. You can contact me directly through the link on the profile page.

A blog of note

I found this wonderful blog last night.

POD-DY MOUTH

Wading through the sea of print-on-demand titles, one overpriced paperback at a time—and giving you the buried treasure

It's a gem. I hadn't really paid much attention to the concept of print on demand. Sure, I noticed it on the Amazon sites but I didn't bother to find out anything about it. Now I don't have to make the effort. Pod-dy Mouth not only explains the phenomenon but reviews the works as well.

There's a temptation to think they're all stinkers. And many of them are more on the nose than a week-old whale carcase. But there are some winners too.

Of course, I'm more interested in the Bulwer-Lytton wannabes. Pod-dy Mouth has gathered together some of the worst opening lines. Here's a small sample. For the rest—and some fascinating insights into the world of print on demand—visit the web site. You know it makes sense.

Michael Hierhoff III was born on October 17, 1972, the son of Samuel Hierhoff and Maria Hierhoff, of the Stamford Hierhoffs. Michael's grandfather, Elijah Hierhoff, came to America from Austria, where Miriam and Claus Hierhoff raised their many children. Ruth Hierhoff was . . .

The rain, wet, cold, misty and murky, fell on our saturated, pruned skin, had us running the cold, hard pavement with such animated and excited fury, that we fell in laughter when we returned to the warm, dry fire.

Everyday [sic] was like Monday for Trudy Goldman, except Tuesday, which always felt like Tuesday to her. I don't know, you'd have to ask her why. But Monday, different story. She preferred Fridays over any day of the week, which was strange since it felt like Monday. To her, I mean.

"Is that blood?" I thought. I ran to the phone to call my friend, Jack Walney, at the local FBI office. Turns out he was out, working another case. What are the odds of that? So I called my contact at the Houston Police Department, and he was out on a case, too. Had I stumbled onto something? Was this a conspiracy unfolding?!

On this (yester)day

Author Hilaire Belloc was born on 27 July, 1870, which means that—were he still alive—he'd be 136 and scary. Of course, he's neither. He died on 16 July, 1953.

In between writing his serious works on politics, history and religion, he produced some of the best known whimsical and humorous poetry. Remember 'Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion' and 'Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death'? These were a couple of the unfortunate stars of Belloc's Cautionary Tales. Fine gruesome stuff for kids. He started a trend continued enthusiastically by Roald Dahl.

The Microbe

The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen—
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so ...
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

Hilaire Belloc

Mild-mannered invaders

Not all introduced snails wreak havoc. Several species of alien subulinids have arrived in the country over the years and become established without causing too much damage. (Apparently.)

At a smidgeon over two centimetres long, Subulina octona is the largest of the three (or four?) introduced and two native species. It is a tropical tramp, hitching rides on cargo. In Australia, populations are known from locations all over the country. The species is particularly abundant in the Top End of the Northern Territory and parts of Queensland. (But I took this photo on Rakata—the island formerly known as Krakatoa.)

Wherever there's one Subulina, there's bound to be more. They aggregate under rotting logs and drifts of leaf litter. This clustering behaviour seems to be encouraged by chemical cues in the mucus. It's not clear whether they do this to conserve moisture or gain protection from predators. Or maybe they just do it for the company.


Read more

D'Avila, S., Dias, R.J.P. & Bessa, E.C.D. (2006). Aggregative behaviour in Subulina octona (Bruguiere) (Mollusca, Subulinidae). Revista Brasileira de Zoologia 23(2): 357–363.

Solem, A. (1988). Non-camaenid land snails of the Kimberley and Northern Territory, Australia. I. Systematics, affinities and ranges. Invertebrate Taxonomy 2(4): 455–604.

Am I the only one amazed by the latest news on inflation?

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) has risen 1.6 per cent in the June quarter, giving an annual inflation rate of 4 per cent.

No surprises there. But the explanation left me blinking like a possum in sunlight.

The rising costs of petrol and bananas have been the key contributors to inflation increasing to its highest annual rate in more than a decade.

Petrol, yes. But bananas? Bananas? Just how important can a fruit crop be?

Maybe Keating was right. This really is a banana republic.

Shelled stalkers

Not all snails are vegetarians*. I've already talked about the Otway black snail (Victaphanta compacta) and its carnivorous kin in the Gondwanan family Rhytididae. But they aren't the only shelled killers. Plenty of snails feed on other animals.

This is an Oleacina from Cuba. As you can see, it's sharing dinner—another snail—with a bunch of free-loading flies. Still, it looks as if there's more than enough to go around.

Euglandina is yet another carnivore. Members of this American genus were introduced into tropical areas to combat the problem caused by the giant African land snail Achatina fulica. You can see what's coming, can't you? Euglandina wasn't particularly fond of the African snails. Too big, maybe. Or too tough. They turned their attention to smaller local snails. Thanks to that ill-conceived attempt at biological control, many species of endemic tree snail in the Pacific Islands have been nudged towards the brink. Others have gone right over the edge.



*That reminds me of a Jimeoin line about how he opened the letterbox to find a snail was grazing away on his mail. 'No!' he said to the mollusc. 'It's lettuce.'

A stark and dormy night

It was a dreary Monday in September when Constable Lightspeed came across the rotting corpse that resembled one of those zombies from Michael Jackson's "Thriller," except that it was lying down and not performing the electric slide.

Derek Fisher, Ottawa
Winner: Detective fiction

How did the Bulwer-Lytton prize winners slip past me like a furtive raccoon on its way to raid the garbage bin ... No, I can't do it.

For those not familiar with the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, it celebrates the truly awful and contrived in ... er ... literature. All entries are composed for the competition, although I'm sure there are equally appalling openings in published works. Well, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830) for one:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Read more about the contest and the eponymous author at http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/. You can find the winners and runners up on http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2006.htm.

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Talking toxins

For marine predators, the sea floor is a smorgasbord. It's covered in snacks that can't move out of the way—sponges, bryozoans, clams and a host of other sedentary animals. They might not be mobile but they're not defenceless. Many species (especially among the sponges) are chock-full of toxins that deter predators after one nibble.

Some sea slugs hijack the toxins used by their prey and use them for their own purposes. (This is not confined to opisthobranchs. It happens across a range of animal groups—insects, fish, frogs and even birds.) Researchers from the University of Guam and the Florida Museum of Natural History studied two closely related species that feed on the same sponge and found contrasting defensive strategies.

The Pacific sea slugs Sagaminopteron nigropunctatum and S. psychedelicum graze on Dysidea granulosa. Both species sequester the same toxin—secondary metabolites called polybrominated diphenyl ethers—in the mantle and skin folds. They also release it in their mucus.

Despite the similarity in their use of hijacked chemical defences, the two species of sea slug avoid predator attack in different ways. Sagaminopteron nigropunctatum is camouflaged, whereas S. psychedelicum is brightly-coloured (as the name suggests). One hides from its predators. The other sends out a signal.

Whatever works. It's the only rule in nature.

Read more
Becerro, M.A., Starmer, J.A. & Paul, VJ. (2006). Chemical defences of cryptic and aposematic gastropterid molluscs feeding on their host sponge Dysidea granulosa. Journal of Chemical Ecology 32(7): 1491–1500.

Rock of ages

Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) lies to the west of Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Central Australia. Like Uluru, it is formed of Mount Currie conglomerate. The rock began as debris from the 600 million year old mountains that once dominated the landscape to the west. Eroded away by rivers and deposited as an alluvial fan, the debris became compressed into conglomerate. Among the sand grains lie boulders of granite and basalt more than a billion years old.

The surrounding land has been weathered away. Wind and water have scoured and sculpted the exposed rock into the curves and canyons that make Kata Tjuta a remarkable place.

Not, as I heard a group of tourists complain, just another bunch of rocks.

Snails at war

Visit any rocky shore around Australia and you'll find nerites. In other parts of the world, they are mostly snails of tropical waters but in Australia they occur all around the coast, including the temperate south.

Nerites (Nerita spp.) are interesting snails. In all species, the shell is rounded with a characteristic D-shaped opening. The exterior may be black, white or multi-coloured, smooth or ridged. The shell lip is always thickened with a row of tiny teeth. Those teeth aren't simply there for ornamentation. They seem to have a protective function.

Crabs love eating snails. But the tough shells present a problem. When disturbed, a snail withdraws into its shell, sealing the opening with an operculum as solid and tight-fitting as a castle door. Crabs get around this defence by grabbing hold of the shell lip and peeling it away. Of course, the thicker the shell, the more effort required to break it off. And that leads to an arms race between the nerites and their crab predators. The snails develop thicker shells and the crabs get beefier claws. And so it goes ...

This is the nerite that got away. Although a crab has given it a bit of scare, the snail has managed to not only escape (very slowly, presumably) but also repair its shell. Almost as good as new.

[Many thanks to Dark Orange for this spectacular photo of Nerita from Yeppoon, mid-east Queensland]

This just about sums up the week. And it's barely Tuesday. Photographed some where in Central Australia. I'm still trying to work out how this happened. (Someone distracted by yet another daft email from Senior Management, maybe?)

And it's goodnight from me ...

It's been a long day, so I'll say goodnight. Here's a fitting shot from the trip to Sabah in Borneo. In it we're heading off to a village close to the Kalimantan border. This was one of the better roads ...

Something to keep you occupied

November is National Novel Writing Month. Okay, so that's ... er ... months away yet, but I thought I'd draw your attention to it now. (Instead of marking Honours thesis. Yes, I've finished the lectures and have moved on. And off again.)

Here's the blurb from the NaNoWriMo web site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

What a hoot! Check out their web site for more information. I dare you to take part! Double dare you. I'll be giving it a go.

Life in the House of Snail

What is happening in the Snail Shell? I've got stacks of work to do, most of which would take me minutes to finish but seems to be taking hours. Sure, laziness plays a big part. But it's not responsible for all of it. It can't be. (Migod, what if it is? What if I've turned into a great big lazy blob? Zut alors!)

I'm supposed to be writing notes for a lecture that I'm giving to the Honours students tomorrow arvo. For some reason, I'm completely frozen. Is it down to those fourteen weeks of leave? Have I forgotten how to play the game?

And why am I writing this instead of that lecture?

Someone asked me about the photos on this blog. Unless otherwise credited, they're all mine. I've used either an Olympus OM-1 or a Nikon F80 and scanned the transparencies. (It's amazing how much dust gathers on film over the years.)

New world

I am writing this blind in pitch darkness. We are under a continual rain of pumice-stone and dust. So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced the Day of Judgement has come.

Captain Sampson, ship's log, Norham Castle

On 27 August 1883, the Indonesian volcano Krakatau erupted, killing 40,000 people in nearby Java and Sumatra. The force of the explosion shattered the volcano, leaving only a narrow crescent—a fragment of the cone—intact. Hot ash and lava covered what little remained of Krakatau and sterilised the neighbouring islands of Sertung and Panjang. Nothing survived.

Three years later, Dutch biologists visiting the island (now called Rakata) found two species of moss, eleven species of ferns and fifteen species of flowering plants growing on the crumbling lava. Within thirteen years of the eruption, over fifty species of plants, including figs (Ficus septica, F. hispida and F. padana) and the fast-growing macaranga (Macaranga tanarius) had established themselves. Today, Rakata, Sertung and Panjang are mantled in forest, the seeds of which have been brought in on the tide, in bird and bat faeces or by human agency.

Krakatau did not blow itself out of existence in 1883. A new volcano, Anak Krakatau (child of Krakatau) emerged from the sea. The pattern of colonisation along its shore resembles that of Rakata—as far as it can. Nothing here is simple. Rakata's forests remain undisturbed, no longer subject to heat and lava. The trees grow, providing food and habitat for other organisms. More and more species gain toeholds and become established. But Anak Krakatau is another story. Periodic volcanic activity incinerates plants and animals with lava flows. This photo shows the fate of a fringe of she oaks and other coastal vegetation following an eruption.

(Remind me later and I'll tell you how it feels to take a photo of an erupting volcano from not far enough away.)


Read more
Thornton, I. (1996). Krakatau: The destruction and reassembly of an island ecosystem. Harvard University Press.

Winchester, S. (2003). Krakatoa: The day the world exploded. Penguin.

Red oasis

At Finke Gorge, SW of Alice Springs, one of the oldest rivers in the world cuts through sandstone ranges on its way to Lake Eyre. For 100 million years, the Finke River has meandered across the heart of the continent, while the scenery around it changed from forest to desert.

Eucalypts and spinifex dominate the Centre now. But in Finke Gorge National Park they share space with relics from another time. Finke Gorge is caught between the wetter Then and arid Now.

The cabbage palm Livistona mariae is restricted to this area. There is no other Livistona for a thousand kilometres. (The nearest occurrence is at Mataranka in the Top End.) But the closest relative—the sister species—of L. mariae is a palm from Fortescue River in the Hamersley Ranges of Western Australia, about 1200 kilometres to the west.

At some time in prehistory, when the Australian climate was more humid, Livistona was spread across much of the interior. (Perhaps Mataranka gives us an idea of how the Centre might have looked.) As the continent drifted northward, it began to dry out. Forest retreated to cool, damp sanctuaries in the rocky gorges. Then the climate beat them. The remnants of that ancient flora and fauna—not only palms, but cycads, snails and other invertebrates—survive in Finke Gorge.

Mystery island(s)

Here's another view of the island group mentioned below. If I offer many more clues, it'll be too easy to guess where it is. (You've probably worked it out already. But humour me.)

That is dust on the photograph but there was a lot of it swirling around in the air while I was clicking away. (With the camera, that is. I'm not arthritic.)

Procrastinating ...

... instead of writing lectures. I can convince myself that I'm being productive. After all, I'm writing something.

Another daft day. This time I went to a workshop. You don't need to hear the details. Here's a message to those who gave talks during the day: Read through your notes before you stand up. (There's more but I'm learning when to stop.)

Now, on to more important things. Should I write a short story for the Scarlet Stiletto Award? I started one last year but chickened out before I got very far. (I am a coward at heart. I also seem to be losing all hand-eye co-ordination, but that's irrelevant. Forget I even mentioned it.)

I could head off down to the coast and spend a couple of days of solitude in Apollo Bay with the computer, the story outline and a suitcase crammed with chocolate.

After I do all the other stuff on my list.

A little something ...

... to keep you amused (or similar). I'll write about this place when I get back into the blog. (With luck and/or good management, I'll be able to make enough time in a day or two to write interesting stuff, not these half-arsed pieces I'm doing now.)

So, do you want to have a guess? It's in the tropics. And, yep, those are she-oaks. That'll narrow it down. Not.

Although that first picture doesn't give much away, you can see from this one that it's an island. (Well, you can't. All you can see is that it has a beach. But trust me. It is an island. Actually, it's a group of islands.) (Damn! I should have thought this out before I posted it.)

And at least one of this group of islands has a well-developed forest with figs and other trees seeded from bird and bat shit.

Oh, and it starred in a movie with a geographically-challenged title.

On the beach

I like to head down to the coast SW of Melbourne whenever I can. (Not as often as I'd like, though.) The rock platforms at Barwon Heads* are always fun for a bit of rock-pooling.

Sometimes you have to make an effort to spot animal life on the shores. Especially at this time of year with the wind howling in from Bass Strait, making your eyes water and your nose stream. (It's not a good look. Or it wouldn't be, if you could see.)

Many organisms (animals and algae) occupy specific ranges on the shore, usually identified by distance from low tide level. For most species, the upper limit of the range depends on the way it handles exposure to air. Not all organisms can deal with the problem effectively but those organisms that live at or above high tide level have efficient ways of avoiding desiccation. They seal off their shells, clamp themselves to rocks, hide under stones or cluster together. Barnacles close their plates, preventing water loss from their bodies. Mussels close the two valves of their shells.

Littorinid snails block the opening of their shells with a plate-like operculum. They also nestle against one another and glue themselves to a hard surface. Just to make sure.

Whereas the upper limit is determined by physical factors, the lower limit of a range is influenced by competition for food and space and by predation. There's not a lot of peace and harmony in nature.


*yes, where they filmed Seachange.

Amazing technicolor slugs

Red-triangle slugs (Triboniophorus graeffei) are probably the only native slugs that are familiar to Australians. And then only to those who live on the east coast from southern Queensland to central New South Wales.

Triboniophorus is found over a much wider range than that. It's also known from the summit of Mount Bellenden Ker in Far North Queensland and from Mount Kaputar in northern New South Wales. These slugs get around.

The common name comes from the red line that marks the edge of the mantle. (David Nelson's blog has pictures of a slug in all its red-triangled glory.) It's a very variable species. The Bellenden Ker and Kaputar versions are red. (Juveniles from Mt Kaputar have racing stripes.) The Sydney to Brisbane slugs are yellow, apple green or pale pink. All terribly House & Garden.

So what about the little (non-technicolor) white blob in the photo? This is a red-triangle slug from Mt Elliot, just south of Townsville. Triboniophorus is probably found in forest patches all the way up the coast but isn't seen very often. You have to be wandering around at night with a good torch, strong insect repellent and an eye for detail. You also need a shed load of luck.

A quiet weekend

No, I'm not dead. I'm just having a quiet weekend. Someone's coming over tomorrow to measure and quote on a new side gate. The old one is no longer fit for this world. More importantly, it's no longer fit for the side path.

Bloody period houses. (When I say 'period', it was built in 1922.) The next one is going to look like this. With a staff to match. (In numbers. I don't mean staff covered in tiles and fancy woodwork.) (For anyone who's interested, this is in Jamaica.)

A dilemma of horns

Horned lizards (Phrynosoma) live in the western US and central America. It's difficult to resist these little, spiky cuties. Had this one not been so lively, I would have used a whole roll of film on it. But as soon as I got close, he did a runner. Well, a scuttle.

It's thought that the horns on the back of the head are used in defence. (Seems like a silly place to have them in that case.) Kevin Young and a couple of generations of Edmund D. Brodies decided to investigate this. They used the flat-tailed horned lizard (Phrynosoma mccalli) as their study animal and concentrated on populations on the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Gunnery Range near Yuma, Arizona. They compared the relative horn lengths of live animals with those hung up in shrike larders in creosote trees. The live ones had horns that were significant larger than those that the shrikes were saving for later on. Young et al. attributed the difference to directional selection.

I found this one on the edge of the road in western Arizona, when I was photographing Lake Havasu, the water body formed by damming of the Colorado River on the California-Arizona border. (If I tried to photograph the dam now, no doubt I'd be whisked away by the Department of Homeland Security.)

Of course, the lizard wasn't sitting on the edge of just any old road. This individual had a feel for popular culture.

Read more

Young, K.V., Brodie, jr, E.D. & Brodie III, E.D. (2004). How the horned lizard got its horns. Science 304: 65–66.

Shell-less shale snail

Now this is way cool. (Oh dear. Did I just say that aloud?) It’s not often that molluscs make it into Nature but they slid into the latest journal. Why? Because Odontogriphus, that enigmatic beast of the Burgess Shale, turns out to be a mollusc.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you hadn’t heard of Odontogriphus. It’s played not so much second fiddle as seventh bassoon to its more famous associates in the Cambrian fauna. (Hallucigenia, anyone?) Many of the blobby fossils show few characteristics that could place them in any known group of animals. When studied, only the toothed, looped structure at the front end provide any clues to their relationships. It looked a bit like a lophophore—the tentacled feeding apparatus found in bryozoans, brachiopods and phoronids. But it also looked a bit like the dentate elements of conodonts, an odd bunch that belong with us in the phylum Chordata. But it didn’t fit well with either gang of animals.

After examining almost two hundred specimens, the international team of palaeontologists and malacologists realised that the toothy band was a radula, the rasp-like ‘tongue’ characteristic of molluscs. It also had a broad foot and multiple paired gills in a mantle groove. They’d finally cracked the identity of one of the more mysterious animals of the Cambrian explosion.

(And yes, Australia has its own odontogriphoid. Late Permian lake deposits near Blackwater in eastern Queensland contain Bowengriphus They’re lying in a shale deposit that has been baked into clinker by intense heat, either from a fire beneath the coal seam or by a local igneous intrusion. Nothing’s straightforward about these things!)

Read more

Caron, J-B, Scheltema, A., Schander, C. & Rudkin, D. (2006). A soft-bodied mollusc with a radula from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale. Nature 442: 159–163.

Ritchie, A. & Edgecombe, G.D. (2001). An odontogriphid from the Upper Permian of Australia. Palaeontology 44: 861–874.

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

The Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), Kota Kinabalu, specialises in research and education on rain forest and freshwater ecosystems. I spent some time there a few years ago, helping to curate their land snail collection. I thought you might like to see some photos from the trip. I'll put them up from time to time (sparingly).

UMS was constructing this huge mosque while I was there. I'd like to go back and see how the finished building looks. It's not going to be for a while, though.

No seeps for me, Austroassiminea

What Australia lacks in snail diversity, it makes up for in its large number of short-range endemics. They’re everywhere. Well, in small bits of everywhere. The country is chockers with species whose entire range might be a single gorge in central Australia, a cliff face in the Ningbing Ranges or a mound spring in the Simpson Desert. Species whose existence depends on a few hundred square metres of habitat.

That’s Austroassiminea letha in the picture. No, not the big one. That’s Glyptophysa. The weeny thing to the north. Although common as fossils in Pleistocene soils between Cape Leeuwin and Point D’Entrecasteaux, living Austroassiminea letha are restricted to just a few spots near the coast. Plot them out on a map and the linear range is about 40 km. Not that small, then. But the snails are so strict in their requirements—suitable freshwater seeps only occur on limestone or at the junction of limestone and underlying igneous rock—that they are found in only four localities along the 40 km line. Three of them are clustered around Augusta. The other one is near Margaret River.

Austroassiminea is unusual for a number of reasons. First off, it’s a monotypic genus—it contains a single species. Okay, that’s more interesting than odd. But what is a bit weird is that it’s one of only two non-marine assimineids found on mainland Australia.

Two things are wrapped up that statement. The first is that most assimineids in Australia live in marine and brackish-water habitats. Whereas elsewhere the family has escaped the sea with great enthusiasm, few of them have made that transition here. Only two genera have shifted out—Duritropis on Norfolk Island and Opinorelia on Lord Howe Island. Both live on land. Why haven't more made the break?

The second oddity is that, worldwide, very few assimineids live in freshwater habitats. Of those, the best known are Eussoia of eastern Africa from Somalia to Mozambique; Pseudogibbula in the Zaire River; and Solenomphala from damp habitats on stream banks in China, Taiwan and Japan. That’s not an impressive list. But mainland Australia has two non-marine assimineids and both of them are monotypic freshwater genera.

The second one is Aviassiminea palitans. (I don’t have a picture but it looks very similar to the first.) Aviassiminea palitans is widespread in northern Australia from the Pilbara in Western Australia to Mataranka in the Northern Territory. Like Austroassiminea letha, it lives along edges of seeps and springs. But, although it belongs to the same family, it is not closely related to Austroassiminea. So the freshwater habit has evolved twice in Australian non-marine assimineids. Odd, eh?


Read more

Fukuda, H. & Ponder, W.F. (2003). Australian freshwater assimineids, with a synopsis of the Recent genus-group taxa of the Assimineidae (Mollusca: Caenogastropoda: Rissooidea). Journal of Natural History 37: 1977–2032.

Solem, A, Girardi, E-L., Slack-Smith, S. & Kendrick, G.W. (1982). Austroassiminea letha, gen. nov. sp. nov, a rare and endangered prosobranch snail from south-western Australia (Mollusca: Prosobranchia: Assimineidae). Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia 65: 119–129.

New frog on the blog

I found this handsome fellow in a bathroom in Borneo. As you do. It's a four-lined tree frog (Polypedates leucomystax). This species is widespread in South East Asia, living in just about all habitats—including bathrooms. Polypedates is a relative of the flying frogs (Rhacophorus). Like them, it builds a foam nest from whipped-up mucus, in which it lays its eggs. The nest is usually attached to a leaf overhanging a body of water. When the tadpoles hatch, they drop and swim away.

This individual made no noise but the call was described to me as 'a big, watery fart'. So there's another reason to encourage wildlife in your house. Something else to blame.

Ho hum thoughts from a broad

One of those odd days today. The daftness started at 7.50 a.m. when the meter reader knocked on my front door to ask me to unlock the side gate, so he could read the gas meter. I was quite glad about this because the past three readings have been estimates. I'm sure they've been underestimates, so I over-paid them by $15 each time to create a buffer for the correction that was inevitably on its way.

I went out into the back garden, fought my way through the weeds along the side path (a disgraceful mess) and unlocked the gate. Which then fell off its hinges. So while I stood there with a 2 m-tall gate in my hands, the meter reader marched past. I had to hold the bloody thing until he left. So now I have to get a new gate. (The old one is beyond repair.)

When I got to work, one of the administrative officers burst into my office in a bit of a fluster. 'There's a cygnet in the garden,' she said. 'I looks very distressed. Can you do something for it?'

Visions of shoving a half-grown black swan into a box, then having my eyes pecked out by a couple of bad tempered parents when I returned their wayward chick to the lake.

It wasn't a cygnet but a fledgling Australasian grebe (Tachybaptus novaehollandiae). The poor little devil was obviously upset at the movement around it (it'd wandered close to the car park) and probably disorientated. It might have found the way back to the lake but it was pointing in the wrong direction. I caught it and carried it back.

I'd never been that close to a grebe of any sort before. They've got beaks like daggers and the most amazing feet—each toe has its own web. (And where are these digital cameras that everyone's supposed to own? No one had a camera. Not even a camera phone.)

'It's very relaxed,' someone said.

It certainly looked tranquil. Mind you, I had it in a grip that prevented it from moving anything except its head. Even that movement was limited.

In my experience with wild animals, very relaxed is the precursor to vicious attack. It appeared calm because its tiny avian brain was calculating the precise moment to launch a violent assault. The mad yellow eyes checked out the vulnerable spots.

Sure enough, I got it to the lake's edge without incident. (It didn't even poo over me.) Then, in a moment of distraction and self-satisfaction at being the bird's benefactor, I let my hand slip into range of the beak. For small birds, they can exert a lot of force. My thumb wasn't quite the same for the rest of the day.

'Are you going to fill in an accident report form?' asked one of my colleagues, with uncharacteristic sympathy.

'Yeah. Right. What do I put down?'

'Isn't it obvious?' he said. 'Grebeous bodily harm.'

Dots and dashes

Here's an interesting bit of snail biogeography. This is Rhachistia histrio (Pfeiffer) from Forty Mile Scrub in NE Queensland. This species is found over a wide stretch of coastal Queensland. It also occurs in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. And it might have been introduced to both places from Africa.

In his 1959 study of land and freshwater molluscs of Vanuatu, American malacologist Alan Solem suggested that R. histrio had been brought to Vanuatu from Madagascar or eastern Africa. From there, it had spread to New Caledonia and Queensland with the transport of indentured labour.

It's an intriguing tale but the evidence for translocation is flimsy. Solem listed the localities of R. histrio in Queensland as Port Denison (= Bowen region), Mt Dryander, Port Curtis, Bundaberg and Maryborough. He wrote:

All are near the active centers for the blackbirding trade between the New Hebrides and Queensland during the late 1800s. Thus there was ample opportunity for accidental importation either to or from Queensland.

He synonymised R. histrio with Bulimus bidwilli, a species described in 1868 by Cox, who believed it to be native. Although B. bidwilli had been collected in natural areas (not the usual pattern for introduced species), Solem dismissed this. He argued that at least one species of Indian Rhachistia introduced into Africa was now found out in the bush. Why shouldn't this one be capable of the same thing?

For a start, it's by no means clear that R. histrio from Africa is the same species as R. histrio from the Pacific. That's the key to the whole story.

And what's the relationship between the populations in Australia, New Caledonia and Vanuatu? Have they been shifted around by human intervention? Or is R. histrio just a widespread species? Or is it really two or three different species with similar shell patterns? (It happens!)

Now there's a great hypothesis just waiting to be tested by a keen molecular biology student. So what are you hanging around here for?

Read more

Solem, A. (1959). Systematics and zoogeography of the land and freshwater Mollusca of the New Hebrides. Fieldiana: Zoology 43: 1–359.

Dialogues

I just had an interesting conversation with a friend who pops in to read the comments about books. (Yep, it's lean pickings. I know.)

Appalled, she was, by my musings in type on the largely Australian phenomenon of the zero or minimal location novel. Ahem. It's just an opinion. And not a very well-thought out one at that. I was merely cogitating.

Did I enjoy Peter Temple's The Broken Shore? she wanted to know. (It was difficult to tell from my observations, where I had leapt from the novel into the critical abyss.)

Yes. Yes, I did.

Particularly the dialogue. No other Australian crime writer produces dialogue as authentic as Temple's. Damn it! Few crime writers anywhere can match his dialogue—especially his use of the vernacular.

Dialogue is tricky. We've all read books where the conversation is clunky. My worst-dialogue-ever award goes to an American crime writer who sets novels in a fictionalised England that seems to be populated entirely by Dick van Dyke clones (Gawd bless yer, guv'nor. Yer a toff.) and Yorkshiremen (Eh, up. There's trouble at t'mill.) Sometimes both. In the same place. And occasionally in the same person.

The best dialogue sounds naturalistic without being natural. It's a representation. Let's face it—real conversation is not that riveting. It's full of hesitation and repetition, mumbling, stumbling and ill-conceived ideas. Mine is, anyway. You might be Oscar Wilde. I dunno.

Great dialogue reveals character, tightens the screws and moves a story along. Done well, it achieves this without drawing attention to itself. Dialogue that waits for applause like a superannuated actor in a sit com simply grates.

Temple does terrific dialogue in The Broken Shore. Just as he does in the Jack Irish novels. (I haven't read the others, but I'm sure they're in the same category.) I've been combing through the text to extract a piece of dialogue as an exemplar, but here's the problem—the effect is cumulative. Slapping down a couple of lines of conversation would give you about as much of an idea of his skill as a brick would give you of a whole building. Read the books. Enjoy them.

I'd better finish here before you think I'm obsessed.

Your feets too big

Australia has three species of megapodes. Megapodes are large birds that build nests from mounds of leaves, which they rake up with their large feet. (Mega-podes—geddit?) Rotting vegetation warms the eggs inside the mound. If it's too warm, the birds scratch away some of the leaves. If it's too cool, they pile on more.

Unless you make a big effort, you're unlikely to see the rare and secretive mallee fowl (Leiopoa ocellatus) of the southern mallee. Orange-footed scrub fowl (Megapodius reinwardti) are easier to spot in the rainforests in the Northern Territory and Wet Tropics. Still, they can be a little shy. But you can hardly miss the brush-turkeys (Alectura lathami). They hang around picnic tables along the East coast, waiting for unwary tourists to sit down and unpack the sandwiches. Then they mug the poor saps.

A brush-turkey is an odd-looking bird. The tail folds vertically, which is strange enough. The featherless head and neck are scarlet. The chrome yellow wattles around the base of the neck look like a deflated balloon. To top it off, there's a sprinkle of black fluff on the top of the head.

But don't let the whimsical appearance fool you. They're as cunning as outhouse rats. Among their little tricks is a neat scam where one decoys the gullible by playing the fool while the others raid the hamper, Yogi Bear-style. I speak from experience.

Don't feed the turkeys. Populations increase rapidly in spots where they get regular hand outs. Areas with high densities of not-so-dense turkeys lose leaf litter, seedlings and ground cover. The birds move through the scrub like bulldozers, scraping away the surface covering and ripping out plants as they go.

Turkey nests are about 4 m across and up to 2 m high. The sex of the hatchlings depends on the temperature inside the mound. At optimum temperature (which the male tries to maintain), the sex ratio is 1:1. If it's cooler than that, the hatchlings are male; if warmer, they're female. But this isn't the same mechanism that controls reptile sex determination. Instead, skewed sex ratios result from embryo mortality at different temperatures.

Chicks are superprecocial. After they crack open the egg with their big feet, they take up to 55 hours to escape the mound. They feed, preen and snooze in between bouts of scraping their way to the top. Once at the surface, they disperse, never receiving parental care. Emerging chicks have well-developed wing feathers. They can't sustain flight for very long but they are capable of short bursts.

With all these things going for them, it's hardly a surprise they're taking over in Queensland. I, for one, am getting ready to salute my avian overlords.


Read more

Göth, A. (2002). Behaviour of the Australian brush-turkey (Alectura lathami, Galliformes: Megapodiidae) chicks following underground hatching. Journal für Ornithologie 143(4): 477–488.

Göth, A. (2005). Temperature-dependent sex ratio in a bird. Biology Letters 1: 31–33.

Starck, J.M. & Sutter, E. (2000). Patterns of growth and heterochrony in moundbuilders (Megapodiidae) and fowl (Phasianidae). Journal of Avian Biology31: 527–547.

Warnken, J., Hodgkinson, S., Wild, C. & Jones, D. (2004). The localized environmental degradation of protected areas adjacent to bird feeding stations: a case study of the Australian brush-turkey Alectura lathami. Journal of Environmental Management 70: 109–118.

Blue in the face

Honeyeaters are an important element of the bird fauna in Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand and parts of the Pacific, including the Hawaiian islands.

The blue-faced honeyeater (Entomyzon cyanotis) of northern and eastern Australia is one of the larger species. As the name indicates, it is characterised by the blue mask around the eyes in adults. (What? You didn't notice?) Blue is a structural colour. It isn't produced by pigments but by the scattering of incident light. Until recently, structural blue was attributed to Rayleigh scattering—reflection of light from random particles. But detailed studies revealed there's nothing random about the way in which light is scattered in bird skin. Collagen fibres are arranged in a regular array to produce the colour. The fibre pattern determines the hue.

Why the blue mask? Is it for signalling to others? Is it a gauge of health for prospective mates? Maybe both or neither of the above. But many homeyeaters (as well as other birds) have coloured facial skin.

Blue-faced honeyeaters were formerly placed with the miners (Manorina) and wattlebirds ( Anthochaera) on the basic of size and presence of coloured skin. DNA analysis showed that they had nothing to do with the miners but were more closely related to the smaller Melithreptus honeyeaters. File it under B for the bleedin' obvious. (Hindsight is a wonderful thing.) The plumage of the two genera is almost identical—black head with white nape, olive green back and wings and white belly. The only difference is the larger size (pfft!) of the blue-faced honeyeater and the extent of the coloured skin around the eyes. In Melithreptus, the skin is restricted to a half moon above the eye. The colour varies between species, ranging from pale blue to bright red.

And that brings us to another question about honeyeaters and colour ... Blue is a structural colour but red is a pigment. Within the one genus we have a variety of coloration with widely different origins. Which came first? The cerulean or the red?


Read more

Driskella, A.C. & Christidis, L. (2004). Phylogeny and evolution of the Australo-Papuan honeyeaters (Passeriformes, Meliphagidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 31: 943–960

Prum, R.O & Torres, R.H. (2003). Structural coloration of avian skin: Convergent evolution of coherently scattering dermal collagen arrays. Journal of Experimental Biology 206: 2409–2429.

A serve of escargot

These planorbids (Glyptophysa georgiana) met a sticky end in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, Western Australia. Large numbers of dead shells are concentrated in depressions along the cliff tops. Presumably they were frolicking around in ephemeral ponds, grazing on algae. Then their homes dried out. It always ends in tears.

Something made a meal of them. But what? A mouse? Mice and rats enjoy snacking on snails, as this photo of Theba pisana indicates. But as Glyptophysa is only about 18 mm long, the assailant was probably smaller than a mouse. A beetle perhaps?

In his autobiography, My Last Sigh, film-maker Luis Buñuel describes the arrival of movies in rural Spain. The audience, unfamiliar with the syntax of films, were bamboozled by the jump cuts and changes in point of view. An explicador accompanied every screening, standing at the front of the cinema and explaining the film to head-scratching movie-goers.

I want an explicador to wander around by my side and explain much of modern life to me. Why is Big Brother so popular? Why do universities offer homeopathy and iridology as units of study but not alchemy or contacting the dead 101? Why is so difficult to get a phone connection in your office?

Yrs
Baffled of Melbourne

Nothing succineids like success

Pulau Kapas might be covered in Amphidromus inversus, but that isn't the only snail on the island. This is an unknown species of succineid (I think).

Succineidae has a worldwide distribution. In Europe and North America, the family is associated with marshes and swamps, but elsewhere the snails might occur in any habitat. I found this Malaysian snail in rainforest. Australian succineids live in coastal heath, under eucalypt bark and on sand dunes. Tough little beggars.

They're difficult to identify. The shells all look pretty much the same (a few rapidly expanding whorls, no markings), as does the internal anatomy. There's nothing fancy about these snails.

So it's down to DNA to sort them out. Dr Rob Cowie and colleagues at the University of Hawaii are doing just that. They've already looked at thirteen species of Hawaiian succineids and found that the current taxonomic arrangement is all over the place like a mad woman's knitting. Almost everything is shoved into the open drawer marked Succinea, whether it should be there or not. Still, in which generic drawers those species should really go remains conjecture—until someone does a full-scale study of the family.

In the meantime, I've got no idea what species this is. If you can put a name on it, please let me in on the secret.


Read more

Rundell, R.J., Holland, B.S. & Cowie, R.H. (2004). Molecular phylogeography of the endemic Hawaiian Succineidae (Gastropoda: Pulmonata). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 31: 246-255.

Another exam answer. Make of it what you will. But don't think about it for too long for that way lies madness.

The function of the pelvic floor is to move the skull.

Cool yulei

Meet Bentosites yulei (Forbes), one of the big camaenids from Queensland. I photographed this one in rainforest at Conway National Park near Airlie Beach. The species occurs from Mt Dryander (north of Airlie Beach) to Seaforth (south of Mackay). It is also found on the Whitsunday Islands.

I said it was one of the 'big camaenids'. It's actually quite middling by their standards. The biggest specimens I've seen have been a little over 40 mm in diameter, but they're usually about 35 mm across. They wouldn't send your car careering into a ditch if you hit them on the road. (Not like Sphaerospira informis or Hadra bipartita. You need a roo bar on the vehicle when they're around.)

Bentosites yulei travels under a number of aliases. It's also known as Sphaerospira and by the specific epithets of rainbirdi, starena, findera and thorogoodi. Indefatigable splitter Tom Iredale was responsible for the last three names, which he applied to shells that departed slightly in appearance from the norm. (To be fair, only starena was a new taxon. Iredale gave the other epithets to taxa already proposed by Pilsbry.)

Despite the little black book's-worth of names, B. yulei maintains roughly the same shell shape throughout its range. Most specimens have depressed spires but occasional individuals are quite globose. Although there is a superficial resemblance to another local camaenid, Temporena macneilli, B. yulei always has an excavated umbilicus. (I don't think it collects fluff.)

We're almost at the end of the exam period. Special and supplementary exams run next week and then it's a fortnight before the re-enactment of Rorke's Drift (or is it Isandlwana?) starts again.

Here are some answers from the third-year immunology exam. They are all sadly genuine.

Viruses are constantly changing their surface antigens by continental drift.

The sympathetic division (of the ANS) is involved mainly in physical activity and the parasympathetic is involved more in vegetation.

Antibody coats antigen like coconut on a lamington.*

*For those unfamiliar with lamingtons, they are cubes of sponge cake, which are coated with a thin layer of chocolate and then sprinkled with coconut.

[Thanks to Sue for these little ... um ... gems. I'm so glad I didn't have any marking to do this semester!]

Whip around

I found this charming fellow under a limestone rock in a Caribbean jungle. (As you do.) It's a whip scorpion (order Thelyphonida, also known as Uropygida). See that fine 'tail' sticking up like a car aerial from its rear? The whip scorpion uses it to spray enemies with acetic acid. A snootful of vinegar soon persuades a predator that this isn't a tasty meal. The claws at the front end had already sent that signal to me. The vinegar was just ... er ... icing on the cake.

Where in the world ... ? Part III

These pictures will give it away.
Old American cars.
Fidel and Ernesto.
Stories of 'Yankee Imperialism'.

Fine phone fun

Not only do I have a telephone in my office but it's connected to the outside world.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

The technician waved a wand over the line. (Literally—he had a machine that went ping.) Then he told me that the number had been diverted to another office. This was a bit odd as the previous incumbent had retired the year before, had not occupied the room for at least six months and hadn't been given another office. So who knows where the calls were going? Not me. And I don't care anyway. I have a working phone. Did I mention that already? A phone. That works.

Where in the world ...? Part II

Let's recap the clues. A tropical island in the western hemisphere with a history of slavery. Lots of limestone, jungle and snails. You must have an inkling by now.

Want some more pictures to help you along? No? Well, tough. You're getting some.

It's not a wealthy country. There are plenty of good biologists but they don't have many resources.
This could be a natural history museum anywhere in the tropics. (But the battered old Hemingway-esque typewriter might give you a clue.)
One of the smallest frogs in the world.
One of the largest. (Okay, it's a toad. What's the diff? You say butterfly, I say moth.)
And the island's beaches are covered in fossil corals.

Where in the world ...?