Rainforest Soundscapes

Five short  soundscapes are taken from the same location

A single day in the life of the jungle in sound  --- 24 hours in the rainforest in 4 minutes and 27 seconds

This is what the rainforest sounds like... at the beginning of the wet season

postcards follow...  starting  2012 when we first moved into a shipping container in the rainforest

Postcards from the Jungle

Our Initial plan had been to put simple  shipping container accomodation on our rainforest property for use as  a casual  weekender.   

It became our new home in the jungle of  Far North Queensland Australia and we have never  lookied back.  

The postcards and imagery were intended to keep our friends and family informed of our journey of discovery beginning 2012...

Postcard from the Jungle #1 - Life in a Shipping Container 

September 24, 2012

Image ABOVE: our shipping container home built 2006 

We have made the move into the rainforest and very luckily for us the weather has been DRY for several days! Amazing sky at night with lots of satellites at sunset!

 Our main living area is about 2m X 3m plus room for our bed with a slightly smaller space in the second container that we use for a microwave and food storage.

This has been great as it has given us time to repack one shipping container ( with our household effects) and given us some extra space. Life on one electrical circuit must be organised - too many things on a once will blow the circuit - requiring a crawl underneath the place to reset the switch.

While we have a creek and several waterfalls on the property, the creek can rapidly rise by as much as 3m  and while we would like to have hyrdro-electric power we have had to connect to the grid for the moment. To get power we had to get our road gazetted then get a street number (two separate processes).

Our telecommunications, provided by the country's largest (and our only) supplier is absolutely third world standard. So horrible is the connection that we have had to revert to  a very slow 56K dial - up modem connection (almost impossible to find a dial-up modem outside museums) that runs sporatically at  at about 10K or less, as little as 30 Bytes per second. We envy those in Burkina Faso who enjoy better internet speeds.  So internet communication with us needs to be simple - no photos please! We dial up the internet about twice a week and it takes about an hour to load up gmail and do 2 or 3 brief replies!  

We have a resident wild bush turkey who does his regular visits twice a day with such regularity that you could set a clock by his visits.

All our mail is now reaching us but we are in dispute with the post office who want our postal address to be different from our residential address (which is also different from the billing address for our electricity supply!)  We would like to have just one address consistng of a line to show our physical street adresss and a second line to show the intersection of two roads where our rural post box is located - sound simple? Because the address shows the word "Road" more than once "computer says NO!"   imagine trying to put that down as an address over the internet!

Rainforest tip -

• never use your finger to pick up the crumbs off the table

• generally the crumbs will try to crawl, hop, jump or slither away!

We had our 2 X 22,500L water tanks delivered this week  - we get about 1/2 a megalitre of water off our roof each year!

Looking forward to our life in the rainforest!

A Lesson in Dam Building for Frogs - Postcard from the Jungle #2

January 12, 2013

Images:

TOP ABOVE:  LEFT:Green-eyed Treefrog (Litoria serrata also called Litoria genimaculata) RIGHT:  White Lipped Green Treefrog (Litoria infrafrenata)

BOTTOM ABOVE:  unknown frog possibly Australian Lace-lid (Nyctimystes dayi)   

Not yet a month in residence but we are feeling that we are adapting to the environment and are getting things done as we can without being too desperate to get them done despite how this recent project sounds.

Our son  was visiting so we decided to expand frog habitat at a nearby spring line by building a tiny dam. The dam was 3 masonry building blocks wide at the base and 5 masonry blocks wide at the top. We all  flagged a slippery trail down to the site and began what turned our to be a fairly brutal exercise of carrying concrete blocks down to the site and lowering them into the drainage. The 17 blocks took us about 6 hours over two days to get on-site.

The plan was to put in 5 layers of blocks, mortaring each in place, sticking some old broken tent poles down the holes in the block and filling up the voids in the blocks with a weak mix of cement and stream sediment. We will then put down thick black builders plastic over the blocks and backfill both sides of the dam with stream gravel and sediments until it is nearly invisible

We used a chisel shaped brick hammer to inset the blocks into the highly weathered local metamorphic bedrocks, then mortared the first two rows of blocks in place. At this point the skies began to cloud over. 

The next day we got 200mm of rain and did a quick slippery dash to recover the tools. This was followed by another 100mm rain day later then a large tree fell over the trail and took about 2 hours to remove with axe and machete. There was a gap for a day and we took the opportunity to go to a local Sunday market and then another 200mm of rain overnight. Good news is that our water tanks are full!

I got down to check the site for the first time today and to my great surprise the hastily mortared first two layers of blocks were not only still in place (albeit leaking) but holding back a good size pool of water. Copulating in the pool was a pair of green eyed tree frogs and further up in the pond was a large northern barred frog. When the water goes back down (who knows when!) the two of us will finish the mortaring, cementing, plastic sheeting and back filling. 

We were concerned that we had seen only a few mammals in our rainforest ... until now.

We bought a very bright LED searchlight for Christmas and on its first night use we got reflections from up to seven sets of eyes high in the canopy. 

Our only reasonable identification was a couple of lemuroid ringtail possums – identified because they were travelling in a group and has a silver-lime to gold eye-shine, chocolate brown fur and fur on their tails. Most of the tree dwelling mammals/marsupials are quite small, these possums come in at about 950 grams each.

Rules of the Jungle

Always put a balled-up plastic bag in the top of your rubber boots before setting them aside

This saves surprises when you decide to put them back on!

With a dehumidifier and bottle of leech killing juice on hand you are in paradise!

From the shade of the cool tropics, smiling while the rest of the country melts ....

Anthropomorphic   Structures and Noctural Creatures - Postcard from the Jungle #3

January 21, 2013

Image ABOVE: the tiny  Buzzing Nursery Frog (Cophixalus bombiens)  on a garden glove

.. our new dam made of 17 masonry blocks and sheets of black building plastic is filling up – quite surprising considering our crude methods of construction. It is full of tadpoles already!

It will still take a significant rainstorm (and I think the rain we have had over the past two days qualifies for “significant”) when the rate of filling exceeds the rate of leakage the water pressure on the black plastic covering should be sufficient to seal any leaks. It holds probably about 30,000L (5000+gallons)

The water level should then hold for most of the year and the down stream flow will return to normal... on the other hand the dam may just collapse! It is best not to look at our family construction techniques. I need to wait for the rain to stop to see if it is holding..it is expected to continue raining for the next three days .

Probably the most bizzare structure (so far) on site is our external “long drop” toilet.The main frame of this toilet block consists of a set a discarded children's swing set to which I attached some old roofing iron... the floor is made up of half-round offcuts from slabbing logs and held together with 38 various size nails, wire and cable ties... the “throne” is a large inverted flower pot with a hole cut in the bottom to accommodate a toilet seat which is cable tied in place

– the rainforest view however... is spectacular!

While the rest of Australia has been sweltering in record heat, we have been cool and comfortable – the rainforest makes its own climate under the canopy, our summer temperatures between 22 and 27 degrees celsius (72-75F). Our rain comes from on shore ocean breezes blowing up nearby Mt. Bartle Frere so our weather is quite localised. 

We have found a number of large new rocky swimming holes to cool off in, a good way to spend an afternoon! As you soak quietly in the stream the wildlife re-emerges.

Recently we discovered a number of tiny 15mm long adult nursery frogs – most species of this frog are rare and we are having difficulty getting clear identification... currently we think they are buzzing nursery frogs – Cophixalus bombiens . It has a mottled light grey back with a distinct black wedge shaped block running below its eye and down its front leg. Because of their rarity we do not want to capture a “specimen” and I can tell you that trying to identify a hopping 15mm (5/8th of an inch) long frog on a leaf covered sandbank is a challenge especially when identification books show only a side view of this tiny frog! To get a good photo of a side view you would have to dig a hole for your chin in the stream bank!

Now that we have electricity we get a fair number of large insects at night. Surprisingly many of them are a large varieties of nocturnal grasshoppers. One insect that was quite astounding was the white kneed king cricket – it was huge!... more the size of a locust than a cricket!

Our mammals list keeps increasing, saw a panda like Herbert River Ringtail Possum one night by spotlight.

The marsupial mammals are small, well hidden and slow moving and really difficult to identify!

Our latest snake viewing was a “small eyed” snake – Cryptophis nigrescens about 1m long. It was jet black with an angular back about as thick as a large felt pen and was moving at speed in advance of a rainstorm. Snakes are a good indicator of impending rain.. they seem to use the pre-rain heat with cloud cover as a good time to change hunting areas.

While not fatally venomous “small eyed snakes” are a “ready biter” so as this one paused to look back, I kept my distance..

It is generally not our policy to try to photograph snakes with the exception of pythons which one can readily approach.

 What was that song? - Postcard from the Jungle #4 

February 08, 2013

Image ABOVE: Green Grocer Cicada  -produces a very loud 85Db song

Why they call it rainforest... think of the heaviest downpour you can imagine, now imagine this rain pelting down continuously for stretches of up to six hours over a period of three days!

We stayed reasonably comfortable and sort of dry while a large tropical low dumped probably 500mm (18 inches) of rain over three days. There was no way to measure just how much rain we had as any thing we left out was quickly filled to the brim and overflowing. During this time we dug a few trenches to keep our road from washing out – it held up pretty well but were mostly indoors. 

Our most prized possession during this time was our dehumidifier – without it sheets. pillows, clothes... would be perpetually damp. With it life in the rainforest is very comfortable.

Remember the frog habitat dam we built... well it washed away. I recovered the blocks and plastic sheeting today.. will have to go to Plan “B” for the dam...then if that doesn't work, Plan “C” and so on... the creek however was full of tadpoles and flowing fast and clear – some rainforest tadpoles prefer fast running water. 

After all that rain, well the rainforest sounded “happy” – everything was singing, creaking, buzzing or barking – our laughing kookaburras were particularly riotous. The clouds in the clearing sky put on a magnificent show.........that was what ex-cyclone Oswald bought and since then we have been dry.......a few light showers last night may have dribbled a bit into the water tanks

Above 19 degrees C and the cicadas sing in unison, another cicada species sings above 24 degrees C but they call and answer gradually building up to unison singing. They can get VERY loud! They are still with us despite the dry but are louder after the wet.

After Cyclone Yasi two years ago, with the legacy of Cyclone Larry still lingering, clear areas made by falling trees were invaded by a non-native species called Devil's Apple and we have spent some time clearing out the last of it. Devil's Apple is nasty stuff...not only is the trunk covered with sharp 1cm (1/2inch) spines but the leaves are covered top and bottom with similar size spikes … they even penetrate leather gloves. Fortunately they are easy to find in the dense bush. The plant originated in South East Asia and produces lots of edible egg plant (aubergine) type fruits the size of a cherry tomato. We are working on not having it on our dining table.

In order to better identify birds by sight or by sound we have purchased a wonderful locally made 2 DVD set of tropical bird identifications. Each bird gets about 30 seconds to do its thing. The tricky bit about this is that after about 20 minutes your eyes begin to glaze over...what was the name of that bird? What was the name of the one before? Many of the birds are magnificently coloured on the DVD and nearly invisible in the low light and thick foliation beneath the canopy...and there seem to be about a hundred flicky, non-descript brown little birds, fast moving, never settling and masters of always managing to be behind a twig or leaf!

And there are still birds that we cannot find on the DVD or in the bird book!

Munched leaves and insects -  Postcard from the Jungle #5  

March 15, 2013

Image ABOVE: bark detail

Our rainforest supports many, many 2500 different kinds of trees and probably similar numbers of bushes, vines and orchids. Why so many kinds of plants and why is each tree you see different? Why are there so many kinds of special / weird insects?

Well there are lots of juicy leaves available 24 hours a day 12 months of the year... there are no marked seasons. About 20% of the leaves on any given day, show signs of being eaten. It wouldn't take long for the insects to multiply and eat everything if left alone but the trees here in the Australian rainforest fight this by developing and evolving toxins in their leaves and fruit. In fact of the thousands of fruit available less than half a dozen can be eaten by humans! Some are so toxic that even touching them can cause heart palpitations or stings.

Two things happen as a result...

1. Insects specialise in eating particular trees, evolving quickly in order to digest a particular toxic leaf or fruit and

2. Trees of the same species space themselves widely.. as concentration of the same type of tree would result in a concentration of insects and an exploding insect population. They keep evolving their toxins to keep from being eaten.

Oddly enough both parties benefit from this!

• The insect gets an assured food supply that is toxic to rival insects and  

• The tree gets a particular insect that seeks out and pollinates it no matter where it is hiding.

So the rainforest has thousands of types of trees, widely spaced; and thousands of types of insects, many very specialised.

We've spent some time fixing and building barbed wire fences. Our local cattle graziers do not always maintain their fences (and have no obligation to do so) and their cattle readily escape...... We would rather not have fences, they hinder the movement of wildlife and cause some injury, but if cattle get into the rainforest they can do a lot a damage.  We once lost 80 - 2m (6 foot) high black palms from a single cattle incursion.

Barbed wire is nasty stuff, the tightly wound 500m rolls remain springy after you struggle to unwind them. The wire needs to be very tight to deal with the half wild cattle that graze the neighbours' properties and will rapidly coil back at you if you lose your grip. Fashion indicates old clothes as they are usually shredded by the time the fence is up and gumboots (rubber boots) to protect your ankles and shins. Cursing while fence making is de rigeur!

For the past week or so the monsoon trough has been directly overhead.  Cyclones originate from the trough but the good news is that the cyclones get some distance from the trough before they develop in size – so we are relatively safe.  As a result we are having fine drizzle / low “thick” cloud and fog – the air is dead still and it is quite eerie. 

At night under the canopy on the ground, spots of glowing fungus create a miniature “milky way”. Why the fungus glows is anybody's guess.

The rainforest grabs most of this moisture by “cloud stripping”, rainforest leaves are shiny with sharp points on their leaf tips as a result the water beads and drips off the tip. This serves two purposes:

• provides water and 

• prevents moulds, algae and fungus from covering over the leaf.

The dirzzle has continued for about nine days.

Our dehumidifier continues to be invaluable during this warm, calm humid period. We move it between the two shipping containers every few days. It extracts 2-3 Litres over 2-4 hours in a closed container, keeping our clothes and bedding nice and dry and inhibiting growth on the container inner walls.

  Tree Identification Blues and Birds Singing to DVDs - Postcard from the Jungle #6 

April 08, 2013

Image ABOVE:  from LEFT TO RIGHT  --> Cassowary plum / Poison walnut / Quandong / Montane walnut

Yes we have no shortage of trees!

The tree identification key cannot fit on a standard DVD! New growth is generally red or  salmon or brown   in colour – insects do not recognise theses colours  leaves as food. 

For many rainforest trees, as the tree gets bigger the shape and size of the leaves change. You can see the young leaves but the mature leaves shown in the identification keys can be up to 40m in the air! This makes identification by leaf difficult. Small young trees struggling for a share of sunlight have large leaves on flexible stems that channel rain to the trunk but as the tree matures and reaches the top of the canopy where there is lots of sunshine and moisture the leaves turn smaller and have a waxier surface and a sharp point to shed rain and prevent algae, mould or fungus from growing on the leaf. 

On a cloudy day the canopy leaves can effectively strip water from the clouds and direct it to the ground. While weather records suggest that we get about 4416mm of rain per year, with “cloud stripping” the amount of water that is directed towards the ground is probably twice that of rain alone. At 700m we can have several days in a row of “low cloud” accompanied by dripping trees - this time of year in particular!

Recently our neighbours, the Coopers, published a field guide to rainforest fruit. It contains 504 fruits arranged by colour and association. Fruit is a much easier way of finding out which trees are present on the property if you're quick and get to see the fruit before the “cat size” white tail rats consume it. If we can't identify the fruit from the guide then we have to go to the Coopers landmark book on rainforest fruit, now in its second revision, 

Our two DVD's on rainforest birds have been very useful. Some birds we have only identified by their calls. Both seeing and hearing them is a great advantage in identification. 

One problem we have is that if we play the DVD in the early morning or early evening it sets off all the other birds. Sometimes we have to close the window to confirm that what we are hearing is the bird on the DVD not the ones outside. On the other hand sometimes the bird call on the DVD elicits an identical reply from outside and we have a confirmed identification. A number of birds are seasonal. It is amazing how such brightly coloured birds such as the blue, green and red King Parrot and black and white Pied Imperial Pigeon become nearly invisible in the canopy!

Rocks, Gold and Rain - Postcard from the Jungle #7  

May 24, 2013

Image ABOVE: access to some areas  in this extreme terrain is often only achieved by swimming down the creek

Our rain forest consists of three types supporting quite different vegetations. While topography, weather and elevation are all the same the underlying geology is different. You could say that the geology determines the ecosystem. A rainforest type map and a geology map show remarkably similar boundaries. 

The most lush and flattest area here is underlain by “recent” basalt lava flows and these make good deep brown soil often metres deep. The most recent volcanic activity in our area was between 14,000 and 4500 years ago.

The second area is underlain by ancient metamorphosed marine sediments with thinner, yellow, poorer leached soil. These metamorphic rocks, their ancient landscape and drainage systems were covered by the basalt and the new different present drainage pattern emerged. Our permanent springs emerge from the boundary between the metamorphics below and the basalt above.

The third area consists of stunted rainforest on ridges covered with massive amounts of quartz rock.

It is said that the greatest diversity of life is present in the transition zones between these rainforest types and that may account for the rich range species on our property.

Over the past couple of weeks we've had about 500mm of rain. I've decided to make my own rain gauge as I cannot find one big enough for the job. It should measure up to 250mm in a day and will hold about 2 litres. It will be just adequate for the job, 300mm would have been better on those extra wet days!

The rain has found a lot of small marsupials seeking shelter under our container, mostly insect eating dunnarts and seed eating melomys. We have supplied them with an idea dry home as we have lots of stacked planks and firewood below. Luckily they are territorial so if you take them a few hundred metres away they tend not to come back. We live-trapped and relocated nine of them over the course of a week. Our best “trap” was a dry fish tank. We balanced a diamond shaped piece of cardboard over the tank supported at two corners and with food on the other two corners. It makes you humble to be repeatedly outsmarted by little creatures with a brain the size of a pea!

 Illegal Gold Miners and Velociraptors  - Postcard from the Jungle #8 

July 08, 2013

Images:

TOP ABOVE:   a southern cassowary (note the dangerous dinosaur-like clawed feet)

ABOVE BOTTOM - stone dam for illegal gold mining that we had to dismantle - had the sluicing commenced the tailings would have run directly into World Heritage Rainforest quickly  killing the clear water adapted tadpoles and nymphs the platypus and kingfisher feed on 

The ancient landscape beneath our rainforest had streams that carried small amounts of gold. 

About 2-3 million  years ago the area was blanketed by volcanic basalt lava flows which covered the old streams. Our property contains the weathered edge of this basalt lava flow and exposes some small gold bearing old drainages. As a result the property is peppered with small races and gold workings dating from the 1890's. 

Recently I cleared an old track down to the creek only to discover an illegal 5m long X 1m high stone dam and camouflaged gold mining powered dredge and sluice box. Had the illegal mining commenced the fine tailings would have carried down stream throughout our entire property and through the Wet TropicsWorld Heritage Rainforest. The result would be the rapid killing of the aquatic plants, tadpoles and nymphs at the bottom of the food chain resulting in the starvation of the fish, water dragons, kingfishers, turtles and platypus that depend on them for their survival. Luckily I had an idea who might be doing the mining and through a third party mentioned the authorities I would be contacting within the next 48 hours. When I came back a day later the equipment was gone, saving me the trouble of removing a critical part. My neighbour, his son, Roberta and I then dismantled the dam by hand. We remain ever vigilant.

From time to time, walking in the bush, we come across large clawed footprints almost identical in size and shape to that of the feared velociraptor in the movie “Jurassic Park”. They are footprints of the very large flightless southern cassowary. Although cassowaries are fruit eaters, they can be quite aggressive particularly during the June-November mating season. Only the males take care of the very large green eggs. Recently we've seen at a distance too close for comfort, a pair of large adults, probably the same pair we saw with chicks a few years ago. They were ok on the first sighting but became upset on the second sighting so we wisely withdrew.. Their droppings called “scats” are quite useful. About 90% of the seeds from the fruit they eat will germinate after passing through their digestive system. Cassowaries are essential for distributing plants around the rainforest. So where the “poo” falls on a track or on rocks, we collect it and pot the seeds resulting, over the past decade, in hundreds of plants for rainforest restoration. 

This week we bought some ripe apples and oranges, around sunset for a couple of nights, a young male cassowary attracted by the smell of ripe fruit kept watch and circled our accommodation for about an hour before he gave up and moved away. Quite disconcerting when you are trying to go to the external shower – we are showering earlier in the day for the next few weeks! We do not feed wild creatures if they are in excellent health. Currently we are in the “dead of winter”, one night the temperature “plunged” to a low of 7.2 degrees but the next night it was back to 14-15 degrees about once every 5 years or so we may get a mild frost for a few hours.

 Soundscapes, Weeds, Wildlife and Water  - Postcard from the Jungle #9

August 14, 2013

Image  ABOVE: bringing our water tank on-site ( note the legs beneath the tank on the right hands side!)

One of the nicest things about the rainforest is the soundscape. Always in the background is a whisper of waterfalls. The background peace is punctuated from time to time by the crash of an old tree or large branch. Wind and rain give warning before they arrive. After rain, low cloud or fog; the drip drip drip of water cascading down the leaves goes on for hours, a slightly different sound for each collision. A bird calls loudly nearby to be answered by a rival in the distance who is in turn answered by another bird until the calls fade in the distance only to return some time later. Some frogs call in unison building to a crescendo while others call and reply singly. The sounds vary from tweets to deep throated growls. The dog sound is a barking owl and the ring that makes you rush for the phone is a bird we have yet to identify. The cassowary gives a sub-sonic grunt. A local family of laughing kookaburras think this is all a great lark!

Lots of introduced non-native plants do their best to invade the rainforest margins. When we weed we have to shake all the soil off the roots and put the removed weeds on top of a fallen log or hang them upside down over a branch; even then, with bare roots exposed to the elements, the plants will often continue to grow for weeks. 

After Cyclone Larry we did a lot of planting and the invasive weeds are better controlled now with the new plants getting established. Some people seem to be unconcerned by invasive Giant Bramble with it edible fruit, but we feel it is threatening biodiversity and so do not tolerate its presence. It as a declared weed in the Wet tropics region. Lantana (sweet little pot plant that it is in cooler climes) was the other major pest that had to be battled. 

The Stinging tree is not alien to our landscape though we have seen little of it even after the cyclones when it did make its presence felt elsewhere on the Tablelands. If we found it where humans tread it was treated as invasive..... one must take care it lives up to it's name! 

Along with the arrival of some intermittent beautiful sunny weather, cassowaries are still being sighted; and as it is their breeding season we are keeping a low profile. In addition to the mature breeding couple mentioned in the last postcard and a young male – about the size and weight of a 12 year old child (photo attached) we have also sighted a large chick now on its own …..its brown juvenile feathers now turning darker. 

We finally have 2 X 22,500L rain water tanks on-site but not yet in use. They were carried down the narrow access track on edge in order to get between the large trees with a few minor dramas enroute, via a rubber tyred crane. About 50 frogs took the tank ride 200m to their new home. 

Trying to build and limit impact on the forest is full of challenges! 

Natural Garbage Disposal, Killer Fruit and Bush Tucker - Postcard from the Jungle #10  

November 19, 2013

Image ABOVE:  Montane Walnu(Endiandra montana)

The rainforest is a master at recycling. The soil is quite infertile, heavy rainfall leaches much of the goodness away. Only by rapidly recycling nutrients does the rainforest survive At any given time about 70% of the nutrients are located in the leaf litter. As photosynthesising leaves reach the end of their service life they drop to the ground and within a matter of days their nutrients are absorbed back into the living plants. Leaves fall constantly throughout the year.

Pretty well anything we throw into the rainforest is rapidly recycled. Not only vegetable refuse but meat scraps, bones even fats and oils are gone within a day, the latter courtesy of a wide range of nocturnal marsupials! We tend to throw the scraps into random locations along our access track, that way no wild creature gets to depend on handouts. It is wise to consider that when you enter the rainforest it tries to consume you.

Recently tall, nearby Montane Walnut trees have been dropping their egg size, bright orange fruit. The fruit is nut-like, heavy and very hard. Falling from 30m it reaches that ground at lethal velocities and when it hits the roof, you jump out of your skin! I've had to knock several dents out of the corrugated polycarbonate roofing of our greenhouse.

A longer than usual “dry” season has resulted in the local slightly stressed trees producing a bumper crop of fruit. This happens perhaps every 5 years of so. While the fruit is pretty to look at, most is toxic to eat. 

I took a bucket of Montane Walnuts to the Ngadjonji traditional owners (Yvonne and Margaret) who live a kilometre up the access road. They will take the flesh off the fruit and throw it away. The nut part of the fruit they bake overnight, crush then put it in a basket place in a fast flowing stream for at least 4 days. Once soaked free of toxins the crushed nut is ground into a flour, mixed with water and baked into a “bread”. Recently there was a line in an article speculating that a possible reason for the unexpectedly short lifespan of rainforest aboriginals may be due to residual toxins in their main vegetarian food supply.

Unlike aboriginal people, over the rest of Australia it would appear from our reading, that rainforest people tend to stay in long term established camps in “humpy” huts of much more robust construction than their dry land compatriots. During the many months of the “wet” season it is suggested that one staple was a diet of carefully stored semi-prepared nuts. This low protein diet would explain the small stature of the elders who once loved a traditional life. Possums and eels were also additional to the diet. There are certainly no eel in our stream and we speculate that sluicing gold upstream must have lost lots of the original sand. Though possums are around the numbers certainly don't illustrate the explorer Palmerston's observations nor the reputation of the rainforest people's possum blankets being quite superior to government issue in the 1890's. The last local aboriginals left a traditional lifestyle in about 1936 though they continued to supplement their European diet with “bush tucker “for a few more decades. The “knowledge” is rapidly being lost as the few aboriginals who remained after the removal of many to Palm Island and other missions are lost. 

Senses in the Rainforest - Postcard from the Jungle #11 

January 15, 2014

Images:

TOP ABOVE: two local orchids LEFT - name unknown yellow orchid  RIGHT - the white - Denobium jonsei magnificum

BOTTOM ABOVE:   LEFT - Spotted Forest Monitor (vanarus scalaris) - tree dwelling  RIGHT Slaty Grey Snake (Stegonotus cucllatus) - eats small reptiles

You use different senses in the rain forest. 

Sight is diminished you can see a hint of movement, the flick of leaves or the out of pattern oscillation of a leaf but rarely the creature responsible.

Sound and smell are the senses that predominate.

Sound takes on dimensionality, calls given distant replys receding into infinity.

Smell is musty, complex with nuanced changes as you traverse you way through.

You can smell areas peaty wet and flinty dry, logs sweetly rotting, the fragrance of flowers out of sight high in the canopy, recent and not so recent kills.

Sound and smell are senses closer to your soul, primeval senses harking back to primate ancestral lines

The Spooky Precursor to Cyclones - Postcard from the Jungle #12  

March 16, 2014

Images:

TOP ABOVE:  Red-legged Pademelon (Thylogale stigmatica) makes a distinctive loud "thump" with its foot to signal danger

BOTTOM ABOVE:  Masked White-tailed Rat (Uromys hadrourus) - found  in unfragmented rainforest

The rainforest tells us when there are cyclones around.  Probably the aboriginals could read the signs before the cyclones take place. For us, less attuned to nature, we only recognise the symptoms after the event.

This week there are two weak cyclones in the area, in the Daintree rainforest well to our north, one cyclone dumped 480mm (18”) of rain in 24 hours but here we just had drizzle. The local record for rain, from nearby Malanda dates from 1963 when the village got 1200mm(47”) in 48 hours. Cyclones have the habit of hovering around, changing direction and strength. While at the time of writing both cyclones appear to be losing strength, they are not yet gone!

Leading up to the cyclonic weather there is intense animal and bird activity. Ants get particularly active, generally moving to higher locations.

There is lots of bird action and constant bird and animal calls well into the night. 

Pademelon - rainforest kangaroos, usually active at night, are seen feeding during the day. The huge amythestine(scrub)  pythons(Simalia kinghorni) are kicked out of their lethargy and move from the their hunting territory on the edges, to the interior. We find cute rodent-like dunnarts and giant white tail rats seeking sheltered places to hide. It is amazing how much and how quickly they can fill a space with nesting material! Around our house theses hiding places include wood piles, under tarps and on the engine block of our car. Consequently we fold up tarps and leave the bonnet (hood) of the car open when we park.

As the pressure drops, the winds stops completely, not a breath of motion in the leaves. At the same time the place becomes eerily and completely silent. It is really spooky! You could light a match or candle anywhere outside and it wouldn't blow out! In recent times this precursor to a cyclone is not only still but dry with several days of dry weather before the cyclone. 

Far more damage is caused if there is heavy rain leading up to a cyclone. Trees, power poles... are more likely to fall over in saturated ground.

Normally the calm would be followed by increasing winds and rain but so far this year the cyclones have kept their distance. I wonder how the tiny wrens keep from being blown away! In previous cyclones we have seen the trees striped bare of leaves – I wonder where the thousands and thousands of tons of leaves end up?

In any event, all things considered, I prefer cyclones to blizzards, sun to snow.

Status Symbols and Water - Postcard from the Jungle #13   

June 25, 2014

Images:

TOP ABOVE: many plants as yet to be identified

BOTTOM ABOVE: the strangler fig strange upside down  start - fig seed lands in a tree top courtest of a bird , sends a very long root down to the ground then grows to cover the host tree 

Yes it is true, we have a status symbol – a heated filing cabinet!

I realise you will all be jealous.

Our 40 watt heater hidden in the base, will be on for 30 minutes a day and keep our documents, certificates, bills and receipts nice and dry!

We have even left the bottom filing cabinet drawer clear to be used when needed for leather goods.

Potential may even be there for drying herbs, fruit and shoes simultaneously. Keep this in mind if we send you herbs for Christmas!

Unfortunately in the 50metre move from the shipping container to the house the filing cabinet fell off the back of our all terrain vehicle and did a back flip or two (quite impressive, double reverse from a prone position - we gave it a score of 7.5 out of a possible 10). It now has a few serious dents!

After two years of construction we are finally into our house(Studio Nimbus Studio Nimbus - a trapezoidal structural insulated panel home in the rainforest) and out of the shipping container. 

It has been pleasing to find that the many design features we put into the house to make living in the jungle comfortable are working well. 

After 18 months we are back on the internet using mobile WiFi. It is very expensive and unreliable and requires a very high 14 element Yagi antenna wit the phone plugged into the antenna to work. To achieve this proved to be a 32 day endurance exercise with our sole available service provider. Once we were back online good old Microsoft hogged the computer system with some 253 updates (and counting). All through the time we were NOT connected we kept getting computer notices from Microsoft that “new updates are available” - so don't believe them!

All our water comes from rain, though we have a spring and creek as backup. A short while ago we got our external water tap working and decided to clean 3 years of accumulated grime off our large water tanks (they sat beside the road for one year and sat on the construction site for two years). We were concerned with the amount of water we used only to find the tanks refilled after one rainy day!

Plan “A” -initially we had planned to supply water for the house from a gravity fed tank on a tower. Our plan was to fill this once a week using a highly efficient and silent submersible pump. Then we discovered that due to cyclone regulations the tower would require 5 tonnes of ballast and need to be 7 metres (24') tall!. (The height was due to the fact that modern washers require quite high minimum pressure to run.) 

Plan “B” was to use a multistage electric pump and an 80L pressure tank – with the tank we can run up to about 30L of water under pressure in the house before the pump cuts in.. Without the pressure tank it would start each time you turn on the tap. At each start up about 30% of the power is used just to get the water moving though the pipes. With our system this only happen about 3 times a day, the pump runs longer (about 30 seconds) at each start up but has time to achieve its most efficient speed. We can also run this pump off our portable electric generator.

Our herb garden has been going since January. It has a clear solid roof that goes about halfway down the sides. The garden is raised on pillars of concrete blocks. A strong metal mesh base is covered with two layers of geofabric. A wooden frame is set on the mesh and fabric and is lined with a third layer of fabric. The frame is filled with a mixture of potting mix, lime, local soil, sand and biochar. Into this we have planted lavender, galangal, lemon ginger, chives, thyme, oregano, horseradish and mint. It never needs watering, the blowing mist from the rain has been enough to keep it moist so far!

Lights, Bugs, Tea wars and Jungle Trails - Postcard from the Jungle #14   

October 27, 2014

Images:

TOP ABOVE:  Insects are attracted to young green leaves so many plants first show leaves in a different colour

MIDDLE ABOVE: one of several ladders needed to gain  creek access

BOTTON ABOVE: Giant King Fern (Angiopteris evecta)

In the jungle we are a beacon of light. What I mean is we are the only light in the dark rainforest at night. At the end of the dry season there is an explosion of insect life.  Lots of beetles, stick insects and moths. Good to see a growing abundance Cyclones Larry and Yasi played havoc with their populations. So we have to seal things up as the wet season approaches as the tiniest opening at night begets visitors oF the six legged kind. Fortunately the house was mostly designed to do this but in our first year of occupation there have been a few gaps undetected until recently....currently no more!! 

As the weather warms up again, we often go for a swim in the creek.  Up until now this has entailed a 10-15 minute walk through the jungle.  Our house is at the highest point on the property and directly in front of the house the creek is close but the land is precipitous.  Our final “dry” season project has been to construct a low impact trail down hill to the water.  The trail took 3 X 3 metre ladders, a large number of steps and over 100m of rope as a support for the needy. The most difficult part of the construction was keeping materials and ourselves from sliding down the slope. Every bit of the soil is packed with dense roots.  Now that the initial trail is in the trip to the creek is reduced to about 5 minutes. 

And the huffing and puffing on the return trip is reduced, and the sweat no longer remnant.

Next years projects will be to continue refining this trail and others along which the slope is more gradual and more encouraging for visitors .........

The pool at the base of the trail is quite interesting, the rocks along the edge are swept clean by wet season flash flooding.  On one side is a Giant King  Fern (Angiopteris evecta) with leaves 4m long. We were concerned it might wash away in the annual floods but it has grown and parented three more giant ferns a bit further downstream. The pool is about 4m deep, and the water rotates in slow anti-clockwise circles. We have plans to install metal table and chairs to relax and take in the view, or to ponder a book. The challenge is finding a spot beyond the flood zone...the greater challenge is returning the furniture to the house for the wet season!

Usually we see about half a dozen kinds of frog tadpoles ranging in size from thumb size to nearly microscopic. There is a small shy fish called a gudgeon that slowly increases numbers over normal years but is flushed over the waterfalls and nearly disappears after exceptionally wet years. Our extremely shy kitten size light brown platypus eats mostly tadpoles, fish and insect nymphs. And there's enough for the eye of the Kingfisher to be attracted and spotted on occasions.

While the weather is clear and beautiful and we are engaged in tea wars.

Possibly as early as 1928, timber cutters planted drinking tea plants around their campsite on our property. The details of who and when are lost but the little plants grew and grew and now they are up to tree size and densely cover an area of about an acre. They are slowly invading the rainforest.

If they kept to themselves it would be fairly easy to clear and replant the area but they have mixed in with the normal rainforest trees. While we can recognise the tea leaf at ground level it is quite a challenge to recognise it at tree level especially when looking into a bright tropical sky!

Our plan is to work from the inside out. That is we are trying to attack the tea plants where they contact the mostly intact rainforest. We will cut a line of defence here and plant it with mature seedlings. then we will move outwards towards the edge of the invasion and into the areas of worst infestation. We will cut down the biggest tea plants and try to get them to fall down through the three dimensional jigsaw of vines, trees and bushes. We will limb the trees and use the branches to protect the bare soil then open up spaces between the fallen and flattened branches to insert seedlings we have been growing.

The largest tea trunks we will use for firewood. 

I've modified a large electric drill with a soil auger to dig the holes. It gets its power from a portable electric generator we put in the back of our little all terrain vehicle. We've used old scaffolding brackets and pipe to put a frame on the roll bar assembly to hold the tree trunks.

The Snake and the Apple Postcard from the Jungle #15  

January 19, 2015

Images : 

TOP ABOVE: blind snake species unknown, length about 20cm (8")

BOTTOM ABOVE: our skinny scrub phython before it's meal courtesy of an apple

This is not a parable about an apple and a snake. We spotted a young scrub python (Simalia kinghorni)  formerly named amythestine python. It stayed around for a few days, quite active in the daytime. Though beautifully coloured and 2.5m long, it was quite thin. As we reach the end of the dry season food is scarce. Our solution was to cut an apple in two and leave it by the snake. A couple of days later the snake had a significant bulge along its length which would keep it going to the wet. There are lots of small mammals here that are attracted by fruit

The Amazing Velvet Worm - Postcard from the Jungle #16 

June 09, 2015  

Image ABOVE: the remarkable Velvet Worm (Perapitus sp.)

We came across a very, very strange creature on a rotting jungle log the other day. Peripatis generally known as the Velvet Worm is unrelated to and has such a different way of life from all other living creatures that it has its own Phylum - Onychophora. They bear a striking resemblance to fossils from the early Cambrian 570MyBP. Peripatopsids are all found in rainforest in what used to be Gondwana.

The specimen we photographed had 14 pairs of stubby conical legs. You would think such an ancient creature would be very simple but the opposite appears the case...their brains, though small, are very complex; consequently, the organisms are capable of rather sophisticated social interactions They form social groups of up to fifteen individuals, usually closely related, which will typically live and hunt together being aggressively territorially defensive of their particular rotting log. After a kill, the dominant female always feeds first, followed in turn by the other females, then males, then the young. 

They are carnivorous forcefully squirting thin white threads of slime to capture prey. Air currents, formed by prey motion, are thought to be the primary mode of locating prey. Once the prey is immobilised it is injected with saliva. This kills the prey very quickly and begins a slower process of digestion. 

The strange stub feet are conical are internally hollow and have no joints. Rigidity is provided by the hydrostatic pressure of their fluid contents, and movement is usually obtained passively by stretching and contraction of the animal's entire body. 

Velvet worms must stay in moist conditions at all times or they will die from dehydration. They dispel the Darwinian myth that ancient creatures have to be simple – it would seem that some of the very first multi-celled creatures from the Cambian era led sophisticated, complex lives.

The smelliest and smartest of marsupials and crazy fruits from the past 

Postcard from the Jungle #17   

October 20, 2015

Images above:

LEFT:  Primitive plant - Double Seeded Brown Pine (Podocarpus dispermia)

MIDDLE - Striped Possum (Dactylopsila trivirgata)

RIGHT - primitive plant - Cloud fruit (Irvingbaileya australia)

We get a lot of rain. Be it a low pressure system to the north or a high pressure system to the south. Warm moist winds off the sea get pushed up nearby Mt. Bartle Frere and provide local rain or heavy cloud. So our area remains a tropical rainforest “refuge” in times of droughts or in ice ages, and has done so for many millions of years. As a result we have some pretty unusual animals and ancient plants. And they are more adaptable than you you would think as rainforest or not we do get months of dry weather as well.

Our motion sensing camera trap recently captured an image of the Striped Possum (Dactylopsila trivirgata), . Weighing just over 400 grams (1 pound) it has the largest brain for its size of any marsupial. It is a “mammalian woodpecker” with a very long tongue and exceptionally long clawed fourth finger with a hooked nail used to open tree rotten tree trunks / branches to expose wood-boring insect larvae. It detects the larvae by a rapid drumming along branches with the toes of its forefoot. It also eats leaves, fruits, and small vertebrates. It emits a "very powerful unpleasant smell." Most easily found by the sound it makes chewing and drinking in the forest. It can carry things with its prehensile tail and has loose skin between its front and back legs suggesting it may be able to glide from tree to tree. The striped possum is one of the least studied marsupials

The red fruit comes from the Double Seeded Brown Pine (Podocarpus dispermus) a very ancient plant largely unchanged since the Cretaceous Period 145 - 65 million years ago - one of very ancient lines of plants referred to as a "primitive". This type of plant has existed since the time of the dinosaurs and shows that our area is a "refuge”, a tiny remnant of the rainforest surviving on the slopes of Mt. Bartle Frere. From this bit of forest formed in Cretaceous times the rest of the rainforest was able to regrow once the climate became favourable again. The red part is edible by humans and tastes like very weak apple with a very long not so pleasant after taste. The local Ngadjon aboriginals ate this red part. Cassowaries and mushy rat kangaroos eat it too. It is not really a fruit but a swollen stem. We can't imagine eating a lot of it! It is endemic. That is to say it exists only within a very restricted local range, here at altitudes between 40m and 720m (our place at 685m). It forms a tree some 20m (60 feet) high. 

The white fruit that looks like chewing gum with a leaf stuck on it is called Cloud Fruit (Irvingbaileya australis). The separate male and female trees grow 20m (60 foot) high. It too is endemic to our area. Don't know if you can eat it but many birds and mammals do. Many fruits are only on the ground for a couple of hours before the local wildlife consumes them! We have collected fruit so far from two different locations on the property. 

Satin Bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus) use Cloud Fruit to decorate their elaborate display areas. This particular bowerbird decorates the display area with mostly blue but also some white objects such as the Cloud Fruit. The display gets renewed each day with fresh objects replacing those no longer attractive.

Four Ngadjon Seasons in the Rainforest - Postcard from the Jungle #18

December 03,  2015

Images above: 

LEFT - Deyell Falls   - note how the clean rocks indicate seasonal flooding heights

MIDDLE - Mount Bartle Frere  - the highest mountain in Queensland at 1622m and critical feature of this World Heritage refugia area  

RIGHT - Gondwana Falls - exiting from World Heritage note the rare Orania Palms that only grow above 600m

We get four seasons in the rainforest which we have tried to roughly match with a conventional calendar:

1. The Wet Season (January -March) when tropical lows dip down from the equator 17° to the north and cyclones develop over the warm tropical ocean - can be VERY intense and VERY wet!

2. The Cool Season (April – June) as the tropical lows slowly shift back to the equator- we live inland behind the Mt. Bartle Frere, the

highest mountain in Queensland (see photo) - showers gradually taper off

3. The Dry Season  (July – September) when stationary highs sit over the centre of the country, clear skies and

4. The Storm Season  (October -December) frontal weather comes from the inland and it often doesn't reach us here other than to put on a good show of rumbling and lighting making for magnificent skies on cloud covered afternoons and early evenings.

The local Ngadjon people had names for these seasons. The Wet Season would start when the Nurinuri (Green Cicada ) began to sing on the coast. 

This bio-indicator meant that:

I. it was time to move from the coast to the mountain rainforest

ii. the rainforest nuts (main food in the Wet Season) were ready to harvest in the mountains

iii.the bush turkey was ready to eat – ie.  just before the mating season so in top condition (once the mating season begins hormones flow and they are no good to eat).The Ngadjon would move from temporary coastal camps to large permanent mountain huts holding about 30 individuals. They would harvest the nuts by climbing the trees, store them in pits in the ground - enough to feed 30-40 people for 3-4 months.

 We live in a wet place but it is not always so. Rainfall statistics have been collected for Topaz at a station about 5 miles (8km) away since November 1979. 1999 has been the wettest in hat period at 7019mm. 1992 the lowest with 3087mm.

Generally it is over 4000mm but unpredictability is the rule

Climate change is causing the seasons to drift. We used to start large scale rainforest tree plantings in January but now we have to wait until February and March for predictable follow-up rain.

Local rain varies too – there are lots of local micro-climates We, by reputation, are drier than Boonjie Road and the other side of Topaz Road both just a couple of kilometres away!. We have World Heritage Rainforest on one side and pastoral land on the other. The wetter areas have more forest surrounding them. The other side of Topaz Road edges into the more impenetrable forest on the steeper slopes of the North Johnstone catchment. A traditional aboriginal man is known to have walked out of the jungle as recently as 1936 along the North Johnstone. Some aboriginals we know were living at least a part-traditional lives up until about 1963!. The explorer Christie Palmerston visited the higher reaches of the Russell River in the 1880's and small scale gold mining followed with aboriginal labourused in the area as the Chinese had been forcefully limited to the lower reaches of the North Johnstone. Timber cutters followed so more land was cleared in these areas. At the time of European settlementthe Queensland government required settled land to be cleared of rainforest.

Our house is about 200metres down a track in the middle of the rainforest and our sense is that the rainfall is greater at the house than it is in the open area on the edge of the property. Our property was explored for gold in the 1880's and selectively logged for red cedar in the 1920's but is fully forested with many huge old trees.

The first air photos of the property in 1943 show that our rainforest has been largely untouched since at least that time. Surrounding properties have not been so lucky.

It has been dry the last week but in the early hours dripping water can be heard. Our rainforest can collect water by cloud stripping. The rainforest continues to nourish itself in the heat and dry of the season by stripping water from the cloud and mist. The trees employ some interesting leaf structures to do this!

Image below:

Nurinuri (Green Cicada ) Ngadjon  bio-indicator of the  Wet Season 

Flowers Pollen and Herbivory - Postcard from the Jungle #19 

February 28, 2016

Image ABOVE:   Northern Stoney Creek Frog (Litoria jungguy) on the radiator of our car - at times we need to leave the bonnet (hood) open to keep various small mammals from converting the engine compartment into their own private accommodation (and chewing the electrical wiring - - colourful wires are wrapped with less tasty-looking black electrical tape)

First time visitors to the rainforest are surprised that flowers are not as obvious as expected. Animal pollination is the main strategy in tropical rainforests. Wind doesn't work – rain washes the pollen out of the air, humidity makes pollen stick together and there is a distinct lack of wind under the canopy.

Birds, not insects are the main pollinators. Ancient infertile soils, force plants to produce an excess of sugar in order to uptake sufficient levels of trace elements. The excess sugar (lurp) is extruded from the leaves and bark by insect attack. Birds take advantage of this easily accessible year-round food source. Large, long-lived birds like honeyeaters are attracted by the flower colours red and yellow. They live complex sugar-charged lives and have some of the longest most complex songs discovered.

Pollen eating bats and nectar eating moths are the main nocturnal pollinators, attracted by strong odour as colour in unimportant in the dark. So lots of flowers are dull green or brown. 

Orchids and fig trees often have very specific pollinators; a specific wasp or a particular beetle limited to a particular plant. The banana fig beside our house begins life growing “down” instead of “up”. Seeds are deposited by birds in the canopy. The banana fig begins growing on a large branch or trunk and sends roots downwards to the ground. Once it has established a link to the ground it begins growing “upward” and engulfs its host tree. The fig is a favourite of cassowaries and because it needs a large host tree to start with is only found in mature rainforest.

Tiny native bees have evolved “buzz pollination” the ability to vibrate the anthers at the particular frequency that releases the pollen so they can collect it.(or maybe this evolution is other way around!)

Plant eating “herbivory”, mostly by insects, consumes probably 10% of all plant resources in the rainforest. It is difficult to find a leaf that has not been affected by a herbivore. Herbivory is like a long and ancient “arms race” between animals eating plants and plants trying to avoid being eaten. Plants have evolved many defensive strategies. Tough or waxy leaves, serrated leaf edges, spikes, spines, stinging hairs – resins, tannins, silica spines , essential oils, alkaloids, direct toxins. 

Two examples:

- a vine has seeds so toxic that one seed can kill a horse

-a plant with a two part poison, when bitten the two parts mix and produce cyanide gas!

In the rainforest if you see a colourful fruit on the ground for several days you know the animals are avoiding it because it is too toxic. Eventually some animals may eat the fruit but often will then go and eat another plant, such as the milky pine, with tummy settling properties. 

Oddly some creatures such as the cassowary can eat many highly toxic plants with impunity! We regularly use seeds from cassowary scats (poo) as we get up to 80% successful germination in just a couple of weeks. The same seed type, that has not gone through a cassowary has a much lower germination rate and may take 2-3 years before it germinates. Giant white-tailed rats are very selective in their eating habits – a good guide to selecting the best seed for planting – if it has been nibbled (but not destroyed) by a rat it is probable a good seed for planting.

The attached image is a little resident that will not be discouraged. It also likes our all terrain vehicle which we use to carry water to this year's plantings. The monsoon hasn't come to visit yet to bring the usual tropical deluge. All time lows in the record book for rain this year so far. We generally keep our car bonnet (hood) up as it provides a warm dry environment for critters, but now we also have to check the front bumper on a regular basis.

Owls and Trees Shaken Not Stirred - Postcard from the Jungle #20

 June 12, 2016

Image ABOVE: night time motion sensing image of a cassowary  - note the distinct curved casque (on head) of this particular cassowary. Casque shape and the patterns of colouration on the neck area are  used to identify each of the twelve individuals we have spotted over the years. Males are smaller, have longer more obvious "wing" feathers and raise the young.

This time of year, our “winter” things can cool down to about 10 or 12 degrees celsius at night and we get stretches of drizzle interspersed with periods of glorious sunshine. During this time the air is pierced from time to time by the distinct sound of a dive bomb. Luckily we were not around fro the London Blitz so we enjoy the calls of the the Lesser Sooty Owl (Tyto tenebricosa). We have 4 identified species of owl on site.

These owls live in old hollow tree trunks about 10m off the ground and can occupy the same nest for up to about 30 years. We have two huge heavy owl nesting boxes – one we have managed to place on top a tall 80 year old stump but the other is still on the ground and has defied all our efforts with extension ladders, multiple ropes and lots of cursing to get placed high up in the fork of a tree. 

Nest box design really needs a re-think in terms of modern materials and methods of fixing the box to a variety of objects – heavy duty core flute, flat pack, self erecting box features and plastic pallet straps come to mind.

If anyone was watching our property over the last couple of weeks they would see a couple of mad people going around periodically shaking trees! 

This is a very hungry month for the large flightless cassowaries. The cassowries are a “keystone” species - some rainforest trees will only germinate when their fruit first passes through a cassowary.

The decade long warming trend in the rainforest, particularly over the past two years, has disrupted the link between fruiting and breeding particularly for those birds that rely solely on fruit for food. Normally we do not feed cassowaries because human interaction means a higher probability of contact with farm dogs and cars. For the first time ever, rather than just planting food trees, we are actively involved in assisting them over the next month or so. 

So the mad people are shaking Lemon Aspen (Acronychia acidula)  trees and getting the fruit to drop a bit earlier. So far nothing nasty or scary has fallen out of the trees with the fruit! 

We've also tried chopping up over-ripe pumpkins into small apple size pieces (cassowaries can swallow apple size fruit whole!). The cassowaries have so far said “no” to this artificial source of food. Cassowries can eat fruit that would kill a human but are naturally reticent to try an “unknown” food.

This year we haven't seen the mature couple of cassowaries that have been periodic visitors many years but we have sighted 4 new cassowaries, one male with two chicks (the males take care of the young) and a young female with an unusual curved casque on her head (photo attached).

Our attempt at enhancing the integrity of this rainforest, some of the oldest in the world, has no text book to follow – success and failure are both learning opportunities!

Megabats and Microbats - Postcard from the Jungle #21 

November 19, 2016

Images above:

LEFT: Ghost Bat  - a carniverous microbat requires precise echolocation

MIDDLE: flying fox fruit eating megabat

RIGHT: pollen eating microbat uses echolocation of less sophistication - essential in tree pollination of the rainforest

We are in the Stormy Season the transition from the cool weather of the dry season to the heat and humidity of the wet season. The season is typified by storms at night with rolling tropical thunder and is a good time to observe bats. The Wet Tropics is home to about 40 species of bat. When we are traversing the jungle at night we see a great variety of bats, quite disconcerting by flashlight! We recently took a visit to a Bat Hospital near Atherton which heightened our awareness of these fascinating creatures which often suffer bad press as humans encroach into their territory and find them noisy, messy, and potentially infectious. Yet without the “flying foxes” we would be without the major pollinator of eucalyptus and rainforests.

Megachiroptera (large hand-wing )and microchiroptera ( small hand-wing), are two major divisions of bats. Most megas are happy to roost in daylight and do so with their wings wrapped around them while the micros seek out dark places and fold their wings beside their bodies. Megas do not hibernate as many micros do and they have two claws on their forelimbs compared with the micros’ one. Micros all use sonar (echolocation) while megas depend on vision and smell. The megas are generally large and are are vegetarians with a preference for blossoms that consist of light coloured flowers arranged in bunches located on the periphery of the tree canopy..The micros are insectivores and carnivores. 

One interesting mega is the blossom bat. At about 15g, it is smaller than a mouse. Its pointed nose and long thin tongue are highly specialised for penetrating flowers and licking up the nectar. On the plants they visit, blossom bats performed 46 percent of the pollination while birds and insects were responsible for only 20 percent each. 

Being as blind as a bat is an impossibility. No bats are blind. Microbats can be smaller than a mouse and havetiny eyes. Microbat sonar, at frequencies of 15-200KHz, is produced by a very specialised larynx (voice box) and beamed out through the mouth or the nose at rates up to 200 pulses a second. Emissions may vary in intensity, frequency and pulse rate depending on whether a bat is ‘searching’ or ‘homing in on’ prey. A nose-sonar specialist (a rather bizarre looker called a nose leaf) flies with its mouth closed and has folds of skin around its nose to ‘beam’ the sound. The mouth-sonar bats (such as our little freetail bats) fly with their mouth open and usually lack facial decorations. Since microbats rely on hearing the reflection of sound waves, they often have big ears with all sorts of wonderful convoluted trumpet and horn-like shapes, to catch and focus the fainter sonar echoes. Those with small ears have a mouth sonar which is probably particularly loud.

At the local bat hospital they have a device that converts in audible bat sound into a range audible by humans – they produce really loud sounds!. Local moths, to avoid being eaten, mimic these sounds to confuse the insect eating bats – sound wars all beyond our range of hearing! Microbats need a lot of energy to fly and to replace the body heat that goes out through the large wing and ear surfaces. A microbat can eat 50% of its body weight every night. 

Australia’s only carnivorous bat, the ghost bat, at 150g, eats frogs, lizards, birds, small mammals (including other bats) as well as large insects. It has good vision and huge ears which are used to listen for noises made by prey, as its sonar is quite weak. It then swoops down on its prey, enveloping it with its wings and killing it with powerful bites.

Queensland anatomist and physiologist, Prof. Jack Pettigrew, in the mid 80s provoked uproar in the world of taxonomy and evolutionary science. When working on vision in animals he had been given he was amazed to discover that the flying fox brain had a pattern of nerve connections found only in primates (monkeys, apes and us) whereas the brain of a microbat whose visual nerve pattern is similar to that found in all mammals except primates. So have all bats evolved from small insectivorous mammals such as shrews as traditionally thought? The next time you see a flying fox flapping across the sky you can consider it a possible close cousin. 

Diversity, Bacterial Rain, Micro-climates and Conveyor Belts - Postcard from the Jungle #22

July 02, 2017

Image ABOVE: The moisture of low foggy cloud is effectively stripped by the rainforest. Airborne and leaf borne bacteria may have a role in providing nucleii for the initial tiny  droplets.

Coastal forests in our wet tropics region have been cleared dramatically with European settlement and development. Our rainforest in the clouds with all its species richness and abundance - groups of animals relics or early descendants of fauna that were around 60 million years ago after the dinosaurs became extinct including ancient lineages of frogs, geckos, legless lizards, dragons, skinks, cassowaries, scrub fowl, brush turkeys, songbirds, chowchillas, beetles, leafhoppers, cockroaches, spiders and land snails within it benefit a reasonably stable micro climate despite habitat loss. 

The intrinsic economic value of the forests as ‘ecosystem service providers’ because of their contribution to the catchment water cycle is becoming more realised and understood. As moist air from the sea rises and condenses clouds are formed and precipitation results. Cloud stripping is an important part of this process. It is the water vapour from fog or clouds that condenses on leaves

As trees transpire moisture… and we have recently been stunned to learn bacteria on the leaves and in their stomatal cavities are dispersed into the air and act as cloud condensation nuclei, forming water droplets!   So 10,000sqm of rainforest produces an aggregate leaf surface area of more than 40,000sqm a huge surface! For water to change from liquid water to water vapour it must absorb heat from the air – the result the air is cooler.

So the rainforest recycles moisture (evapotranspiration), the rain is partly or even largely caused by the rain forest and the process creates a cooler micro-climate

The amount of water that the cool leaves strip from low-level clouds and fogs, estimated to be as much as 30 per cent of the total water. The water stripped from the clouds as they brush against trees becomes ‘throughfall’, that falls directly through the canopy, and ‘stemfall’, that runs down the tree trunks. The trees use little of the water that they strip, and the rest is released to the system by streams and rivers. 

So warm moist air from the sea is conveyed by the platform of vegetation below it and enhanced by the up swell of moisture from cloud stripping. It dumps it loads as it goes over the mountain. But the conveyor belt is not as efficient now with the clearing of forest reducing the volume of moisture that is pushed inland. 

We are in the third year of a green drought - the first six months of this year just over 2000mm of rain….about half the annual total but the wet season is going and the dry is a coming! Many days of low cloud / fog and lots of cloud stripping the past 2 months… the rainforest look fine though fruit production is much less than “normal”. The fruit on our papaya are a supplement for our clever little furry friends who visit by night. The cassowaries have been enjoying luscious invasive guava fruit rather than the native lemon aspen which was in abundance when we left for an overseas trip this time last year but are no where to be seen this year. Where forests are cut and a species invades they can provide food for the critters but the impact on diversity of fauna and flora is massive. Current thinking on natural systems is that we are “Macdonaldising” them ie “ordinary”, “aggressive” with “little choice”….but that is another thought and story.

Queensland Giant Blue Earthworm - Postcard from the Jungle #24

February 09, 2018

Wet season rains have provided 290mm (11.4 “) in the past two of days and the ground is saturated. Consequently we see things that are normally hidden in the ground coming out on the surface to get out of the water. 

Australia is home to some of the largest earthworms in the world. 

One particularly unusual creature that emerged, with a length of 520mm (19.6”) and a thickness of 25mm (1”) that astounded us, was the Queensland Giant Blue Earthworm (Phylum Annelida Class Oligochaeta Family Megascolecidae - Terriswalkeris terraereginae).

This particular earthworm is only found locally, associated with very limited upland areas of rainforest growing on deep volcanic soils, found in the mountains so even on our property limited to a few small patches of very mature deep soil rainforest on level land. So we have both extreme biodiversity and extreme rarity.

This very large species is all the more striking for being a deep Prussian blue (blue generally is a colour that signals "do not eat me I am toxic") but there is no evidence that is true as we have no idea what creatures may eat this worm if any. Alternatively it could be just a genetic mutation that has stuck because there wasn’t strong selective pressure one way or another. In either case I heeded the blue colour, assumed it meant “toxic” and took care to protect my eyes and wash my hands after handling it.

This little-known rarely seen zoological marvel is easily overlooked when one considers the more charismatic elements of the fauna that usually rate a mention – such as cassowaries, koalas and 

kangaroos. (When has the WWF ever protected and “ugly” creature?)

For most worms nutrition comes from things in soil, such as decaying roots and leaves. They eat living organisms such as nematodes, protozoans, rotifers, bacteria, fungi in soil. 

They do not have teeth. A liplike extension over the mouth helps direct food into the mouth, where the muscular pharynx (throat) grabs it, coats it with saliva and pushes it down the oesophagus into the crop, where it is stored before moving on to the gizzard. There it is crushed and ground apart 

before moving into the intestine, where it is broken down further by digestive enzymes. Some of the food is passed into the bloodstream for use by the earthworm, and the rest passes out the anus as castings (worm poop). So worm casings make good organic fertilizer.

These creatures have receptor cells in their skin that are sensitive to light and touch. They will move away from light because heat from the sun or a light source will dry out their skin and kill them.

Earthworms do not have lungs; instead, they breathe through their skin. Their skin needs to stay moist to allow the passage of dissolved oxygen into their bloodstream. Earthworm skin is coated with mucus, and they need to live in a humid, moist environment.

They have groups of bristles on each segment of the body that move in and out to grip surfaces as they stretch and contract their muscles to push themselves forward or backward. They tend to move forward. The head is at the end closest to a swollen band encircling an adult earthworm.

Earthworms are hermaphrodites, so individuals have both female and male organs. They mate by aligning themselves in opposite directions at their gonadal openings and exchanging packets of sperm. Each earthworm will form an egg capsule in its clitellum (the band you see) and pass it into the environment. 

We do know the Queensland Giant Blue Earthworm lives down unusually deep for an earthworm but we have no idea how long it lives or what it can eat so deep in the rainforest soil. We have not idea how long they live, a couple or years, a hundred years – who knows? 

As with a lot of the rare creatures hearsay abounds - for example that their slime or poo is bioluminescent. Certainly that was not the case of our specimen when it was released back into the rainforest at night and observed over a couple of hours before it disappeared into the soil.

However one can speculate some credibility to the tale. They are big and active so they need a lot of food. Down so deep they are below the level or most earthworm food sources into a zone of roots and fungus so likely they eat decaying roots and their symbiotic root fungii. Some fungii in the rainforest are bioluminescent. On the surface this makes sense as the light attracts creatures who eat the fungus and spread their spores. However I’ve never understood why some bioluminescent fungus is found beneath the surface and perhaps this explains the tales of bioluminescent worm slime or poo. 

If the Queensland Giant Blue Earthworm has better than average light receptors then if might eat bioluminescent fungii and defecate bioluminescent poo but as they have not been studied we do not know it they have have enhanced isual organs so they can’t see the bioluminescence. It may just be a physiological accident.

All the reptiles captured were studied , measured and released back into the wild.

Our rainforest is full of amazing creatures. It will take many years to identify the majority and for most of the ones listed very little is known about their lives and habits.

In the Lee of the Sacred Mountain - Postcard from the Jungle #26

November 12, 2018

Our neighbours Yvonne and Robert are Ngadjon - People of the Rainforest living on their ancestral lands in a landscape dominated by a sacred mountain (now called Mt. Bartle Frere). The Ngunyanbara Ngadjonji Clan have occupied the area for a long time. Direct evidence (a story of a volcanic eruption) radiocarbon dates back 12, 000 years.

               above ... Mount Bartle Frere 1622m “Choor-a-Chellum” directly behind the central tree trunk

It is a challenge for the Western mind to conceptualise the Ngadjon world which is concurrently both wholisitc / compartmentalised and dynamic/ static. 

It is a wholistic world... the past ancestors, present people, creatures and landscape of the jungle are viewed as one. When a Ngadjon ancestor dies their spirit travels to Choor-a-Chellum, a bare patch of land we can see near the summit of the mountain. After a period of time the spirit moves to the moon and presumably some time later moves to the stars. The Milky Way is a river, the stars the fires of the ancestors. On entering the jungle you speak to the ancestors to reassure them- in doing so all the past and present converge, and from then on you walk in the presence of the ancestors. An unpredictable future bears little meaning.

It is a compartmentalised world… Knowledge is not universal. Parts are designated / allocated to men or women or mother-in-laws (who had their own language - now lost), further dissected by clans and totems. There is no directed leadership – one must listen to but not necessarily follow the advice of elders. Each piece of oral knowledge must be passed on precisely and exactly as taught to the next custodian of that knowledge through a process of listening and watching. If there is no custodian the knowledge is lost. Over millennia the knowledge base refines but does not expand.

It is a dynamic world externally directed by bio-indicators and seasons. As hunter gatherers a great deal of communication is done by facial expressions, subtle movements or via reading footprints and trail markers. Animate and inanimate may be addressed in the same manner through a small language of about 4000 words. There are four genders but the items the Ngadjon place within each gender will baffle the Western mind - for example grouped in the same gender are - “women, fire and dangerous things”.

                                                                                              above...The four Ngadjon genders combine items that baffle the Western mind

It is a static world in which a story may be passed on orally for 200 generations without losing its meaning and the material culture of stone and wooden tools remain unevolved over millennia. The Ngadjon share about ¼ of their language with surrounding neighbours. To have neighbours so close,yet language so far apart suggests that periodically, and on a fairly regular basis, climatic disasters such as cyclones or droughts reduce population to critically low levels, followed by substantial periods of isolation during which languages diverge. In surviving, certain practices become hardwired in the culture and the material culture becomes locked in time.

Postcard from the Jungle #27 - Constant Temperature and Longevity

A scientific talk from a James Cook expert on the effects of Climate Change on local wildlife made us consider whether their had been changes on our property over the past few years. They have done studies that show populations of possums are declining and that species are moving to cooler altitudes. 

Our World Heritage Rainforest is a refugia area, holding living examples of ancient lines of living things, because it has had predictable rainfall and has had a small temperature range for many millions of years. Though high rainfall is the norm what is more predictable is that totals will vary considerably on a daily, monthly and annual basis. The temperature has been more constant. Some creatures like the Lemuroid Possum (Hemibelideus lemuroides) and Herbert River Possum (Pseudochirulus herbertensis) have lost the ability to effectively cool their body temperature. They neither sweat nor pant. 

Possum body temperature seems to be related to their level of activity, peaking after midnight which is their feeding time and dropping to a minimum around midday when they snooze. On extra hot days they move lower in the canopy (cooler) and basically shut down neither eating nor drinking. 

The hot weather also coincides with dry weather. The leaves contain less moisture and the possums will try to absorb midday heat in preference to losing moisture through evaporative processes. They appear to be able to do this up to their maximum night-time body temperature. 

This rather odd strategy works for up to about four days of high temperatures but if the heat lasts longer as it did for three weeks in late 2018, then they just dehydrate and die. 

Possums are territorial so they do not move to higher and cooler elevations as those niches are already occupied. Some other species of possum spend the day in hollow logs and thus may be able to better cope with heatwaves.

We have not sighted Lemuroid possums on the property for a few years and saw our most recent Herbert River possum about two years ago – is this decline an affect of record hot years? Only time will tell.

We also have have a sense that the calls some of the endemic birds like the Bower’s Shrike Thrush are missing and research says that species are moving to cooler altitudes. Toothbilled bower bird is supposedly at risk but its display of arranged leaves we can still observe beside one of our tracks we are pleased to observe. 

Some rainforest creatures have quite long lifespans and low rates of reproduction. These factors can distort our short term view of how well the creatures are fairing. There is some local concern for a focus on revegetation in higher areas of the Southern Tablelands between Milllaa Millaa and Ravenshoe which seems timely all the same.. 

The Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) lives up to about forty years but only starts breeding at the age of about five usually and has about one chick per year.

The Short-beaked Echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) lives forty years, only breeds after the age of seven and lays just one egg per year.

Postcard from the Jungle #28 - 

Hypsiprimnodon moschatus the weird and wonderful Musky Rat-kangaroo 

One of the strangest creatures you can imagine, is a tiny rainforest kangaroo that doesn't hop, looks like a chubby rat and can pick up things with its scaly hairless tail. The female has two vaginas, two uteri, bear usually at least two young at a time, and bring up two to four young in their pouch simultaneously. The males have testes that enlarge to ten times their size during the mating season and exert so much energy during that time that it affects their health and they take weeks to recover (A bit better situation that the poor Atherton Antechinus, that lives here as well, whose males expend so much energy during the mating season that they die). 

Musky rat-kangaroos build several long lasting "nests" often between the buttress roots of large rainforest trees, after a while fungus "stitches" the leaves together making the nest waterproof. The rarely seen, multiple, young quickly out-grow the mother's pouch and wait for her at the nest until weaned after about a year. There is a periodic move from nest to nest to nest probably to foil predators (owls, dingoes, feral cats). A habit from the time in the ancient past when they lived in the canopy, they only drink from water that collects in the clefts of tree branches or buttresses never having to visit a stream. 

We see and enjoy the antics of these tiny, solitary, silent, diurnal, ground dwelling kangaroos on a daily basis as they skitter across our track. 

They weigh on average just 650 grams, are the smallest of all kangaroos being 100 times smaller that the largest kangaroo. They have an opposing "thumb" on their rear legs permitting them to grasp objects and climb. They retain characteristics of proto-kangaroos from 20 million years ago when kangaroos were possum-like and lived their lives in the trees.

Food consists of fruit, invertebrates and fungii. Generally only the flesh of the fruit is eaten leaving the seed intact. About 25% of the fruit is carried on average about 15 metres (and up to about 70 metres) being buried in a clearing away from the host tree to be picked up later. This greatly increases the chances of a seed germinating. In an unstudied symbiotic relationship with the Chowchilla (an ancient line of ground dwelling birds that find food by shifting enormous quantities of leaf litter), the bird’s noisy activity exposes invertebrates, mostly worms and insects, for the musky rat-kangaroo who in return is the "eyes and ears" and able to alert to the presence of predators. The fruiting bodies of white and grey fungii found on rotting logs are eaten in a messy fashion that effectively distributes their spores.

Creatures in the rainforest have a maximum size to the fruit they can process. Birds and bats for example can only process quite small fruit. The three creatures who are capable of dealing with the largest fruit in the rainforest are the cassowary, the powerful giant, white-tailed rat and the musky rat-kangaroo. The creature that can process the largest fruits of all, larger than a cassowary or rat can handle, is ironically the tiny musky rat-kangaroo. Without the musky rat-kangaroo the huge rainforest giants with the largest fruit could only distribute fruit downhill by rolling or floating downstream. Eventually their distribution would only move further and further downhill. Coming to the rescue, the tiny musky rat-kangaroo who rolls the largest fruit up hill to bury it. (an unusual behaviour shared with the giant, cat sized, white- tailed rat).

After all the concern about the loss of species in our past postcard we can say this fellow seems quite safe. We have noticed diminished numbers this year but enquiries indicate it is the lack of fruit rather than the heat. Populations vary according to availability of food. This year has been a wet one we are pleased to report. The truth remains that the only consistent in our weather is always wet but variable.

02 August 2019

First fig seeds are deposited in leaf compost on branches high in the canopy by fruit eating bats and birds. The tiny fig plants expend most of their energy growing downwards, sending a long root down to the ground. Only then do they grow upwards entwining and engulfing the host tree and essentially stealing its space in the sun in the rainforest canopy. If there is no host tree they can also grow from the ground up like other trees.

Strangely, figs grow their fruit before they flower. Female and male flowers are hidden inside the fruit (called syconia). A very specialised wasp species unique to each type of fig pollinates the flowers. 

The process starts with one or two pregnant, pollen carrying female wasps pollinating the female flowers and depositing eggs in some of the flowers. The flowers with eggs turn into galls which house the wasp larvae. Some weeks later the larvae hatch just as the male flowers have matured their pollen sacs. 

As soon as the young wasps hatch they mate (frequently brothers and sisters). The males dig a hole in the side of the fruit for the females to escape and fly off to pollinate another fig. Then the males, who do not have wings and cannot fly, either exit the fruit and die or remain in the fruit to be digested by the plant. Many of the newly hatched males lack  genetic diversity. Their much reduced genetic fitness means that many die quickly so that at any given time 95% of the fig wasps and all fig wasps with wings are female.

Seeds form inside the tasty fruit and generally must be eaten and excreted hence the seeds end up deposited on branches high in the jungle canopy.

A  good source of fig seed for us is bat “mouthings”. Fruit bats eat the figs, suck off the flesh then spit out a disk of seed which we collect off the ground.

Butterflies

Botanists are using DNA to identify different species of plants. It turns out that the genetic boundaries between plant species are not clear like a bar code but rather more fuzzy boundary that anticipated. Each rainforest butterfly species harvests nectar from a range of tree types. By observing butterflies botanists have been surprised to discover butterfly  visited  trees that look completely different from each other, have in fact,  remarkably similar DNA. In the past plants that looked similar were grouped together – easy to check in the field.  But now there are some species with similar DNA but no observable features in common – something impossible to check in the field. So rather than making life simple, DNA tests have really complicated the processes of identification!

Postcard from the Jungle #30 -The Story of “M” - the Cassowary

If birds are descended from the dinosaurs then surely the large flightless cassowary is the closest living match. 

When we identify a cassowary on our property we give it a letter of the alphabet and at time of writing are at “O”. It is a response to not wanting to humanise the creature.

“M” is a cassowary that has visited us since 2018: a sad beginning but a happy outcome so far. When we first met “M” he/she was in a sorry state, a young juvenile with brown plumage and seriously under weight. 

A few things things disturbed us about “M” 

• “M” did not have an adult male looking after it and teaching it how to survive. Cassowary males sit on the eggs and bring up the young who stay with the male bird 12 -18 months learning the tricks and trades of what to eat, where to go for food and the dangers ever present in the jungle. We assumed that “M’s” father had died or been accidently killed 

• ”M” did not seem to know what to eat or where to go and had taken to following probable female “L”, at a safe distance. Females are solitary and aggressive and would see a young bird as competition. First “L” would pass by then 20 to 30 minutes later “M” would be seen to mimic “L’s” trail and visit the same food trees she had inspected . Cassowaries have a very good sense of smell so following her trail would not have been difficult for the young bird. “M” would inspect “L’s” scats (poo) presumably to determine what was ripe and safe to eat.

• “M” showed no fear of humans or vehicles. If we were outside “M” would come within half a metre of us. If “M” was about , we got to carrying a leaf rake in order to keep the increasingly aggressive young bird at bay. For us this was very unnerving, cassowaries are not the brightest spark on the block and if excited or scared can suddenly lash out with their dinner plate size veloceraptor–like clawed dinosaur feet.

But “M” survived and began taking on the black coloration of an adult also taking advantage of the hundreds of cassowary food trees we have planted over the years as well as those already here. While “M” was still much too fearless with humans we had to conclude that someone was in the habit of feeding the cassowary. Feeding cassowaries is not a good idea as familiarity with humans puts them in contact with vehicles, farm dogs and unhealthy bird food like white bread. The good news was that “M” must have fed well on rainforest fruit over the Wet Season and was looking much healthier.

Our rainforest is home to a variety of slime moulds which are individually difficult to identify.

They are most active during and just after the Wet Season (January to March).

Slime moulds are neither plants nor animals. What they are exactly, continues to be the subject of scientific debate. While they reproduce in a similar fashion to fungii they are probably best thought of as soil-dwelling amoeba - brainless, single-celled animal organisms(protozoa), often containing multiple nuclei.

When all is well, the slime mould thrives in decaying plant matter as a single-celled organism, but when food is scarce, it combines forces with its brethren, and forms large jelly-like masses.

The collective “gooy mass” is called a plasmodium. While lacking a brain these “blobs of goo” can “sense” food (usually in the form of a fallen rotting log) and move quite directly and deliberately some distance through the damp rainforest.This mass creeps over the rainforest floor by extending a “fake limb”, pseudopodia, and then flowing into the limb. The chief mode of nutrition of plasmodium is saprotrophic; that is absorbing the organic food from the decaying organic matter.

However: the plasmodium also feeds on bacteria, protozoa, spores of fungi, yeasts and other microorganisms through engulfing and ingestion. Basically it extends pseudopodia all the way around the food until they join. Then is dissolves the interior cell membranes and “voila!” what was outside is now inside!

Under unfavourable conditions such as drought or too much cold, the plasmodium divides to form many multinucleate cysts that remain dormant until conditions improve. Sometimes even whole plasmodium forms a hard dormant structure called sclerotium that lies dormant until triggered into activity again usually by water.

The slime moulds resemble both protozoa and the true fungi. They are like protozoa in their amoeboid plasmodial stage and similar to true fungi in abundant spore formation.

Ways in which they appear to be a fungus – they lack chlorophyll and produce spores both asexually and sexually, the spores have a wall of cellulose, and they come in many colours.

Ways in which they resemble an amoeboid animal – the non-reproductive parts are encased in a plasma membrane just like human cells, they have the ability to move from place to place, they collectively appear to be able to “hunt” for food including “meat” in the form of bacteria, other single celled animals and microorganisms.

The images are local, require fancy equipment and are not ours.

October 25, 2020

Postcard from the Jungle #32 -The Secret of Invisibility

When we walk through the low light of the mature section of the rainforest, if we are lucky, we might hear a faint russle of leaves and a few quiet “ers”. Looking up to the upper canopy at the very tops of the trees will be up to a dozen large 45cm green parrots. Once they see us go silent but they continue to eat and whisper from branch to branch.

What we are experiencing is the extended family of the Australia King Parrot Alisterus scapularis. Seen in the open and in good light they are a spectacular bird emerald green bodies with red blue and yellow.

But somehow in the rainforest they generally remain cryptic, and seem to have discovered the secret of invisibility.

King Parrots have remarkable vision...

Our eyes have rod cell for black and white (night) vision and red, green and blue cone cells for colour vision. But King Parrots have a fourth con cell for ultraviolet light.

Seeing in ultraviolet is advantageous…

• Family members and Mates - UV identifies males from females and identifies individuals by causing some of the green feathers to glow yellow

• food - lost green leaves do not reflect UV light, -->but some rainforest seeds, berries reflect UV --> many insects, including moths and butterflies, have body coatings that strongly reflect UV light. --> some rainforest fruits as they ripen, develop a highly reflective waxy coating that does reflects UV light 

• some predators, like owls and hawks, cannot see ultraviolet light - this raises the possibility that ultraviolet vision gives birds a channel in which they can privately signal, thereby remaining inconspicuous to predators

• each eye operates independently of the other, and being on either side of the head gives a wide field of vision

• they have the ability to voluntarily dilate and contract their pupils in order to more clearly focus on something; this is known as “pinning”

• can see approximately 10 times more frames per second than humans, this means they detect fast movement quickly (like the attack of a predator) but also means they can detect slow movement (like the movement of the stars?)

• some nest parasites deposit eggs that glow in UV so the nest can be cleaned

• BUT --- they need 5-20 times the amount of light as do humans in order to see colour – they are built for day-time feeding
  
  

King parrots do not chase their young away . With a lifespan of 30 years in the wild , the King parrot has developed complex communication through gesture and sound as well as complex social behaviours few of which have been studied. They are normally encountered in family groups of about a dozen comprising (mostly) monogamous parents, juvenile chicks and mature offspring from the previous year. They make nests in deep hollows of a tree trunk. In mature rainforest, where the entrance may be high in the tree (over 10m) but the eggs are in a nest of decayed wood-dust near the bottom of the tree hollow (0.5m).

Year-round we gain glimpses of their early morning forage for insects, seeds, berries, fruit, flowers, leaf buds and nectar followed by an afternoon retired in the dense canopy.

17 May 2021

Oxygen is a big factor in determining insect size as their respiration system is less efficient than lungs. In the geological past (215My) when the atmosphere was more than 30% oxygen many fossil insects were much larger . In the modern era with oxygen at 21% maximum insect sizes are less.

An insect’s breathing system consists of pairs of holes called spiracles along their bodies connecting to tubes called tracheae which transport oxygen to cells and remove carbon dioxide. No cells in the insect body are more than 2 to 3 ^m from a tracheole.

Batocer frenchi is a large beetle found in our rainforest. It used to be much more common. Because it learned to eat sugar cane farmers introduced the destructive Cand Toad from Hawaii and frequently spray broad spectrum insecticides. Both short-sighted practices have a negative affect on all rainforest insects and all natural insect predators.

In order to obtain enough oxygen Batocera frenchi had to expand the tracheae into their legs and antennae to create a proportionally greater amount of space in their bodies. A larger body size increases oxygen needs. But there is a limit to this because at a certain point the more tracheae become impractical as they crowd out other organs. Consequently Batocera frenchi being near the upper limit of beetle size, tend to move slowly and rely for protection on their thick exoskeleton.

Periodically the exoskeleton must be moulted in order for the insect to grow in size. During moulting the a large insect is most highly vunerable to both predation and injury. A very large insect would take too long to molt, put too much energy into the production of a new exoskeleton, and collapse under its own weight. For example, if a beetle’s exoskeleton must become thicker as body size increases (strength is proportional to length squared whereas mass is proportional to length cubed), at a certain point this thickness would cause the beetle’s legs to crumple under the strain of holding up its own body weight. Of course there are other ways be big, get oxygen and not get eaten.

Some of our large butterflies and moths have enormous caterpillars in bright colours. They can absorb some oxygen through their skin. The colour says to predators “I am very very toxic – so don’t eat me!”

Another strategy is to be long but very skinny. This means more cells closer to the trachae and thus more energy. Titan Walking sticks can grow up to about 50cm. They live high in the canopy and we only get to see them when a old large tree falls. Even on the ground they are very difficult to see as they look exactly like the twigs and branches and they flawlessly move in concert with gentle rainforest breezes. The stick insect below was moved onto a contrasting background so it could be seen. These insects move very slowly using much of their energy on metobolising quite toxic leaves.

The Giant Petaltail Dragonfly is long and skinny. This limits tracheal length and the distance oxygen has to travel. The easy access to oxygen makes it very energetic. This dragonfly is a giant – up to 170mm long and is found along our rainforest margins.

Really large flying insects are more conspicuous and less manouverable than their predators. It is likely that the evolutionary rise of birds and bats between the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous (150My) resulted in insects evolving into a smaller target size to avoid being eaten. This would explain why while oxygen levels increased insect size decreased during this time. (Previously mentioned in Postcard #23)

25 January 2022

Postcard from the Jungle #34

Walledge” and Things That Aren’t What They Seem

In the past year we have identified another 170 or so species on the property bringing our total to date to around 600+ unique species. The job gets more difficult as we go. Up until recently we have relied on publically available identification keys, texts and web-sources.Fortunately some of these sources are getting better particularly the Queensland Herbarium, the Atlas of Living Australia and iNaturalist.Sadly there is a trend for some vital new information to be limited to a select audience.

We have coined a new term for this ...

“walledge” - knowledge hidden behind paywalls and passwords.

It is not true knowledge as it‘s veracity cannot be tested by the world community at large.

This year we have come across a number of species that aren’t what they seem.

Looks like a wasp but it is a moth. First seen four years ago only able to put a name to it 2 weeks ago. Eressa rhysoptila has black wings with transparent patches and an orange / black striped abdomen like a wasp. Best guess is that it is trying to mimic the aggressive mud wasp. There are about 1400 locally identified moths and about an equal number yet to be identified.

Looks like a mushroom , smells like a mouse. Balanophora fungosa, is not a mushroom. It is a parasitic flowering plant that lacks the green pigment – cholorophyll – that enables plants to photosynthesize.The white tipped structures at the base are male flowers. The female flowers are the very tiny white dots on the top of the dome. Usually found amongst litter on the forest floor. The flowers emit a mouse-like odour. Most of the time, it remains underground where the plant grows on the roots of about 25 species of trees. In September it pushes up through the leaf litter to flower. This specimen was attached to the roots of an ancient fig tree.

Looks much like a christmas tree, produces explosive spores.

Palhinhaea cernua is a clubmoss, a prehistoric fern-ally evolutionarily located between ferns and mosses, before flowering plants appeared on Earth. It is a very ancient vascular plant (ie. plants with special tissues xylem and phloem to conduct water and food).

Club-like projections produce large volumes of minute spores (lycopodium powder). The spores are very flammable due to their high oil content. The local aboriginal people could use it as a fire starter even in very wet weather.

The spores ignite with a bright flash of light and were used in early black and white flash photography, in stage productions and in fireworks (up until the 1950s),

The spores repel water have been used as a powder on wounds / skin rashes or as a flea / cockroach repellent. The foliage as cotton substitute to stuff cushions, and foliage used to filter water.

The rare (and often transitory) occurrence of this clubmoss well beyond the margins of its main range been attributed to long-distance dispersal of spores by major storms or cyclones.

29 September 2022

Postcard from the Jungle #35 Giant Webs of Gold, 

Kleptomaniac Spiders and Mystery Hole Punchers

It’s April and we have just entered our “Cool Season” charcterised by sunny periods interspersed with random, generally overnight, thunderstorms with brief stretches of very intense rain. You get a bit of warning of a storm often hearing the classic tropical “rolling thunder”, a low growl that slowly works its way across the sky and can go on for several minutes. The sky abounds with beautiful colours and breathtaking cloud formations.

Insect populations are much more active, particularly around sunrise, sunset and overnight. Consequently it is a chance for spiders to get a good feed. Being a tropical climate and no threat of frost, there is nothing stopping a spider from getting pretty big.

Giant Webs of Gold

The Giant Golden Orbweaver (Nephila pilipes) builds large, semi-permanent orb webs 1 to 2 metres across with supporting silk that can span across a distance of an additional 3 metres.

The web is noted for its irregular mesh, quite unlike the precise geometric mesh patterns of many common spiders.The thick strong silk has a distinct golden sheen with the potential to ensnare even tiny birds and bats.

Why is their silk golden? Two possible reasons as you can see in the photo...

• The part of the yellow web which is in the sunlight glows and will attract nectar feeding insects like butterflies and moths.

• The part of the yellow web which is in the shade will appear invisible against the green background plants

These spiders remain in their webs day and night and gain some protection from bird attack by the presence of a “panic room” of threads on one or both sides of the orb web that they will readily escape to when threatened. Birds are reluctant to get entangled in the “safety-mesh” of web silk and as we can attest, the king size web is sticky and time consuming to remove. In addition the spider will vibrate its web to distract potential predators and avoid accidental damage.

The female spider is BIG - usually bigger than the palm of an adult hand with a body about the size of an adult’s little finger.

If the web is located in a rainforest flyway, the food supply is enormous and the female will just get bigger and bigger. Lucky for us, they tend to sit in the middle of the web at about eye level so they are easy to spot before you walk into the web. Nevertheless, when you nearly run into one going down a jungle path they absolutely seem larger than life! They have large visible red palps beside their formidable fangs though we have never had one bite us so far.

Being big requires big prey – large flies, beetles, locusts, wood moths, cicadas and ever so rarely tiny birds or bats.

But there are thieves about!

Some of the abundant food that they collect in their giant websis stolen not by one but by two other critters.

Kleptomaniacs of the Web

So what happens to the small insects that get stuck to the web?

Well the web also hosts a second species of spider - small kleptoparasitic spiders who eat the small insects and keep the web clean. At some peril to their lives, they steal some of the big spider’s food.

Hole Punchers

During the day each spider repairs their web to perfection. Each morning we go out and look at the web and it is punched through with a few almost perfectly round fist-size holes. For a while the holes were a mystery to us. Then we worked out the cause. Nocturnal microbats punch holes in the web either in the pursuit of flying insects or by deliberately stealing, by brute force at speed , a larger insect already trapped on the web.

Where is the male spider ?

You have to look closely around the edges of the web. The tiny 6mm pale coloured males are doing their best to blend in with the golden silk. Life isn’t great, you live on small insect scraps, you might be lucky to breed with the giant female -- therein lies a conumdrum...

will she love you or eat you!

After mating, the female Golden Orb Weaving Spider wraps her single egg sac in a mass of golden silk, which is then hidden on foliage away from the web, disguised within a curled leaf or sprig of twigs. Little is known about this period of the spider’s life – how they choose a site for the web or how the tiny males reach the web.

Nephila spiders are the oldest surviving genus of spider in the world, living here in the oldest continuous rainforest in the world. Similar fossil specimens date back to the time of dinosaurs 165 million years ago.

The jungle always surprises!

13 April 2023

Postcard from the Jungle #36

Cyclones, Sounds and Electroreception

Cyclone Jasper, Category 2, has just passed through it’s eye was well to the north so we caught the wet southern edge and received about 933mm of rain in four days. Quite early for the first cyclone of the year especially in what is supposed to be an El Nino~. Quite impressed with how well the cyclones track and strength can be predicted from the dozen or so “models”.

The rainforest is amazingly resilient and other than dropping a few rotten branches everything remained intact. In the lulls between heavy downpours the wildlife continues on as normal. Nothing new in this, the place has been evolving for rain for millennia. If a rainforest can sound “happy” then this is the time.

Researchers tend to do all their studies in the short “dry season” rather than when the rainforest has rain. Does this make any sense? During the “dry season” wildlife behaviour is affected by the relative paucity of water, concentrated around and limited to creek areas, spring lines or little catchments within tree hollows. The majority of mating and pollinating takes place at the beginning of the “wet season”. How this may affect their data seems to be lost on them.

In the jungle sight is limited due to the dense vegetation and the senses of smell and sound predominate. So a little bit more about sound. High frequency sound can carry more data (like 5G 2400Hz phones versus 4G 1200Hz phones) but has a limited range. Low frequency sound carries less data but can travel much greater distances (think of the sounds whales make).

High Frequency Sounds

Small territorial creatures like the ubiquitous range of “little brown birds” here communicate with their immediate neighbours in high frequency long, varied and complex twitters and tweets. There is some convincing evidence that all song birds originated in the area that is now Australia. This additional time for evolution may account for their longer life spans in bird terms.

Image 36_1 below: - Silvereye one if the world’s fastest evolving birds

 A “robin size” catbird can live up to around 14 years in the wild. This evolutional and individual longevity has resulted in longer more varied , more complex calls, a greater diversity of calls and different series of calls for different purposes (within a family group, family to family communication, predator warning, collective communications against rivals of another species). In addition within a species there are local regional “dialects” of birdcalls so recording a birdcall in one area and playing it several kilometres away can result in the reply of a distress call as the local population of birds feels they are being invaded.

Cockatoos and parrots can live for decades in the wilds and make a huge range of very expressive sounds in all frequencies.

The toothed bowerbird, not only has its own repertoire but also can mimic convincingly at great number of other birds which it uses to distract predators towards supposedly easier prey and away from its display bower and nesting site.

Bats are the most common mammals in the jungle but notoriously difficult to photograph and identify. Different species have distinctive sounds but they are generally above human hearing range. Fast flying insect eating bats emit very high frequency sounds continuously while chasing close behind fast moving prey. The high frequency is needed to detect the detail of rapid twists and turns of the fleeing insects.

Image 36_2 below: - unidentified species of rainforest frog

Tiny thumb-nail size rainforest frogs, that never come near water and live their entire lives in the moist jungle leaf litter, communicate at high frequency so their closest neighbours can hear but predators such as the musky rat-kangaroo or giant white tailed rat cannot locate them at a distance. They call at different times rather than in unison and employ long time intervals between their calls to frustrate predators.

On the other hand, larger frogs more widely dispersed along or around streams or pools call in unison at lower frequencies. Their strategy to avoid predators, simply to jump into the water.

There are four species of cicada on our site. Each species of these large insects has a unique high frequency call. Vertically perched on the trunk of a they vary the pitch by raising or lowering their abdomens. The calls are temperature dependent, at our place starting/stopping morning and evening between 24 and 26 degrees. While each insect projects sound over a limited range, the collective sound is over square kilometres and can reach 85 decibels.

Low Frequency Sounds

Not all bats echo-locate with high frequency. Tube-nose bats feed on widely separated very large spiders while they sit on their huge 1-2m wide webs. They use low frequency to scan large areas and must fly slowly in order to collect sufficient data to locate their targets. They then punch a hole through the web in order to collect the spider.

The large cat-size fruit bats do not use echolocation at all but rely mostly on smell and a bit on night vision. They chatter in mid-frequency to keep the night time flock together and perhaps to pass on information of good fruiting areas.

Arboreal mammals, such as possums, can be widely distributed in the canopy. Though barely studied, many emit low frequency growls for example the recently in discovered colony of koalas in the region the male can send out a growl that lasts up to about 90 seconds. On a windless night the male’s growl informs females , likely up to several kilometres away, that he is around. In koala social life the females travel to the male. It is not known if females also growl.

For most of the year the large flightless southern cassowaries live a solitary life feeding on a wide range of rainforest fruit. They keep in touch, not only in the mating season but year round via near sub-sonic rumbles. Again little work has been done to understand this communication. One concern is that the low frequency sounds prodiced at large wind farms may drown out low frequency wildlife communication sounds. One would think it is a no-brainer to check this out before putting in a wind farm. Alternatively wind farms could employ more efficient torroidal blades that seem to produce less turbulence which is the likely source of the low frequency sound pollution.

Image 36_3 below:  – Platypus feeding on nymphs in rapids

Electroreception

As I reached the creek two days ago I spotted a Platypus in the rapids and because of the noise of the water it did not do the usual disappearing act so I got to quietly watch it for about 10 minutes. Swimming in the rivers and streams of its native Australia after dusk, the platypus closes its eyes, nose, and ears when it dives in search of dinner—bottom-dwelling invertebrates such as insect larvae, crustaceans, worms, and mollusks. To find these meals in the mud, it relies on its bill instead. This super-sensory organ is packed with three distinct receptor cells that help the platypus detect movements and subtle electric fields produced by its prey. Push-rod mechanoreceptors on the bill detect changes in pressure and motion, while two types of electroreceptors track the electrical signals produced by the muscular contractions of the small prey. Using a side-to-side motion of its head, the platypus gauges the direction and distance of its next meal by collecting, and combining, these flows of sensory information. The platypus may not be the only monotreme (egg laying mammal) with electroreception, but its sensory structures are the most complex. About 40,000 specialized electroreceptor skin cells are arranged in stripes on the top and underside of its bill. Echidna species have anywhere from 2,000 to as few as 400, as is the case with the short-billed echidna.

January 02, 2024