Bodacious Bull Ants (Formicidae: Myrmeciinae: Myrmecia)
In Australia colonies of Myrmecia (bull ants, bulldog ants, jumping jacks, jackjumpers) are a conspicuous and formidable component of the indigenous biota. Bull ants are dominantly Australian with 89 described species spread across the continent, mainly in the cooler southern regions, and a species in New Caledonia. In the past relatives of these ants were much more widespread, with fossils of at least six extinct genera recorded from the Americas and Europe.
Myrmecia can be tricky to photograph because of their size, excellent vision and aggressive defense of their usually small colonies. You know when you have been bitten by one of these beauties - these images resulted in two bites and I can still feel the result a week later!
Many Little Things with Stings!
The Handsome Thyregis ‘twinkle toes’ kershawi!
This is my pet Thyregis ‘twinkle toes’ kershawi (Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae), well behaved and living in Tupperware. Every week I feed it (I’m not sure if it’s a him or her) a few tiny mushrooms which are dragged down into burrow deep in the dark of the night. I first tried feeding it possum and wombat dung (because it is a 'dung beetle’) but found it really wasn’t interested. After a week or so I tried the fungi and we have never looked back.
A small percentage of dung beetles feed on materials other than dung and among these are species which feed exclusively, or dominantly, on mushrooms - mycetophagy or fungivory. Even the genus Onthophagus, the largest genus of dung beetles, with around 2000 species and almost cosmopolitan, contains species that are fungivores. Some of these species may be attracted to other materials but it is likely they provision their brood burrows with fungus.
Sunday Afternoon at Kallista: Happy Little Springtails.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours in the Dandenong Ranges National Park at Kallista. I didn’t move more than 10 metres in the whole 4 hours and was within a 20 metres of a major road. I was rewarded for my stasis with about 200 reasonable invert and other little things images. These are the springtails (Collembola). I could have stayed weeks and continued to get fresh things to take pictures of.
Perhaps my favorite (and I think that of many collembolaphiles) is the lovely, distinctive, springtail genus Acanthanura (middle). This genus belongs to the neanurid subfamily Uchidanurinae which has representatives in Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Micronesia and southeast Asia. Acanthanura itself is reasonably common in and under rotting wood in wet forest habitats in southeastern Australia and Tasmania.
Life in a Rotten Log: Saproxylic Invertebrates
Showy stuff tends to be large and conspicuous. But weaving their magic inside rotten logs and trees are a wide array of organisms that contribute to the break-down of forest debris. Foremost among them are the fungi - and the even less appreciated bacteria and relatives - but there are also a wide range of invertebrates that directly contribute to this process or live in the evolving decay habitat.
Often is has been considered that this group of organisms of the ’saproxylic’ habitat live only in dead or dying trees and their products like rotten logs, but many living trees contain similar habitat: they have hollows filled with dead wood or they are partly living and partly dead and many remain like this for decades or even centuries. Subsequently the mass of decay products in forest is proportional to the rate of death and decay of trees and the rate of removal of this dead material from the forest. Hence the significant conservation issues posed by firewood collection, especially in drier forests where the mass of dead wood at any one time can be relatively small.
Any single decaying log or tree in mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forest in southeastern Australia has hundreds of species likely living in it. Here are five representing various aspects of the ecology of the rotten log.
The very cute baby snail is Pillomena dandenongensis, probably a grazer of algae and fungi and the like. The unidentified millipede, on a background of lovely orange fungus, is a detrivore, consuming rotting plant products and potentially scavenging dead invertebrates. The beetle is Scopodes tasmanicus, a wet forest obligate that is commonly found inside dead logs when cold and actively diurnally hunting on the log surface when it is warmer. The genus Scopodes is diverse in Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea with species also in New Caledonia and Java. The spider is a hunter too, potentially internally but coming out from the log nocturnally. Finally we have a millipede and centipede relative, a symphalan, extremely abundant in all sorts of decaying plant matter habitats.
So Many Little Things are important in recycling!
Wattle Pigs: Whattle What?
The weevil genus Leptopius is common is Australia where its many large species are conspicuous on wattles (Acacia spp.) and a few other plant genera during the spring and summer - a few have even become pests of orchard trees like apples and of sugarcane. Leptopius belongs to the weevil subfamily Entiminae, a group characterised by, amongst other things, their short rostra (‘noses’) and specifically to the tribe Leptopiini which includes around 50 genera occurring in Australia. R.J. Tillyard in his classic ’The Insects of Australia and New Zealand’ (1926) rightly states that this group ’contains some of the finest of all Australian weevils’ - and it does if you like large showy species.
The term ‘wattle pig’ is used by many to refer to the large weevils of this genus. The Australian National Dictionary states that this name refers to a specific species, L. duponti, whereas Froggatt (1907: Australian Insects) restricts the name to a single species also, but a different one, L. tribulus, and noted that boys in Sydney used the colloquial name for these conspicuous weevils. CSIRO’s Handbook of Australian Insect Names (1993) doesn’t even list 'wattle pig’ in its extensive list of common names for Australian insects. The most recent and - I say - final say is that of John Lawrence and Adam Slipinski in their fantabulous recent book ’Australian Beetles Vol. 1: Morphology, Classification and Keys’ - they simply state that Leptopius are known as wattle pigs.
So there we have it. It reinforces one of the reasons why we have scientific names - to avoid confusion as often as possible!
Many Wittle Wattle Pig Things!
Beetle (Coleoptera) Portraits
Generally I tend to photograph beetles from the side, or from above, to show their distinctive shape; what entomologists call ‘habitus’. This refers to the build or overall morphology of the organism. It is sometimes nice to take their picture as you would a friend - of their face, from the front. It is interesting how it can be easy to interpret (I definitely think over interpret!) human characters or emotions in them. In this bunch I see cute, coy and even evil or untrustworthy. Can you guess which ones I attribute these to?
The Faces of Many Little Things!