Wild BNE

Last week, while exploring a patch of forest near Caboolture Airport, I disturbed an enormous flying insect that whirred past my head and landed a short distance away in the undergrowth. My first impression was that of a large, dark metallic blue wasp which was carrying something. Raising my binoculars to my eyes, however, revealed that I was looking at a huge, predatory fly—the giant blue robber fly (Blepharotes splendidissimus). What it was carrying was a poor, unfortunate scarab beetle, the spotted flower chafer (Neorrhina punctatum). It had been stabbed between its hardened wing cases by the fly’s mouthparts, receiving a dose of toxic, protein-destroying saliva in the process. With the beetle’s insides liquidized, the fly was slurping up the contents like some kind of entomological milkshake. The beetle is no shrinking violet itself and is only a little smaller than your average Christmas beetle in the same family. Hopefully that puts the size of the fly into perspective! Robber fl...

I visited South Brisbane Cemetery recently, hoping to photograph nocturnal creepy-crawlies for a Halloween-themed blog post. And boy, did I find something creepy. I found a zombie!  Now I know what you might be thinking: “That man has watched too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and on that point, you are actually correct, but I swear that I did find a zombie, only I didn’t know it at the time. To me, it was just a spider. A spider with a small, white grub on its back. The spider belongs to the cobweb spider family Theridiidae, whose best known member in Australia is the red-back spider. This particular spider was pea-sized and had a messy web in the foliage of a weeping fig. I never figured out which species it is because learning about the grub became my focus, but if anyone reading this can enlighten me, please let me know. As for the grub, it’s the larval form of a wasp in the Ichneumonidae family, which are perhaps nature’s most famous parasitoids. * Within this family are a sma...

I recently spent five nights at the delightful Shelly Beach Motel in Urangan, Hervey Bay. A large portion of each day was spent photographing insects and spiders, some of which I’ve shared on the Wild BNE Facebook page. It wasn’t all invertebrate study though, and I thought I’d share some of my other experiences here.  On my first day, I headed into Vernon Conservation Park, halfway between Hervey Bay and Maryborough. When I arrived, I saw that the tracks were heavily degraded by dirt bikes and illegal 4WD use, and being the school holidays, I knew it wouldn’t be long before such vehicles arrived that day too. I decided to follow some very faint wallaby trails deeper into the park, and I did so just in time, as the roaring dirt bikes showed up just ten minutes later. I appreciated the stringybark woodland that the trails led through, weaving my way through a shrub layer composed of hakeas, she-oaks and grevilleas. The bike noise became distant enough to no longer intrude on my sen...

In May earlier this year, I had the honour of being invited to participate in the Cooloola BioBlitz as a Team Leader. Over the course of a weekend, I led two groups of lovely people around various sites near Rainbow Beach, searching for and identifying as many life forms as we could find. These sightings were then uploaded to iNaturalist in order to paint a full picture of the biodiversity occurring on the Cooloola Coast. Here I will share some of the highlights from the weekend! MISTLETOES Both groups I took out into the bush found amazing mistletoes! The most stunning of them all was a long-flowered mistletoe (Dendrophthoe vitellina) parasitising a paperbark, which then had two other species of mistletoe on it—a layer cake of parasitism! With the help of LaTrobe Natural History lecturer Gregg Müller, those two species were identified as the leafless jointed mistletoe (Viscum articulatum) and the golden mistletoe (Notothixos subaureus). It was such a fascinating find that I returned ...

Having spent the three days prior in pandemic lockdown, I was keen to kick off my Easter weekend with a few hours spent in a forest. I also wanted to be able to sleep in a little on Good Friday, so I picked a place less than half an hour’s drive away to visit: Redlands Track Park in Alexandra Hills. Also known by the much better name of Scribbly Gums Conservation Area, this place is large and its trails are many! Though there were also many mountain-bikers, dog-walkers and other users of the park there during my visit, there were hour-long stretches where I didn’t see another soul, which is just how I like my forest time! It was that kind of day where the forest washes over me, lulling me into a mood so tranquil that I don’t so much as walk among the trees, but rather glide through them. I see so much when I feel this way. There is treasure everywhere. On this walk, it came in the form of a gorgeous pair of shaggy caps (Boletellus emodensis), emerging from the base of a dead goliath ne...

I had the best experience on Saturday night! Bayside Creeks Catchment Group held a nocturnal foray into Melaleuca Environmental Park at Lota to survey moths at a light sheet, and we saw so many interesting creatures! The survey was conducted as part of Brisbane's Big Butterfly Count , a community engagement and citizen science project being run through March to gather butterfly records across the city. Someone had the bright idea to not leave out the nocturnal cousins of butterflies, and to them I am very grateful! The evening was hosted by the friendly Keith Brown from Bayside Creeks Catchment Group, and the participants gathered around the light sheet set-up to hear expert commentary from John Moss and Wes Jenkinson, who both have many years of experience with lepidopterans. For those interested in the set-up, there was a metal frame tied upright with rope and pegs, over which a white sheet was draped. A bracket holding two bulbs was placed over the top, with one side illuminati...

If only waders had gaudy colours like a rainbow lorikeet, or baby-sized proportions like a koala. If only they had a cheery song like the butcherbird, or icon status like the kangaroo. But no. To most, they are distant brown specks on a humble mud flat, not worth a second glance nor thought. The reality is that they are the best travellers on the entire planet . The birds right here in these photos taken at Wynnum on the weekend are great knots, and in four months time, these exact same birds will be nesting on upland tundra in north-east Russia. If they're lucky, that is. Because in the meantime, offleash dogs and beach walkers disturb them everyday, wasting the energy these birds need for a very long flight. The journey itself is perilous too: land reclamation in China and Korea is destroying the refuelling stops for these marathon athletes, and we have similar development plans here in Queensland . The unfortunate truth is that waders have climbed up endangered species lists v...

On Sunday afternoon, I paid a visit to the Brisbane River at Murarrie for an hour. There, I poked about the rocks and stalked the shoreline to see if I could find some periwinkles to identify, and caught up with a species that has puzzled me ever since I found it at Lamb Island (below) a few weeks ago. It is small, with a pointed apex and distinctive, bold patterning on its shell, and at both localities was found on hard substrates near mangroves.  It reminded me of Littoraria luteola in general shape and colour scheme, but was the wrong size and patterning and utilised a different microhabitat, with luteola being arboreal on mangrove trunks and branches. Below is a luteola  that I found at Jacobs Well last year. Studying my books at home, I realised the answer had been staring me in the face the whole time as Littoraria articulata , the checkerboard periwinkle. The book to solve this for me was Graham Edgar's 'Tropical Marine Life of Australia' (2019) , which has quickly ...

Near the summit of Mount Coot-tha earlier this week, I found a beautiful orange beetle with black spots. My first impression was that it was a leaf beetle in the Chrysomelidae family, and looking up the Brisbane Insects website later confirmed not only this, but its membership to the Cryptocephalinae subfamily, with a tentative genus placement of Cadmus. I often find it more helpful to learn about insect families, subfamilies and tribes than it is to have a narrow focus on genus and species, and that was the case with this beetle. Reading the Hangay and Zborowski (2010) field guide to Australian beetle families, I was informed that when the female cryptocephalinid beetle lays eggs, she coats them in faeces which then become a shelter-providing case that each larvae lives inside of. This caught my attention because when I examined the photos I had taken of the beetle I had seen, I could see it was depositing large droppings onto the dead stump, and it turns out these may have actually c...