The Richmond Birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera richmondia) is one of Australia’s biggest and most spectacular butterflies. Just 100 years ago, these butterflies were abundant throughout greater Brisbane. Today they are gone. Not entirely extinct, but no longer in Brisbane. The reason is more than just building a city. It’s a story of habitat loss, isolation and invasive species.
We can give them the chance to return and we’ll explain how here.
People often think of mangroves as smelly muddy places that ‘get in the way’ and block your view of the water.
It’s true they can be smelly, sticky places, but they’re also an important habitat for juvenile fish and crabs which we want to catch when they’re adults. So what is that smell and which fish get a benefit from those mangroves?
When something is really dry, Aussie’s might refer it as being “as dry as a dead dingo’s donger” after all, Australia is a pretty dry place. But if you’ve been around a bit and are clocking up the years, you could also be as “old as a dead dingo’s donger”! Some interesting facts about the dingo and a video of the New Guinea singing dog (no it’s not a cartoon character!)
When I was younger we learnt about proverbs at school. I always wondered about this one
“A bird in the hand is worth or two in the bush”. This proverb is probably rushing around the minds of male brown antechinus (Antechinus stuartii) during their September mating season. For these little carnivorous marsupials it’s now or never! It’s time for a lek!
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
