The Cabbages of Doom

We’ve been meaning to go whale watching since we moved to Sydney and today we finally got round to it. The weather was not the best - and the sea was a bit choppier than ideal - but it was a fantastic morning, well spent. Best of all, we got to see humpback whales!

It was only a small pod - a mother and calf, plus “escort” - but we got some reasonably close up views when one of them was having a play.

As well as a couple of breaches, this included a couple of good tail slaps.

Amazing animals. We saw some birds too - and, of course, some great views of the cliffs around Sydney harbour. All in all, a recommended half day trip.

Today, I decided to take the day off and went to Taronga Zoo in advance of the Oceans of Plastic event. Like most people with an interest in conservation and animal welfare, I have mixed feelings about zoos. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need them; unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world and zoos are an increasingly important bastion of biodiversity.

They are also a place where you can go and marvel at nature. And what a marvellous chap this is:

How anyone can look at that and think, “I really must shoot that” (other than with a camera), is totally beyond me.

The Sydney Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) have Michael McFadden, the Unit Supervisor of the Herpetofauna division at Taronga Zoo, for 2^nd May’s Conservation Cafe. That’s reptiles and amphibians to the rest of us:

This May, Sydney-SCB welcomes Michael McFadden, the Unit Supervisor of the Herpetofauna division at Taronga Zoo. Michael began working at Taronga Zoo in January 2003 and now oversees the maintenance and husbandry of the Zoo’s collection of reptiles and amphibians. He works closely with the Zoo’s conservation projects which include captive breeding and release programs for the highly endangered Southern and Northern Corroboree Frogs. The current focus of Michael’s work is developing techniques to improve captive breeding and rearing success in threatened Australian frogs and reintroduction biology.

As before, it’s free: RSVP on Eventbrite.

Over the weekend, I was at Lorne for the 20th APS Lorne Proteomics Symposium. It’s a lovely spot for a conference, and the schedule always includes some free time in the afternoon. On the friday, I took advantage of this and went for a walk on the nearby Tramway track.

I was attracted by the (somewhat optimistic) hope of seeing an Echidna, possibly my favourite animal of all, but instead got my first wild wallaby on the trail:

And some kangaroos:

Indeed, it was a good day for nature, with a seal having fun by the pier and some cockatoos strutting their stuff. (Galahs too, for all those Alf Stewart fans.)

No echidna, sadly. Maybe next time. (More pics here.)

As well as cool reptiles, Australia also has some interesting insects that are not found in the UK. One of them paid us a visit on Saturday night: a mantis of some sort.

I'm not sure what species it was, and therefore whether it was technically a "praying mantis" or not. Hopefully, it was a preying mantis and will despatch a few of our less appreciated insect visitors, i.e. cockroaches!

It didn’t come into the house, which is a good thing because the cats seemed super-interested! Indeed, it was Arthur who drew our attention to it, spotting it on one of the outdoor chairs in the dark.

I went out to take a few pictures and it obligingly wandered over to the door to give the kitties a closer look.

Via the Youtube channel of a friend from (but no longer in!) Dublin, Jonathan Gordon, here are some awesome videos of octopus camouflage. (Yes, I know that “octopuses” or “octopodes” is more correct for the plural but “octopi” is more fun!) I’ve seen this kind of thing on documentaries before but never realised this kind of thing could happen when just “[diving] down to look at a shell”.

The screenshots give the game away, sadly, but even when you know it’s there, the camouflage is still so amazing that the octopus is hard to spot.

And if that’s too scary for you, here is another video from Jon featuring an über-cute baby octopus “walking on the beach”:

One of the great things about living in Sydney is that you do not need to venture far from the city to find little pockets of National Park and bush tracks, where you can take a stroll away from the hustle and bustle. One such pocket is the headland at Shelly Beach, in Manly.

Last Friday, I took advantage of a day off to pay Shelly Beach a visit, and stumbled across this guy (or gal) on the headland:

To be honest, I almost stumbled on him! He was good enough to hang around and pose for some close-ups. (A much larger one scared the bejaysus out of me when it bolted into the bush a little later!)

Judging from the signs up in the area, (s)he is an Eastern water dragon. I've never really noticed such prominent ear openings on lizards before.

The UK has only 6 native reptile species, so it’s always a treat to see them. (Until, I suspect, I stumble across a venomous snake!) Fantastic creatures!

A couple more photos here.

Via WEIT, here is a crazy/cheery "cat suckling ducklings" story that is fit to be an April Fool's joke but isn't!

Last year, the British government started a trail badger cull despite stiff opposition from scientists, the public and even the House of Commons. The BBC have reported that those Badger culls were ‘ineffective and failed humaneness test’.

Next time, maybe they will listen to the Science. Hopefully, these millions can now be directed to alternatives that might actually work, such as vaccine development.

After 24 hours, not a lot…

Every now and then, something comes along that just needs to be re-blogged. I give you, The fabulous pom-pom crab!:

h/t: @JohnRHutchinson via WEIT. (Original source unknown.)

Hunting whales for commercial exploitation was banned in the mid eighties and for good reason: stocks were dwindling and many of the uses for whale parts (oil etc.) are now redundant. Of course, people still eat whales and, not being a vegetarian, it would be pretty hypocritical of me to take issue with that aspect. (At least whales are free range, although I have no idea how humane their actual deaths are.) The problem is that many species of whale are now endangered or vulnerable. With their long generations and slow reproduction, it is clearly not that easy for populations to rebound.

Japan has got round whaling bans by exercising its right to “scientific” whaling. Not everyone is convinced, though, including the Australian government who have recently reported that they will send out a surveillance plane to the Southern Ocean to monitor Japanese whaling ships having previously challenged Japanese whaling at the UN as “commercial whaling in another guise”. The Japanese, of course, deny this.

The thing is, whilst it’s not my field, I cannot think of any good scientific reasons to hunt (and kill) whales at all. An article in the Japan Times last year, “In science terms, Japan has no need at all to kill whales”, agrees:

“Now, it is true that by catching and killing whales, and analyzing their stomach contents, a lot can be learned about cetacean biology. In the past, it was the only real method available to investigate these animals. But for many years now, it has been entirely unnecessary to kill whales in order to get the information that Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research says it needs. …

Killing whales provides negligible data to science. Less than 1 percent of the papers published on cetacean biology come from studies that required the killing of a whale.”

Ironically, one of the reasons given to the scientific whaling is to get a better handle on their current populations - perhaps not so ironic if the hope is to use that information to remove the whaling ban.

There are some nations, such as Norway, who object to - and have declared themselves exempt from - the International Whaling Commission moratorium. This is bad (although I think they generally target large whale populations) but at least it is honest. I think it is time to ban scientific whaling just as commercial whaling is banned. That way, if a nation wants flout international consensus then at least the genuine motives will be clear.

When we arrived in Sydney it was the awesome purple Jacaranda trees and screechy fruit bats that gave us daily reminders that we were in a new a foreign land. At this time of year, it’s the cicadas. As reported in a Daily Telegraph article, Cicadas having a blast this year, it is a particularly noisy year for these insect tree huggers.

According to Wikipedia:

“The male cicada has loud noisemakers called “tymbals” on the sides of the abdominal base. Its “singing” is not the stridulation (where one structure is rubbed against another) that characterizes many other familiar sound-producing insects, such as crickets. Rather, the tymbals are regions of the exoskeleton that form a complex membrane with thin, membranous portions and thickened ribs; contracting the internal tymbal muscles produces a clicking sound as the tymbals buckle inwards, and the relaxing of the muscles causes the tymbals to return to their original position, producing another click. The interior of the male abdomen is mostly hollow, which amplifies the sound. A cicada rapidly vibrates these membranes, and enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae make its body serve as a resonance chamber, further amplifying the sound. The cicada modulates the sound by positioning its abdomen toward or away from the substrate.”

These things are crazily loud! On recent drives down the coast and to the Hunter Valley we would be driving along and hear this noise building, as if we were approaching a hissing downpour of rain through the trees. It was, in fact, pockets of cicadas, “singing” so loudly that even at 100 km/h it sounded loud as we passed. (Louder than “an industrial jackhammer, a chainsaw or even a dreaded vuvuzela horn” according to the Telegraph.)

Although we have cicadas outside our apartment that start up around dusk each night, they fortunately shut up before bed time. (And even if they did not, they’d still be more welcome than a Huntsman spider!)

[Picture from Wikipedia article on Cyclochila australasiae a.k.a. the Green Grocer - “one of the loudest insects in the world”.]

Just before dinner this evening, I spotted one of our cats looking inquisitively above the door. I followed his gaze to this awesome chap. A most unwelcome visitor in our home, I must say! Our Aussie friends on Facebook identified it as a “mostly harmless” Huntsman spider.

“They have been known to inflict defensive bites, but are not widely regarded as dangerous to healthy humans.”

Nevertheless, I cannot say that removing it was much fun, as I certainly did not want to be on the receiving end of a defensive bite! Sadly, our attempted catch-and-release operation went a bit wrong a Mr Huntsman is no more. Time to get a spider catcher I think!

Darwin is soon to disappear from the Bank of England £10 note but he’ll be found in British wallets, pockets and purses for some time to come - not just on tenners but also the special release £2 coins from 2009 to mark 200 years since Darwin’s birth. For obvious reasons, it was one of my favourite coins to get in change. Since moving to Australia, the chances of getting a Darwin coin in my change have susbtantially diminished. Instead, however, there is a fair chance of getting one of my favourite animals, the Echidna, which graces the 5c coin.

Echidnas are one of the iconic animals of Australia. Neither a placental mammal nor a marsupial, the Echidna is a monotreme like the playtpus. Monotremes lay eggs like reptiles and produce milk for their young like mammals but have no nipples. Today, we paid another visit to the Australian Museum (for their Tyrannosaurs: Meet the family exhibit), which uses the Echidna for their main logo. As you would expect, they also have a few specimens in the museum. The one below really looks like the one on the coin - I wonder if it was the inspiration!

I have been lucky enough to see an echidna in the wild once. When on holiday in 2004, I was out for a walk in Mission Beach, Queensland, and I chanced upon the guy below who snuffled across my path. One of the highlights of the trip! Hopefully, it won’t be my last wild encounter.

When one pictures fossil hunters, one normally imagines someone carefully chipping and brushing away at some exposed rock. The picture that springs to mind is rarely someone sitting on a box of explosives. With Professor Mike Archer at UNSW, however, that’s exactly what you get.

I first found out about Mike’s extraordinary approach to fossil hunting at the UNSW family BBQ a couple of weeks ago. As described in the Australian Wildlife notes on Riversleigh, a world heritage fossil site in north-western Queensland: (my emphasis)

As water dissolves the rock, bones and teeth can be seen protruding from the rock. Releasing them from the rock is not so easy. Quarrying techniques must be used, including the occasional use of light explosives. Many of the areas are so inaccessible that the larger rocks have to be broken up with sledge hammers, bagged and labeled and lifted out by helicopter.

Once they finally reach the laboratory, the fossils are freed by dissolving away the surrounding limestone with dilute acetic acid. After treatment with preservatives, the fossils are then ready for study by scientists.

This approach has reaped rewards, including the recently reported giant toothed platypus fossil.

Another example of dramatic palaeontology doing the rounds is the amazing set of dinosaur footprints in a Bolivian quarry, which presumably were unmasked by something similarly explosive.

Opponents of evolution often point erroneously at the gappy nature of the fossil record, conveniently ignoring that not only do past organisms need to have been subject to the relatively rare conditions that result in fossilisation but then that bit of rock needs to be exposed again and then someone needs to find it before it’s destroyed! Given of all this, I think that the fossil record is actually remarkably complete! (Not to mention, of course, that even as more and more fossils get added, the fossil record is entirely consistent with evolution and extremely inconsistent with a recent global flood or Young Earth Creationism.)

Today we went to the Australian Museum in Sydney. The main reason for the visit was to join and get tickets for the Tyrannosaurs: Meet the family exhibit but, even with a very lazy Sunday morning, we had a bit of time to wander round some of the exhibits and so paid the Australian fauna section a visit. I’d already been back in February when I was over for my job interview but you always spot new and interesting things in a museum like this. Today’s interesting fact…

Unfortunately, the museum had little more information than that but thankfully the internet is more forthcoming on faecal facts. (The picture above is from (where else?) Wikipedia.) It appears that the function of the exciting excreta is to stop the stools from rolling away, as they are used for marking territory etc. The secret to the shaping of the poo is the moisture content, apparently. So there you go. My other interesting wombat fact is that their pouches open backwards relative to other marsupials, which stops them from filling up with dirt when burrowing.

You can find out more at a page at “Today I found out about”: Wombat Poop is Cubic and Other Fascinating Wombat Facts. It’s a sadly ad- and pop-up-riddled page but does end with the great “bonus fact”:

Wombats are protected under Australian law, presumably mostly due to being awesome.

This evening, we visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which is open “after hours” on Wednesday with free entry and live music. Free wifi too! It’s a great gallery with a mix of Australian and European art, contemporary and old, painted and sculpted, including my new favourite sculpture:

Fruit Bats, 1991

Lin Onus (1948-1996)
Yorta Yorta, South Riverine region,
Melbourne, South-east region

Worth a visit for that alone!

Taken at Dublin Zoo, December 2007.