If you’ve ever walked through a forest of ancient Southern Beech (Nothofagus spp.) you can be forgiven for believing that you have just stepped into another world. You often find these trees growing as rings of giant trunks, covered in hundreds of epiphytes and mosses. But don’t be fooled. The rings of trunks are just the one tree! It’s called coppicing; the tree sends out new shoots radially from the base of the original trunk, and these shoot eventually grow into clones of the parent tree forming a ring of tunks, all belonging to the one tree.
Posts from ‘February, 2010’
Nest boxes make new homes for sugar gliders
Australia is well known for it’s marsupials and many of them live in the trees. It can get windy, wet and cold living in a tree so a little hollow inside a tree makes a perfect den. Over 300 species of Australian vertebrates use tree hollows as a home for shelter, sleeping, nesting, and escaping predators! But where can they live in a new forest with few old trees?
Why frogs love puddles! The ephemeral breeders.
The summer afternoon storms of subtropical Queensland are an awe inspiring sight and sound of nature. If you’re lucky enough to have some trees and ponds around your house, the wet balmy night will be filled with the crawk – crawk – crawk of male Green Tree Frogs (Litoria caerulea) seducing prospective partners. But not all frogs are so lucky!
New Zealand’s rarest parakeet settles into its ecological island
Ecological islands can help bring species back from the brink of extinction. New Zealand’s Department of Conservation created pest free island refuges for some of New Zealand’s most endangered fauna, including Malherbe’s parakeet (Cyanoramphus malherbi) read on to find out how its going.
Small forage fish: food for fish, pets or people?
A significant quantity of all fish caught are used for ‘non-human-food’ purposes. What are these ‘non-human-food’ purposes?
Fish are used for two main purposes that do not relate to human food.
Watch a microdoc on the minke whale population
Dr Steve Palumbi of Stanford University in the USA is putting together a series of MICRODOCS. They’re pretty interesting so I thought I’d promote them here and encourage you to check them out.
Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important
The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International year of biodiversity. This year we will celebrate life on earth and the importance of biodiversity. It also presents an occasion for us to think more about biodiversity. What exactly is meant by biodiversity? Why it is so important? This article answers these questions and introduces the concept of biodiversity.
Glaucus atlanticus a beauty at eating those marine stingers
Along the beaches of Queensland and Northern New South Wales, northerly winds often bring with them blue bottles or Portugese man o’ war jelly fish. The blue bottle (Physalia physalis) is a small jellyfish (Siphonophora) with a powerful sting. Sometimes know as a marine stinger it can inflict a nasty sting when its tentacles wrap around the tender skin of your torso or thigh. But the blue bottles have other things on their cnardarian minds…there is a predator out there and a beautiful one at that
Bats breed better when the rivers run
Many things in nature are interconnected; I guess that’s why people use terms like the ‘web of life’ and other big words like ‘biocomplexity’. Dr Rick Adams (of the BatLab) recently published his work on the reproductive success of bats in relation to changes in the volume of water flowing down streams.
