It's bark is worse in this light

Eucalyptus saligna forms a continuous hybrid with E. pilularis

The three 50m trees in our backyard are probably slightly towards the saligna end of the spectrum as the branch forks are more open than the pronounced, upright V's of the blackbutts and the perminant bark just covers slightly more than a quarter of the main trunk. The rest of the smooth bark (an infra-red reflecting adaption to frequent fires) sheds annually.
Why the science lesson?:
Our backyard is covered in a substantial layer of bark.

These photos were taken the day after we mowed - less than 24 hrs.

Off on holls down the coast - I'll take some photos for you so you know what you are missing out on.

Any way, Merry Xmas, and a 'appy new one.

Chat next year.

Cheers

Paleontologist strokes his bone and changes worlds history

(image pinched from here)

Alternate title: 2 wings good, 4 wings bad.

Flipping through Septembers edition of the journal Nature - vol 461 (7264): 640–643, if you must know - I flipped straight to the paper about a fossil dinosaur that has been found with 4 wings.

A few years back a paleontologist was fondling a fossil arm bone from a small raptor like dinosaur when he noticed bumps arranged in a particular pattern and separation that suggested they were the remnants of the attachment points for feathers. Specifically flight feathers. His find led to alot of further scrutiny of existing collections and we very quickly learnt a great deal more about the origin of birds and feathers. We now know that they adorned the hides of most raptors (think small front legs, long running hind limbs and big teeth - like a t-rex).

Well preserved feathers have been identified on Gigantoraptor, a 1.5 tone 70 myo ostrich like behemoth and a Microraptor, Microraptor gui which had feathers on both it's arms and legs. But a new find in China earlier this year has clarified some of the early stages in wing development. It seams that 4 wings was the norm for these early gliders and that, to nobodies surprise, birds are derived from Troodontidae.

Not found on good shit.

Sydney Red Gum

Our neighbour

This little hole in the bottom of our garden is home to the worlds deadliest spider. Atrax robustus, the Sydney Funnel Web.

More than deserved of their bad rep - they are as aggressive as they are deadly. They don't run for cover when poked with a stick or when you put your foot in a boot left outside. There is an antivenin but I'm told the bites are excruciating. In the last two weeks I've found a few around the house (so we'll spray) but this one is home as it repairs the webbed burrow overnight if I disturb it.

Next weekend I'll dig up the hole for you. Should make a good you tube.

Huntsman for dinner

Here be Dragons

Back in August 2007 we took the kids for a walk around the STEP track. A year later Annalise is walking better and taking more interest in the environment around her; commentating on the birds, ants, flowers and trees as we walked. The last year has been dry and this time I couldn't find any of the endangered carnivorous sundews (Drosera). There is also noticeably more fallen timber, branches and leaf litter in the Terry's Creak Valley which is going to fuel a ripper of a fire when one eventually comes through.

And we saw a dragon



(apologies for the appalling vid but I'm crap at editing this kind of stuff)
photos

Cockatoo Vs. Wooden Snake

Living on the edge of the National park we have a variety of birds come visit. It would be unusual for us to have breakfast alone without at least one sulphur-crested cockatoo, eastern rozella, rainbow lorikeet, pink and grey galah or kookaburra come up to the window to see what us two-legs-no-feathers-can't-fly are doing.
They are very playful social animals. I've come across at least one paper which found that the sulphur-crested cockatoo is the worlds most intelligent bird. They live for over 100 years, and in addition to being large (50 cm, 20 inches) inquisitive, cheeky showoffs they love to make a noise with their valley filling raucous screech. All well and good but the cockatoos are big and like to chew houses, stripping the wood, detaching guttering and removing fly-screen, just for the fun of it. They also crap on your washing and the bastards know exactly what they are doing when they do so.
To try and keep them at a distance from the washing we put a relativly lifelike $2 wooden snake on the fence.
It worked for about a week.

Little Bastards

The Aussie bull ant (Myrmecia sp).

When it comes to poisonous critters we've got the 'est': most venomous etc. Even the bloody platypus is venomous. Now the Brown Snake may be all the rage: 1, 2, 3, 4 and certainly has a rather cool - hay I'm one of the dedliest snakes in the world - kind of thing going for its image and sure, bull ants are not in that league of poisonousness as say a box jellyfish, nore do they swarm in insane numbers like green tree ants but at up to 30mm long (3cm or 1.2 inches for you non SI types) and each and every one of them delivering a sting from their mandibles and multiple stings from their hypodermic tail sting, these guys are not to be fucked with. At 3 (out of 4) on the Starr sting pain scale that's about as bad as it gets. They aggressively chase you, can jump and whilst usually solitary, they will swarm if you are stupid or unlucky and stand on a nest.
They are responsible for more deaths than snake bite, shark attack, spider bite and crock attack combined.
They are primitive and pre-date the separation of wasps from ants.
There is a larger one - black with yellow pincers, 40mm long, that is absolutely solitary and is much more aggressive. Whilst the photo would have been good I'm glad these were not the bigger ant as I took this photo less than 30m from my back door.

Pale blue dot

In 1990 Carl Sagan had the NASA engineers turn Voyager 1 around to take a photo of Earth. At the time Voyager was beyond the orbit of Pluto; 6.4 billion kilometers. Having traveled past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune the spacecraft was, as it is now, on its way to the stars. From this distance Earth is distant pinprick of light very close to the sun almost invisible in the sunlight reflecting from the spacecraft. The stripes are a flare artifact in the lens. The Earth is the little dot, slightly less than half way up on the right, in this picture it resolves to something smaller than a single pixel. Earth is just one of 7 other planets orbiting a very average star in a very average galaxy composed of around 4 billion other stars.

From this distant vantage point the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Childcare is doing a theme this month - space.
They've asked me to come along and talk about space. What do I tell a bunch of 4 year old's about space, hmmm;
- free energy of a vacuum? - too obvious,
- The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram? - doubly so,
- Recent observations backing up some of the more obscure predictions of Relativity? - not general enough.

Nah, they're all into robots, rockets and planets. So I'm taking along my Mars rover (shoe box with a picture stuck on either side) and a scale model of the solar system from plasticine and card. Yup - I just built the Solar system.

And now I need a rest.

Death of a Neighbour

She had been getting on a bit and had outlived all but one of her sisters who lived in the town house complex who had all succumbed to the cold of the last few weeks. She was noticeably slowing down and her usually beautiful home was looking disheveled. She spent most of her time in our garden and we would wave and take a moment to observe her on our busy bustling way past whilst she sat in the morning sun or shealtered from the rain within the ferns. We never named her but her now empty spot in the garden is a reminder that nature does not care. Her once beautiful golden web has been dismantled by the breakfast rituals of the wattle birds jumping through the grevillea. Her shriveled corps a shadow of her once plump presence. We saw her suiters come and go and once counted over 20 bees strung out in her trophy line. Around xmass there were 87 Nephila plumpies between the road and our door. Last week there were two and today, just the one.

Slug love

On the neighbours wall

Spotted in the garden

An eastern brown snake.

Appearance: any colour from brown to black to orange, with or without black stripes - want to test your luck identifying it?

Distribution: every damn place except Tasmania but including the Lance Cove River National Park, which is on the other side of my back fence.

Is it dangerous?

In Australia there are about 3,000 snake bites per year, of which 200 to 500 receive antivenom; on average one or two will prove fatal. About half the deaths are due to bites from the brown snake; the rest mostly from tiger snake, taipan and death adder. Some deaths are sudden, however in fact it is uncommon to die within four hours of a snake bite.

- Good to know that it is uncommon to die within 4 hours.

The snake wrangler came to catch it and was all "oh fark" when he saw that it was not a common python as he believed it to be. He spend his time futzing about and patting his back pocket to make sure his compression bandage was still there. He didn't manage to catch it but I'm not sure that I blame him. At least it wasn't one of these.

How do echidnas procreate?

A: very carefully.

Critters in the garden

Annalise and I went looking for critters in the garden and found this praying mantis stalking our fingers.

How faries keep dry

With an umbrella of course.

Dragon destroys flowerbed

Physignathus lesueurii or the Eastern Water Dragon digging in our garden.

Animeme

Wow, I've been memed,

Thanks Mark for taking me with my first meme. I'm thankful it's a small one. I do wonder how these things start, do they reproduce, recombine, mutate, and evolve? What are the selection pressures acting on a blog meme? Is extinction forever or are they periodically revivified? Will the far right Christian lobby try to prevent meme evolution being taught in favor of meme design? I'm sure somebody studying meme fitness will investigate it one day? This meme has a name - "Animeme". Is it common to name a meme or are they more like the Gary Larson Commic book I have that had an index that was empty for every letter except for the letter 'T' which has all the cartoones indexed under their respective titles "The one about ......."

The meme:

An interesting animal I had
As a boy living on the edge of a National Park in Sydney's north I enjoyed almost daily interaction with the snakes, spiders, goanas, owls and all the other critters that invaded my space much as I was invading theirs. I kept a tank of red crowned toadlets for a few years. When I learned that they were endangered I carried their spawn, which they always created in vast quantities in my fish tank, back out into the bush whenever it rained. I hope I have helped this little species on the brink to hold on for a while longer.


An interesting animal I ate
As a geologist doing exploration work in the remote outback I had the opportunity to do a bush survival course where we mostly learned how to fix a broken 4x4, do remote first aid, fix a broken radio, burn spinafex to get attention, build a shelter and collect some water we did get to try some of the spiders, ants, and delicious Witchetty grubs.
The most memorable bush tucker was a meal around the camp fire prepared by an aboriginal camp hand. Over a few beers and what I thought was an unusually flaky but somewhat tough smoked fish One of the drillers asked him, "Hay cookie - you didn't eat that goanna you were feading at lunch did ya?" "Nah mate", replied the cook, "you eat him now".
On a less exotic note, depending on your perspective, you can roll up to the Australian Hotel, right next to the approach to the Harbor Bridge in Sydney and have kangaroo, emu & crocadile on a pizza - now that's Aussie.


An interesting animal in the museum
That would have to be Ekaltadeta the flesh eating kangaroo but it's a close competition. Check out some of the competitors

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
I would not could not with a goat, I would not could not in a boat...
If using conodonts to date rocks around Parks doesn't cut it then I think that, when I was working as an environmental scientist and I used nematodes to characterize soil environments in and around one of Australia's most toxic polluted sites that that was pretty interesting. No?


An interesting animal in its natural habitat
Having one of these on you shoe right outside the front door is pretty interesting but I think that the female form of homo sapiens australes in it's native habitat at the beach is more so.

I'm tagging Rowena, andLeesha.

Didja see it

Paper under an electron microscope

check out the paper project.