Sciences

MV palaeontologist Tom Rich, along with colleagues Roger Benson, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Mike Hall, today published a review of all the theropod dinosaurs known from early Cretaceous period deposits in southern Australia. In doing so, they present the first complete snapshot of local theropod diversity around 120-105 million years ago.

Theropods are a group of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs and had three-toed feet. Included among the theropods are the infamous T.rex, the small and agile Deinonychus, the feathered Archaeopteryx and modern birds. Tom and his colleagues have been pulling theropod fossils out of Victoria's coastline deposits since the 1970s and in this review, they considered 37 bones and over 90 individual teeth. They conclude that the local Cretaceous theropod fauna comprised nine major groups (or taxa), including allosauroids, tyrannosauroids, spinosauroids and the recently-discovered ceratosaur.

Some of the fossils reviewed in this examination of southern therapod diversity. These are large theropod manual phalanges, or bones from the 'hands' of these dinosaurs.
Source: Benson et al.  

A summary cladogram (evolutionary tree) of the therapod dinosaurs, showing the relationships between the major groups within the suborder Therapoda.
Source: Benson et al.  

Like the unique fauna of Australia living today, our prehistoric fauna was distinctive too, with some groups dominating the fossil record and others seemingly absent. In the past, palaeontologists have considered several explanations why the types of dinosaurs that lived in Australia were so different to the types found in other continents, even our nearby Gondwanan neighbours. Did certain groups evolve in other continents after Gondwana had split up, so those groups never dispersed to Australia? Or were there patterns of regional extinctions reflecting the differences in climate between the continents as they drifted apart?

As more fossils are uncovered and studied, the picture gets a little clearer. It now appears that many high-level dinosaur taxa, such as the tyrannosauroids and allosauroids, emereged earlier than previously estimated and were distributed all over the world during the Jurassic. This suggests they've been missing from Australian records simply because our dinosaur fauna is poorly known. The Australian fossil record is patchy – whether it's because the fossils have not been preserved or simply not discovered or properly interpreted yet – and often only one or two bones represent an entire group of animals.

However the isolation of Gondwana and Australia from the rest of the world, and the unique conditions here, did help shape a unique assemblage at the species level. During the early Cretaceous, Australia was still attached to Antarctica and was much closer to the South Pole than it is now. Earth's climate was much warmer, the poles were free of icecaps and Victoria and Antarctica were covered in lush, ferny temperate forests. Long periods of winter darkness and extended summer daylight influenced the evolution of endemic dinosaurs whereas in other parts of the world, their distant relatives were contending with quite different environments.

Approximate position of Australia 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous era.
Image: Ron Blakey. Altered by Cally Bennet and Fons VandenBerg
Source: Colorado Plateau Geosystems  

The possibility remains that some dinosaurs, such as the long-necked quadrupedal sauropods, which were present in Queensland but have not been found in Victoria, could not survive in cool, dark Cretaceous southern Australia and and so they did not enter this area.

Links:

Benson RBJ, Rich TH, Vickers-Rich P, Hall M (2012) Theropod Fauna from Southern Australia Indicates High Polar Diversity and Climate-Driven Dinosaur Provinciality. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37122.doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037122

Monash University: The killer dinosaurs of south-eastern Australia

600 Million Years: Victoria evolves

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: Victorian tyrannosauroid found

Your Question: What is eating my carpets?

Some of us with a wool or wool blend carpet have had the unpleasant experience of noticing our carpets slowly receding from the wall. Closer inspection of this phenomenon shows numbers of hairy carpet beetle larvae to be the cause of the loss.

Varied carpet beetle
Image: e_monk
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from e_monk  

There are a number of different species of introduced and native carpet beetles.  As adults carpet beetles are small and usually dark, often with patterned scales on the body. The adults feed on pollen and can often be found on the window ledge trying to get outside to feed. The larvae can often be hard to see so finding the adults on window ledges can be a good pointer as to the likely presence of the larvae. As the adults feed on pollen, they won’t cause damage to property but of course will be looking to lay more eggs to maintain the population.

Despite their common name, these tenacious insects will feed on a variety of things such as carcasses, feathers, felt, textiles of an organic nature and pet hair.

Carpet beetles Anthrenus verbasci on a flower head
Image: Ombrosoparacloucycle
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from Ombrosoparacloucycle  

These beetles can originate in bird or mammal nesting which may be in the roof or walls from where the larvae and adults find their way down into the house. Neither the larvae nor the adult beetles bite people but if left unchecked they do have the ability to cause damage to a variety of objects containing organic matter such as carpets, felt on pianos, clothing made from wool, insect collections and animal mounts. There is also the possibility for the shed larval skins to cause some irritation to people.

  Dermestidae: Anthrenus sp (larva).
Image: Jacobo Martin
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC 2.0 from JMDN  

While these small beetles do a great job in nature of helping to break down and consume organic matter it is wise to prevent them from dining out on your expensive woollens. Undertake regular vacuuming concentrating under furniture or areas that are not often disturbed. Keep an eye out for any build up of pet hair and lint which can also support populations of these beetles.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

CSIRO: Guide to the control of clothes moths and carpet beetles.

CSIRO: Carpet Beetles 

Mel helps manage MV's Marine Invertebrates collections. In her spare time she works with honorary associate Mark O’Loughlin and others to develop her specialist knowledge of holothuroids, or sea cucumbers.

Ice was what I saw from my porthole each morning as I’d wake yet again to the realisation... Woohoo! I’m in Antarctica!

What a wonderful realisation it was. For nearly two months this summer my home was the British ice-strengthened research vessel the RSS James Clark Ross, and I loved every minute of my freezing, rolling, ice-crunching scientific voyage. On board at the invitation of the British Antarctic Survey and with the support of Museum Victoria, I was part of the biological research team tasked with collecting marine benthinc invertebrates from the shelf and slopes of the Weddell Sea in Western Antarctica.

View from the top of the RSS James Clark Ross
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

My regular work in the museum's Marine Invertebrate Collections held me in good stead to assist the biological team with our daily work of collecting, sorting, identifying, preserving, and DNA-sampling specimens as we brought these bottom-dwelling 'beasties' up in nets and sleds from the ocean floor. Our aim was to assess the biodiversity and evolutionary history of the area, and my particular focus was on sea cucumbers (holothuroids) which I have studied for a number of years now under the mentorship of Museum Victoria honorary associate Mark O'Loughlin.

The biology team
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: British Antarctic Survey

Relatives of animals such as the sea star, many sea cucumbers actually look more like sausages with tentacles (which explains their name), and have developed a variety of different feeding and reproductive methods to adapt to environments worldwide. They are diverse in Antarctic waters with over 180 species (including many undescribed) recorded south of the Antarctic Convergence, and as such, they make a good group for evolutionary study. Often coming up squashed in trawls they can be tricky to identify, but the key lies in a variety of identifiers from tentacle shape and number, to tube-foot arrangement and the tiny little skeletal remnants known as 'ossicles' which can be viewed in dissolved tissue under a microscope.

Sea cucumbers and bivalves clinging to urchin spines.
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

With my previous experience of Antarctic sea cucumbers limited to pickled museum specimens, I was very excited to finally see these animals in living colour! They were amazingly diverse, from the tiny Psolids which clung to sea-urchin spines, to my favourite football-shaped 'sea-pigs' which the ship crew were delighted to see. We even got some footage (from cameras lashed to one of our collecting sleds) of different species feeding and moving about on the sea floor.

Along with sea cucumbers we saw many other amazing critters, from nets crawling with sea spiders to beautiful glass sponges filled with brittle stars and deep-sea fish with 'lights' attached to their heads... and that was just from below the water! On top we saw breaching Minke whales, majestic Emperors and curious (and chatty) chin-strap penguins against the always gorgeous background of floating icebergs. Stopping in the sub-Antarctic British Base at Signey to help close up for winter, we even had the chance to see (while firmly holding our noses) the huge elephant seals which roll their way around the camp.

Emperor penguin (left), Elephant seals at the UK’s Signy base
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

Skeletons of sea cucumbers, MV Blog post, April 2011

Your Question: What does the word megafauna mean?

The name megafauna means ‘big animals’, generally animals with a body mass of over 40 kilograms. Much of the time, megafauna is general term used to describe a particular group of large land animals that evolved millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct. The extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago left a void of large land animals worldwide. Over millions of years, the surviving mammals, birds and reptiles evolved to include some very large animals. This group of megafauna was at their largest and most widespread during the Quaternary Period, in the last 2.5 million years.

  The skull and upper body of Diprotodon, the largest marsupial to have lived
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria  

Australia’s Quaternary megafauna were unique, and included giant marsupials such as Diprotodon, huge flightless birds such as Genyornis (a distant relative to today’s ducks and geese) and giant reptiles such as Varanus ‘Megalania’ (related closely to living goannas and the Komodo Dragon), all three of which are displayed in Melbourne Museum’s Dinosaur Walk exhibition - despite the fact these animals are not dinosaurs at all.

The skeleton of Thylacoleo, the so-called marsupial 'lion'
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some more examples of Australian megafauna are also on display in the adjoining exhibition at Melbourne Museum called 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves, such as the curious-looking Zygomaturus and Palorchestes (both relatives of Diprotodon), the carnivorous Thylacoleo (sometimes called a marsupial ‘lion’), and some megafaunal relatives of kangaroos and wallabies such as Protemnodon.

  The skeleton of Zygomaturus, a Rhinoceros-like marsupial
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria  

It is worth noting that not all megafauna are extinct – Australia has living megafauna in the form of Red and Eastern Grey Kangaroos and Saltwater Crocodiles, some of which are on display in the Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world exhibition, which is also in the Melbourne Museum Science and Life Gallery.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Video, Studying Megafauna Fossils

Book, Prehistoric Giants: The Megafauna of Australia, published by Museum Victoria

It's Earth Day on 22 April 2012 and the Earth Day Network is seeking a billion pledges for 'acts of green' – individuals and organisations to commit to an act or activity, large or small, to contribute to conservation and environmental awareness.

One of the museum's customer service staff, Ella, is passionate about protecting the Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius johnsonii). She's inspired MV Blog's act of green: to highlight this amazing flightless bird and the efforts to conserve its Queensland rainforest habitat. The species is listed as endangered in Queensland, and vulnerable on the IUCN Redlist.

Museum Victoria's Southern Cassowary. It is exhibition in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Southern Cassowary in the Wild exhibition has been in the museum's collection for over 100 years. Our records note that it was collected on 26 March 1885 in Queensland by an unknown collector and that we acquired it in 1887 from the Acclimitization Society of Victoria. In the 1880s, cassowaries were far more common; an estimated 1000 individuals are all that are left in the wild today.

Australian Cassowary, reproduced from The Birds of Australia, supplements by John Gould, London 1851, vol. 1 (5parts)
Image: Artist John Gould / Lithographer H. C. Richter
Source: Museum Victoria  

The name cassowary stems from a Malay word meaning needle, after the bird's the needle-like wing feathers. With its brilliant-coloured neck and glossy black plumage, the Southern Cassowary is Australia's heaviest bird. Its large body is fuelled by the fruits of over 200 species of rainforest trees and it has an important ecological role in spreading seeds. It's estimated that 70-100 plant species will only germinate once their seeds have travelled through the gut of a cassowary.

As humans have cleared Queensland forests for timber, agriculture and housing developments, we have removed and fragmented the birds' habitat. Fewer trees mean less food for cassowaries. The birds roam between forest patches that are now criss-crossed by roads and many are killed by cars each year. Domestic dogs are another cause of cassowary population decline. In 2011, Cyclone Yasi hit the Far North Queensland coast and severely damaged the remaining habitat occupied by a cassowary population at Mission Beach.

Preserving and regenerating suitable habitat is critical for the survival of this species. Rainforest Rescue is an organisation that purchases land in the Daintree River valley to turn into permanent conservation reserves. They also reconnect remnant forest patches by revegetating cleared land between them, forming continuous tracts of habitat full of cassowary food plants. Since 2007, Rainforest Rescue has planted over 26,000 native plants in the Daintree. It is a very long-term project because these plantings take many years to mature. Their hope is that one day the fruits of those trees will fill the bellies of a stable and thriving cassowary population.

Links:

Rainforest Rescue

Cassowary in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world 

Your Question: Who or what has been eating my Easter Eggs?

This week, the Discovery Centre was sent some pictures of Easter eggs. It's a sad story: they'd been gnawed, and not by their rightful owner (who was very interested to find out who the culprit was).

Gnawed Easter chocolates
Image: Anonymous
Source: Anonymous  

Usually we need to see a specimen or a photograph of an animal in order to identify it, but the chocolate thief had left behind a clue – teeth marks.

Gnawed Easter chocolate
Image: Anonymous
Source: Anonymous  

We sent the photographs to Museum Victoria's Senior Curator of Mammals. He examined the marks and reported that they had been made by the incisors of a small rodent, most likely a House Mouse, Mus musculus. His identification came with another sad story – his own chocolate Bilby had suffered the same fate!

A House Mouse, Mus musculus
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Rodents have very distinctive teeth – a pair of incisors in the upper jaw and another pair in the lower jaw. The incisors grow continuously (like our fingernails), so rodents have to do a lot of gnawing to grind them down. In fact, the name "rodent" comes from the Latin words "gnaw" (rodere) and "tooth" (dentis). The gnawing process also acts to sharpen the incisors.

The skull of a House Mouse, Mus musculus
Image: Marnie Rawlinson, Cathy Accurso and Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria  

Wild House Mice are primarily granivorous (they eat grains and seeds), but they will eat almost anything. It seems that, like us, they love chocolate.

Happy Easter House Mice!

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Introduced Rodents

Collections Online: Easter

Tucked away from public view, kept in unlit, climate-controlled storage, the museum has millions of zoological specimens. Most of these are insects and other invertebrates but thousands are fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. On top of that, we have huge tissue collection: tiny pieces of animal tissue preserved in a sort of genetic library.

Learning this, you might ponder: why do we collect and keep so many specimens, and often, multiple specimens of the same species? As Victoria's official repository for examples of our state's fauna, wouldn't one of each species be enough? And why would we want specimens from outside Victoria?

These are very good questions and there are several reasons why.

Defining a species

Let's say you were out hiking and you found a hidden canyon that wasn't on your map. Within the canyon, you spot an unusual butterfly that's not in your field guide. In fact, it's not like anything you have ever seen before. How would you verify that it is species new to science? You would need to compare it with properly identified examples of other species. You'd probably find those examples in a museum.

There are strict rules for describing and naming new species; the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature oversees the process worldwide. To describe a new animal species you must lodge a holotype – the irreplaceable, single specimen that stands as the official representative of that species. It might take a few specimens, called a type series, to properly describe the species but there is only ever one holotype. Museum Victoria counts several thousand holotypes among our collections, including the Leadbeater's Possum, the Baw Baw Frog, and numerous invertebrates.

However one specimen can't possibly represent a whole species: what about the other sex? What if males and females are very different? Or the animal changes over its life cycle? Or the individuals from over here are slightly different to the individuals from over there? To get a full picture of all the variation within a species, we need many examples of that species.

Multiple examples of a few species of butterfly. Each individual specimen records the variation within a species.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Changes through time

Preserving five individuals of our hypothetical new butterfly that you caught during your hike is a good start. You might have examples of slightly different sizes or varying wing patterns. But what about next month or next year? How early do the butterflies emerge in spring, and when do they disappear in winter? Maybe next year the canyon receives lots of rain, the butterfly's food plant is plentiful, and the population is twice as large and each individual butterfly is fatter. You'll need some examples of this, too.

Collecting specimens over time records all sorts of useful information. It can indicate the incoming wave of an invasive species or the decline of a rare one. Physical changes in the animals themselves – their size, colour, pattern – can reflect changes in their environment but it requires a large number of data points over many years to detect patterns and work out why those changes might be occurring.

The museum's wet collection contains specimens in alcohol. These are marine crustaceans.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Future research

Natural history collectors of a century ago could not have imagined how we would use their specimens today. They didn't even know that DNA existed, let alone that it would one day help define and analyse species. Emerging technologies mean that we can return to old specimens again and again and keep learning new things. So-called 'next generation sequencing' means we can now look at the entire genome of an individual, every gene in their cells, where just a decade ago we could only look at a few marker genes. Genetic analysis can identify cryptic species – ones that can't otherwise be distinguished from closely-related species – and is useful for forensic questions such as determining the origin of smuggled wildlife. Museum collections are the source of tissue and reference specimens for these activities.

The museum's banks of freezers contain thousands of tissue samples.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Just like those collectors of old, we can only guess at the importance of today's collecting. Perhaps our hypothetical butterfly might experience a population explosion in the changing climate and become an important indicator of local conditions. That data set begins with those five specimens you collected on your weekend hike.

Links:

Lyman Entomological Museum: Why so many specimens?

The John Curtis British Insects Collection

The Field Museum: From Finches to Ostriches

Leo Joseph, 2011. Museum collections in ornithology: today's record of avianbiodiversity for tomorrow's world, Emu 111, i–xii  (PDF, 417 KB)

We are very excited to announce our participation in the Google Art Project.

At Museum Victoria we aim to give as many people as possible access to our rich and wonderful collections. The internet provides ways to do that far beyond the walls of our public exhibition venues. We provide access to over 72,000 items from our History and Technology Collections through our own Collections Online site. But we also contribute to other projects, which might attract new visitors to our collections; people who come with different interests – or even just different search terms.

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project.
Source: Google / Museum Victoria  

Originally launched in February 2011, the Art Project has now expanded its reach and scope to include 151 institutions across 40 different countries. Museum Victoria has contributed 185 high resolution images into the site, along with detailed descriptive information about each work and biographies of the artists where they are known. The items range from Aboriginal bark paintings, beautiful pencil illustrations, historic photographs depicting early Victorian history, to scientific illustrations and works on display at Melbourne Museum.

The project has been interesting and challenging for museum staff as we have had to think about objects in the collection through the lens of 'art'. Our collections are made for their scientific, cultural or personal significance, so it has been fascinating to look again at the items we hold and to tell their story through art.

To go along with the Art Project website, the Museum has also made thirteen videos about the stories of the objects we've included. These videos are all available in a special playlist at Museum Victoria's YouTube channel. One of the videos, about photographer and naturalist A J Campbell can be seen below, as a taster to explore the others.

We are very excited to join just a handful of other galleries and museums in Australia, including our friends at the NGV, but many others around the world, to showcase extraordinary and beautiful works of art. We hope you will enjoy exploring some our rich treasures in this quite new light.

Links:

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project

Google Art Project playlist on YouTube

Exhibition horticulturalist Brendan Fleming is turning April's Bug of the Month post into Plant of the Month. He is one of the Live Exhibits staff that tend the plants in the Forest Gallery and Milarri Garden.

From an early age I have enjoyed bushwalking within the Grampian Ranges in western Victoria. One particular plant species found there that fascinates me is Xanthorrhoea australis, the Southern Grasstree. X. australis is the most widespread of the genus of 30 odd species and subspecies. It is found down the eastern coast of Australia.

A spectacular display of Southern Grasstrees following a bushfire in the Grampians.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Brendan Fleming  

Its appearance is unlike any other indigenous plant. Older grasstrees have a blackened, sometimes gnarled elevated trunk, with bluish-green whorled leaves that seem to explode from the crown and drape down to skirt the stem.

The Southern Grasstree is very slow-growing. It grows approximately one to three centimetres per year, reaching a height of three metres in about 100 years. It has a shallow root system and is found in even the poorest of soils. Whilst not generally occurring in areas with less than 250mm rainfall, it does best in areas exceeding 500mm per year. Southern Grasstrees are found in the understorey of woodlands, heaths, swamps, and rocky hillsides.

Grasstree species are mostly distinguished by the shape of their leaves in cross-section. X.australis has a diamond shape, and with the leaves being softer than other species.

Close up of the apex of a Southern Grasstree in Milarri, showing a single diamond-shaped leaf in cross section.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Museum Victoria

From germination it takes about seven years to reach maturity, and although sporadic flowering and fruiting can occur thereafter, X.australis generally flower following fire. It is not well understood why fire stimulates reproduction, but cutting off the leaves can also initiate flowering. Application of ethylene, which is present in smoke, has a similar effect, indicating that flowering is stimulated from a hormonal response to leaf removal.

I found an extraordinary scene following bushfires several years ago in the Grampians National Park. Thousands of flower spikes up to 3m high as far as the eye can see, even curly ones, evoking some Leunig illustration!

Although most flower spikes are perfectly vertical, I occasionally see odd shapes at the Grampians.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Brendan Fleming

The flowers are highly scented and produce much nectar, prized by birds, mammals and insects which pollinate the flowers. Each stalk can produce up to 10,000 seeds.

Close-up of the Southern Grasstree flower spike showing individual flowers.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Brendan Fleming  

Southern Grasstrees are quite susceptible to Phytopthora cinnamomi (root rot), often being the first plants to show symptoms. Hence they are a good indicator of the presence of the disease.

Drenching with Phosphonate is a good way to boost the Southern Grasstree's defences against the Cinnamon Fungus Phytopthora.
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria

Xanthorrhoea australis is not difficult to propagate. Seed germinate readily in just a few weeks, with no pre-sowing treatment required. Just be patient though - growth is very slow. A grasstree I germinated from seed was well-established but still trunkless after 10 years, and made a handsome addition to my garden.

Grasstrees feature heavily in Indigenous culture. Uses include weapons and fire sticks from flower stalks, sweet drinks from flower nectar, and edible leaf bases.

I don't have to go to the Grampians to enjoy grasstrees. The Milarri Garden at Melbourne Museum displays these remarkable plants right in the heart of Melbourne. Exit the Forest gallery to the North terrace and meet Milarri from its western end. It really is a dramatic entrance to the Museum's Indigenous garden.

Grasstrees at the entrance to Milarri Walk from the North Terrace during autumn.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Museum Victoria  

References:

Flora of Tasmania

Wrigley, J. & Fagg, M., 1983, Australian Native Plants, William Collins, Sydney, 512pp.

In their previous video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts reported the results of their mammal surveys of Wilsons Prom. They joined other MV scientists and Parks Victoria staff for the the rapid biodiversity survey, Prom Bioscan, of October 2011.

In this video, Karen and Karen talk about their work with the Mammology Collection at Museum Victoria and why the museum collects mammal specimens.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

View all Prom Bioscan blog posts

MV Animal Ethics Procedures

Mammalogy Collection

On Thursday 1 March, hundreds of people gathered outside Melbourne Museum from 5pm, apparently as curious as we were to see what would happen at the adults-only SmartBar event.

Crowd waiting outside Melbourne Museum for SmartBar to open.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

The idea of adults-only museum events is not a new one, but it's new to Museum Victoria. All over the world, history and science museums like us witness the same pattern: young people in their twenties don't visit much. Many museums have started holding special events to cater for the interests of this group. The Australian Museum launched their Jurassic Lounge three summers ago and it's a hit in Sydney. Closer to home, NGV and ACMI have launched successful adult programs, but would such a thing work for us?

Mark Norman talking about strange sex in the deep blue sea. Here he shows the SmartBar crowd a female argonaut or paper nautilus.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

David Perkins works in the museum's Public Programs department and helped organise SmartBar. "The whole point was to find if people were interested in coming to this type of event," says David, "And they were, more so that we ever expected." Online tickets sold out days in advance and people waited patiently to grab the last remaining door tickets. Over 1,000 people attended SmartBar and we were delighted that 83% of the audience were between 18 and 34 years old.

Erich Fitzgerald addressing the age-old question: just how accurate was Jurassic Park?
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

"The presentations were the most popular thing," says David. The talks covered the bizarre sex lives of deep-water animals, spotlights on specimens and chats with preparators, curators and animal keepers. They all had a blast giving visitors direct access to the museum's research activity and to talk about their work. The Science and Life Galleries became a social space and all kinds of enthusiasts came out of the woodwork, many of them commenting that they liked being in the museum with no kids around.

Bird's eye view of the crowd watching Wayne's demonstration in the Science and Life Gallery.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The phenomenal success of SmartBar is encouraging and the museum is exploring how we can hold it regularly. Because we weren't sure what to expect, there were a lot of surprises – mostly good, but there were some aspects that we didn't get right. The queues at the door were too long and it was difficult to get the sound right in the Science and Life Gallery with so much going on. A survey, a comment board and feedback on Twitter, provides us with lots of information about what to improve next time, and what was spot-on. We'd like to thank everyone who gave us feedback as it will help us get things right in the future. At this stage we are planning to have four a year to follow the seasons – so watch out for our winter SmartBar.

Nearly a quarter of the attendees had never been to Melbourne Museum before. What was it about this event that attracted them? And what has stopped them in the past? David thinks the focus was just right for this crowd. "Adult education is a dirty phrase. If you asked a bunch of people to sit in a class after work, it would be a hard sell. But if it's easy and casual you can take it at your own pace. You have a nice night and you've learned something."

Links:

Comments from the pinboard on Pinterest

SmartBar photos on Melbourne Museum's Facebook page

Your Question: Why are bird eggs so variable in their colours and patterns?

The colour and colour pattern of bird eggs vary enormously from species to species (and often between individuals of the same species, and sometimes between the eggs of the same mother).

  A tray of eggs from Museum Victoria's H.L White egg collection, showing the diversity of patterns and colours for a single species, the Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria  

Eggs are made of calcium carbonate, which is white. White is therefore the default colour for bird eggs, but many birds lay coloured or colourfully-patterned eggs. Why?

The colouration of bird eggs can often be explained by the animal's biology and behaviour. The eggs of ground-nesting birds, for example, need to be well-camouflaged to avoid discovery by predators. They are usually coloured and patterned to match the substrate they are laid upon.

The highly-camouflaged eggs of the American Golden Plover Pluvialis dominica, which nests on the ground.
Image: MeegsC
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Tree-nesters, on the other hand, usually have blue or green eggs.

The American Robin, Turdus migratorius, which nests in trees, lays bright blue eggs.
Image: Laslovarga
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Birds whose eggs are hidden from view (in hollows, burrows or deep nests), or who sit on their eggs continuously throughout incubation, tend to have white eggs.

  The now extinct Paradise Parrot Psephotus pulcherrimus, which laid its eggs in termite mounds, had white, unpatterned eggs.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The patterns on eggs have developed over eons via natural selection – the better the camouflage, the more likely the eggs are to survive and pass on the genes for well-camouflaged eggs to the next generation. Ornithologists have classified egg patterns and given each "style" a name in order to distinguish them: splashed, blotched, spotted, dotted, marbled, streaked, scrawled, overlaid, capped, and wreathed.

Eggs from Museum Victoria's Ornithology Collection
Image: John Broomfield
Source: Museum Victoria

Colour also provides another form of protection: it is thought to act as a sunscreen, protecting the developing foetus from UV light. The addition of colour also strengthens the eggshell. Birds that are calcium-deficient lay thin-shelled eggs, which are more likely to break. Scientists have found that birds that have multiple clutches in a single season have more highly-coloured eggs in the second and subsequent clutches (when the mother's calcium supplies are reduced). Patterned colouration is also more common in areas with calcium-deficient soils.

The specific colours are incorporated into the shell in the final stage of egg development. Blue and green colour comes from a pigment called biliverdin (which is the same pigment that causes green bruises in humans). In egg colouration, biliverdin comes from bile; the red and brown colour on eggs comes from protoporphyrins, which comes from blood.

The Red-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus cafer lays red eggs.
Image: J. M. Garg
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Australia's native birds are protected. It is illegal to collect eggs or to interfere with birds' nests without a permit. Details of regulations and permits can be obtained from the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Links:

Museum Victoria's Ornithology Collection

H.L. White Collection of Australian Birds’ Eggs

The evolution of egg colour and patterning in birds

Australian Magpie Eggs

Hey check out www.portphillipmarinelife.net.au – the new Port Phillip Taxonomic Toolkit website we launched this week! It's a joint initiative between the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and us at the museum.

Left to right: Juvenile Scalyfin, jellyfish and biscuit stars in Port Phillip Bay.
Image: Julian Finn | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

There is a spectacular gallery of over 2,000 photographs that make it the site to surf if you don't want to get wet this dive season. And if you do get wet, then it's the one place to learn about the cool stuff you've seen underwater.

Have a click around and find your favourite pretty fin or an awesome octopus!

Left to right: albatross, isopod and moray eel from Port Phillip Bay.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria  

The site has 1,001 species from Port Phillip Bay with more to come in 2012. There are frowning faces of stargazers to picture-perfect blue devils, fish that walk instead of swim, cannibalistic sea cucumbers, and seahorses that eat lunch like sucking a hotdog out of a roll. They're all part of our truly amazing local marine life.

The Port Phillip Taxonomic Toolkit is primarily an identification and information resource for scientists and marine enthusiasts, but the images provide some fun and education for all audiences. There are also interactive menus to identify selected species as well as descriptions of characters that make the animals unique.

The project is funded by the Department of Sustainability and Environment's Seagrass and Reefs Program for Port Phillip Bay and will be completed later this year.

Live Exhibits staff visited Cairns and Cape Tribulation in North Queensland in December to augment our live animal collection with fresh genetic stock. We met many interesting animals along the way, so here are a few portraits of the critters that came back with us to Melbourne Museum.

The Giant Mantid is one of the largest mantid species in Australia. They feed on a range of insects but are large enough to overpower small frogs and lizards. Giant Mantids are currently on display in Bugs Alive!.

Giant Mantid, Heirodula majuscula.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

Raspy crickets derive their common name from the fact that all known species, both male and female, can produce a rasping sound at all stages of development. There are more than 200 species of raspy crickets in Australia and new species are regularly discovered. This very large adult female has powerful jaws and, like all raspy crickets, a bad temper. She ate her way out of several containers on the journey from North Queensland, causing havoc wherever she went.

Raspy Cricket, Chauliogryllacris species.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

A male Golden Huntsman, probably the largest huntsman in Australia and generally considered the second largest in the world. This species sometimes causes panic when it enters houses, but like most huntsmans it is relatively harmless.

Golden Huntsman, Beregama aurea.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Net-casting Spiders are famous for their ability to spin perfectly rectangular silken nets, about the size of a postage stamp. These nets are thrown over passing prey as the spider sits suspended above an insect pathway. In honour of their enormous eyes, they are also known as Ogre-Faced Spiders.

Net-casting Spider, Deinopis bicornis.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

French's Longicorn is one of Australia's larger beetle species. This one was found in a small mating aggregation on a strangler fig in the rainforest at night. Longicorns are characterised by kidney-shaped eyes which wrap around the base of the antennae.

French's Longicorn, Batocera frenchi.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

The spiny legs of the Serrated Bush Katydid give it both its common and scientific name. Adults are always green, but nymphs may be red, brown or violet, depending on the colour of the leaves on which they feed. Males produce a short, loud call which is commonly heard in the rainforest at night. Another katydid, the Kuranda Spotted Katydid, is one of the larger and more robust of this group in Australia. The nymphs closely resemble ants, which may afford them some protection against predators. The eggs are glued to dead twigs by the female using a short, thick ovipositor.

Left: Serrated Bush Katydid, Paracaedicia serrata. | Right: Kuranda Spotted Katydid, Ephippitytha kuranda.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

These creatures, and many more, can be seen every day in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum.

Bec is working on the history of Museum Victoria's Science Collections and all the people who have been part of them since the museum's origin in 1854.

Last night, twenty extraordinary women were inducted into the Victorian Women's Honour Roll at a ceremony in Parliament House. I was lucky enough to be invited to witness Curator Emeritus Hope Black join this group.

Hope Macpherson receiving her award at the Victorian Women's Honour Roll ceremony on 6 March 2012.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

Each year, the Honour Roll recognises and celebrates inspirational women across Victoria who, through their vision, leadership, commitment and hard work, have made an exceptional contribution to their communities or areas of expertise.

Minister for Women’s Affairs the Hon Mary Wooldridge opened the events with this quote: "If your dreams do not scare you they are not big enough." These women, without exception, had big dreams.

Hope says she wasn't sure what she wanted to do "but it had to be zoology". In 1937, then 18-year-old Hope Macpherson successfully applied for a job at the museum. Initially, her role was to make biology cases and dioramas. Driven to progress further, she studied science part-time at Melbourne University. Shortly after she graduated in 1946, was promoted to Curator of Shells and, simultaneously, the museum's first female curator.

Hope Macpherson identifying shells at the National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 1948 (MM 118931).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Her fieldwork as curator took her to remote parts of the Australian coast and she was part of the first group of female scientists permitted to research in the sub-Antarctic.

Hope also led ground-breaking surveys of Port Phillip Bay from 1957-1963. That data is still used today by environmental scientists, managers and planners, providing a benchmark against which to monitor change.

Hope Macpherson and Dan Lynch sorting material on the jetty at yjr Quarantine Station, Port Phillip Survey, Victoria, 1959 (MM 118931).
Source: Museum Victoria  

In addition to her scientific pursuits, Hope also pioneered specialist education programs by establishing a biology course for blind children held at the museum, using collection material.

Hope was required to resign from the Public Service when she married in 1965, as married women were excluded from employment in the service at that time. The forced change did not quell her drive. She retrained as a science teacher, passing on her passion for science to girls for 13 years.

Photograph that captures Hope Macpherson mid-air while running, Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, 1950. (MM 118929)
Image: Charles Brazenor
Source: Museum Victoria  

I have been privileged to work with Hope over the past couple of years, recording her history and acquiring personal working papers and images for the museum collection. After hearing her story and that of the other inductees I can only hope to be as fearless.

Links:

Victorian Women's Honour Roll

Hope Black nee Macpherson, Curator of Molluscs (1919 - )

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

By the tenth day of the annual Dinosaur Dreaming dig we had already catalogued more than 140 fossils. To know where to dig in the first place we need to understand the geology of the area because the types of rock and how they have been laid down can give us much information about the palaeoenvironment. Dr Alan Tait, Adjunct Research Fellow in the Department of Geosciences at Monash University is currently researching the sedimentology of the Flatrocks site and kindly explained its geology to me.

Today the site known as Flatrocks is a rocky beach dominated by light grey sandstone but 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous, the environment was very different. Australia was once part of a supercontinent called Gondwana which also comprised Antarctica, South America, Africa, New Zealand and India.

Much of Gondwana had broken up by the Cretaceous and a rift had started to form between Australia and Antarctic. The types of rocks and fossils we find along the coastline in Inverloch today tell us the story of the rift valley and the animals and plants that lived there.

The cliff face near the Flatrocks site. The grey mudstone is the remains of a flood plain which was on the floor of the rift valley. The layer where we find most of our fossils lies above this and at the top is massive sandstone. To the left of the mudstone you can see a fault where the rock layers have shifted dramatically from their original horizontal deposition.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria

The fossil layer itself consists of the sedimentary rocks, grey sandstone and conglomerate that were deposited during flooding of the rift valley. The conglomerate pebbles are made of clay eroded from the flood plain soils during flooding. The sandstone is grey because it contains grains of volcanic rock eroded from active volcanos some distance away and washed into the rift valley. The sediments also include the fossilised remains of dead animals, plants and trees. The time between the floods was long enough for large trees to grow, perhaps at least 100 years, and the floods were catastrophic.

“The main fossil bearing layer (under the red line) consists of grey sandstone with coal throughout it. The layer is bounded by a layer of mudstone below and massive sandstone above.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria

There are many fossilised tree stumps on the shore platform. Some of these trees lie horizontally with their fossilised roots still attached and are believed to have been knocked over by the force of the floods and washed down the river. We also find fossil leaves of ferns, gingkoes and monkey puzzle-like trees that once grew as part of a forest within the rift valley.

A fossil tree trunk. If you look closely you can even see the growth rings.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

The coal in the fossil layer is the remains of decomposing plants that once grew in the valley. Fossilised grains of pollen from these plants have also been found and by identifying their species, we can date the sediments surrounding them.

A nearby dyke (a long straight crack in the rocks through which magma from deep below the Earth's crust travels upwards and cools) is made up of basaltic rock, another igneous rock type. The dyke is 99.5 million years old and cuts through the grey sandstone, meaning it formed after the sedimentary rocks had been deposited. 

Dale Nelson stands upon the basaltic dyke near the Flatrocks site.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

We also find minerals at the site, like pyrite and calcite.

Minerals found at the fossil dig site, shown with objects often found in geologists' pockets, for scale. Left: Pyrite crystals | Right: Calcite crystals
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Infosheet: Dinosaur Dreaming - the Inverloch fossil site

Video: Dinosaur Dreaming

SmartBar logo
Source: Museum Victoria  

On March 1, Melbourne Museum will be presenting SmartBar – an evening event for adults featuring talks by museum scientists and interactive experiences.

As part of the event, the dissection of a road-killed bird will occur to demonstrate how Museum Victoria researchers study these sorts of animals that are brought in by concerned members of the public. This process increases our understanding of animal health, diet, welfare and conservation. The information we gain from this type of research is critical for our understanding of issues that impact Victorian fauna such as climate change and human activities.

SmartBar will provide Museum Victoria a chance to introduce people to the work of the museum, first hand. Beyond our exhibitions, we undertake important and ongoing research to learn more about our fauna, with a view to helping inform its conservation into the future. At SmartBar, we're giving people a chance to learn about some of that work and meet some of our staff in an informal setting. We're hoping this attracts an audience who would not normally attend Melbourne Museum so they too can become passionate, informed and respectful of Victoria and Australia's wildlife.

In earlier communications we described the event in a way which was misinterpreted by some readers. We apologise for any confusion or anxiety this may have caused and would like to thank everyone who has given us feedback on the SmartBar event.

Links:

SmartBar

Your Question: Is the Moon getting further away?

The short answer is yes, the Moon is getting further away - it is retreating from Earth by 3.8 cm per year.

Close-up of Planet Earth with Moon in background
Image: NASA, JPL
Source: NASA, JPL  
The history of the Moon gives us clues about its future. Over 4.5 billion years ago, a planet-sized body collided with a young Earth. Although most of the impact was absorbed into the still-molten Earth, the collision threw debris into space. A large section of this debris solidified in orbit around Earth and formed our Moon. The Moon has been slowly getting further from Earth since then.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon
Image: NASA
Source: NASA  
If we were to fast-forward from the impact event to about 1.2 billion years ago (over 3 billion years after the Moon formed), the Moon was still relatively close to Earth; much more so than it is today. As a result, the Moon’s gravitational effect on Earth was greater, and the tides were 20 per cent stronger than they are today. The Moon would have appeared much larger in the sky, although there was no life on earth equipped to see it.

Earth as seen from the Moon, Apollo 8 Mission
Image: NASA
Source: NASA  
If we fast-forward again, this time 600 million years into the future, the moon will have less influence on Earth - ocean tides will be significantly weaker. From Earth the Moon will appear tiny by today’s standards and events like eclipses will no longer be visible.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Moon rocks land at Melbourne Museum

Dynamic Earth: How the Moon formed

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

Last weekend hailed the beginning of the annual Dinosaur Dreaming dig season at Inverloch in Victoria. The crew will spend the next three weeks searching for the fossils of animals including dinosaurs, mammals, turtles, freshwater plesiosaurs, fish and pterosaurs that lived on and around the floodplain and in the forests that existed in the area 120 million years ago.

We can only access the dig site while the tide is out far enough to expose the shore platform, and before we can start hunting for fossils we need to prepare the site. First we remove the sand with shovels, which is often a bit of a smelly job due to the bits of rotting seaweed that have washed into the hole (the name we give to the part of the site which is being worked at any given time) with the tide.

Left: The crew removes sand, boulders and seaweed from on top of the rock layers. Right: John Wilkins and Dean Wright remove one of many large boulders from the dig site using a boulder extraction contraption John invented and built for us.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Next we use large chisels, crowbars and large drills to remove the overlying layer of sandstone. Once we have access to the fossil layer we can begin searching.

Some of the crew use large chisels and sledgehammers to remove large chunks of the fossil layer and the rest of the crew sit further up on the shore breaking these large rocks into walnut sized pieces in search of fossils.

Left: Travis Park uses a sledgehammer and chisel to remove a large chunk of fossil-bearing rock. Right: Gerry Kool uses a much smaller hammer and chisel to break down chunks of rock in search of fossils.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

While the main aim of the dig is to find fossils, there is much more we can learn about the site. Dean Wright, a surveyor, and Doris Seegats-Villiers, a PhD candidate at Monash University, used a Leica Total Station to collect data which will be used to map geological features such as the different rock layers and fault lines. Dean plans to overlay this data onto a 3D map of the site he made last year and this information will assist scientists to better understand the geology of the site.

Dean Wright and Doris Seegats-Villiers taking data points which Dean will use to create a geologic map of the Flatrocks site.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some of the interesting bones we have found so far this season:

Left: A cross-section through a dinosaur limb bone. Right: A cross-section through a dinosaur toe bone.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Infosheet: Dinosaur Dreaming - the Inverloch fossil site

Video: Dinosaur Dreaming

A long-time resident of Melbourne Museum's Mind and Body Gallery has retired from display to be replaced by an equally lovely, but more feminine, colleague. These two extraordinary 19th century anatomical models belong to the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney. Made from papier-mâché at the factory of Dr Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, they were important teaching aids for budding anatomists at the university.

Left: Male Auzoux anatomical model as he appeared in the Mind and Body Gallery. Right: Female Auzoux anatomical model before she was installed in the gallery in January.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Auzoux (1797–1880) was a French anatomist who, frustrated at the limited usefulness of genuine cadavers and wax models for learning about the human body, began producing papier-mâché models of humans, animals, organs and plants. Where a human cadaver could only be dissected once and wax models deteriorated from use, papier-mâché was durable, lightweight and could be used over and over again. His models were very popular and continued production after his death. The arrival of plastic in the 20th century superseded papier-mâché as a material, but for decades his models were unsurpassed.

They were formed in lead moulds under high pressure from a mix of papier-mâché, clay and cork. The surface was covered with veins made from linen-covered wire and then hand-painted, varnished and labelled. The handwork means that each model - and there are examples in museums worldwide – has a distinctive character and unique appearance.

Nurin Veis is the curator responsible for the Mind and Body Gallery exhibitions. "We've included a variety of multidisciplinary ways of looking at science and medicine," she explains. "This model is a great example where art meets science which is a rich area that many people are interested in. I think she's beautiful. All that work – each model is individually crafted, not like the plastic anatomical models that are churned out."

The new arrival peering out from the custom-made travel crate that carried her from Sydney to Melbourne.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Nurin Veis looking at the arm of the female anatomical model.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The first thing you'll notice is that she is unusually proportioned with a small head and very broad hips. This remains an inexplicable curiosity; female Auzoux models are extremely rare and there aren't many to compare her with.

Nurin is fascinated by the model's odd shape and stance. "It's what they have and haven't fleshed out – her head is so small but they've made such a big issue of her hips. I can't help thinking that the external form was possibly done from sketches. It doesn't look like it's been modelled from life. The discrete way that she's trying to hide her body and all the things that it says about gender roles is very interesting."

The female model's torso opens up to reveal her internal organs but unfortunately there was not room in the showcase to permit this for display. Before she was installed, we took photographs of her insides. She is in wonderful condition for her age but for one thing: she does not have a heart. No one knows if her heart was lost, stolen or strayed; the Macleay Museum has no record of her ever having one.

Conservator Helen Privett opening the female anatomical model's torso to reveal her heartless core.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

The Human Body exhibition

Macleay Museum at Sydney University

Lack of human cadavers? Turn to papier-mâché medicine (New Scientist blog)

The papier-mache anatomist (Curious Expeditions)

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday, now celebrated at institutions around the world as Darwin Day. Darwin's work is obviously relevant to a lot of the research that goes on at Museum Victoria today, but we also have a direct link with him through some specimens housed in the Palaeontology Department.

Charles Darwin in 1854
Source: Out of copyright, via Wikipedia.  

Darwin's best-known work is The Origin of Species, and if you had to name the animals he was particularly interested in, you'd probably think finches, or perhaps tortoises. But these are just the tip of the iceberg; before, and after publishing The Origin, Darwin also published prolifically across a breadth of natural history subjects, including geology, zoology, ornithology, entomology and botany. All of this work was vital, both in developing his theory of evolution by natural selection, and in gaining him a wide and interested audience.

One of the lynchpins of Darwin's theory was homology, the sharing of characters due to common descent (meaning that if two species share a feature we assume, until we can show otherwise, that they both inherited it from their common ancestor). Much of Darwin's thinking about homology was developed through his detailed study of the humble barnacle. He published the first full treatment of barnacles in the early 1850s with four monographs on modern and fossil barnacles.

Over 100 years later in the 1960s, the then Curator of Palaeontology at Museum Victoria, Thomas Darragh, noticed that some of the specimen labels in the palaeontology collection had handwritten notes saying "Original figured by Darwin".

Specimen label written by Kranz.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Going back to Darwin's original descriptions and illustrations, Dr. Darragh confirmed that these specimens matched Darwin's material. For instance, looking at this photo of Scalpellum simplex and the original illustration, it's clear that the illustration is of this specimen – they share the same broken tip even though the figure shows the specimen free of the rock. Similarly, the other specimens are close matches to those in Darwin's monographs.

  Left: Extract of plate from Darwin's original monograph. | Right:Fossil barnacle Scalpellum simplex Darwin 1854. Scale bar = 1cm. (NMV P133334).
Image: Charles Darwin | Thomas Watson
Source: Out of copyright | Museum Victoria  

A little more investigation showed that all of the specimens Dr. Darragh had found had been declared lost by Thomas Henry Withers in the 1930s when he compiled a catalogue of the barnacle material at the Natural History Museum in London (then the Natural History section of the British Museum). So the specimens that had been thought lost for over 30 years were now found, but how had they come to be in Melbourne instead of London?

In 1854 when his work on barnacles was complete, Darwin donated all the material that he had collected himself to the British Museum, where, 80 years later, Withers made his catalogue. However, Darwin also borrowed from other collectors. One of these was John Morris, a mollusc specialist possibly best known for The Catalogue of British Fossils and who went on to become professor of Geology at University College London. When he donated his own collection, Darwin returned Morris' material to him. Morris later sold his collection to the German fossil dealer, August Krantz who, for some reason, discarded all of the original labels and re-wrote them.

In 1863, Frederick McCoy, the first director of Museum Victoria (then known as the National Museum of History and Geology) bought a collection of fossils from Krantz for the museum.

This was just one of many purchases of fossils and minerals that McCoy made from Krantz, but this one happened to include at least part of Morris' collection, including the barnacles that Darwin had worked on. Since nobody was actively working on barnacles, it took 100 years for anyone to realise the importance of these specimens, but since we did the specimens have been housed safely in the museum's type collection accessible for researchers around the world.

Happy Darwin Day!

Links:

Darwin Online Project 

Darwin's barnacle studies (Darwin Online Project)

Invertebrate Palaeonology Collections

Infosheet: How do barnacles cement themselves to rocks?

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

This cabinet contains parts of the skeleton of a fossil whale collected at Bells Beach, on the Surf Coast southwest of Melbourne.

Vertebrate Palaeontology Collection storage cabinet full of fossils.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This story is only indirectly about that whale, but it does start with one of its bones:

Fossilised whale bone.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This is a metacarpal – a bone from one of the whale's flippers (forelimbs). Here, it's being held by Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Harold Mitchell Fellow at Museum Victoria, which gives you an idea of the size – it's about 7cm long. The equivalent bone in a human hand (the bone that runs between your middle finger and your wrist) is about the same length, though not as chunky.

At the top of the bone, you can see two grooves that make an inverted 'V'. While they might not look particularly impressive, to Erich's eye that chevron shape was an immediate clue to something that's quite rare to find in the fossil record: it's a classic example of the marks left on bone by shark teeth. We know what a modern shark bite looks like from observing modern sharks and their prey, and the marks on this bone look just like the sorts of marks a modern shark bite makes. In the next photo, Erich is re-enacting the way a shark's tooth would make this sort of mark, (though obviously when a shark bites there are many more teeth involved).

Erich demonstrates how a shark tooth probably struck the whale bone.
Source: Museum Victoria  

While it's not absolutely conclusive evidence – this sort of palaeo-behaviour trace fossil rarely is – this, and other marks on other bones from the same specimen, is enough for us to be fairly certain that this whale was bitten by a shark. We also know that this happened very close to the whale's death because the bone shows no sign of healing. This tells us that either the whale was killed by the shark that attacked it or that the shark was scavenging the whale carcass after it died – we can't be sure which but we know that the whale wasn't bitten and then got away.

Even with this uncertainty, though, this is more information than palaeontologists usually have about interactions between animals in the fossil record. Information modern ecologists take for granted, such as who's eating who, is extremely rare to find for fossils. Bite marks like these are one of the few ways palaeontologists have any idea of how food webs may have been constructed way back when. But what's really cool about this particular whale/shark palaeo-interaction, is that rather than just being satisfied with 'this whale was attacked by a shark' we can actually figure out who the culprit was. A lot of work has been done on the geological unit that this specimen was collected from so we know what was sharing the waters with our luckless whale. Of the list of sharks known from the same unit, only one has teeth big enough to have made these marks:

Fossil shark tooth.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This tooth comes from the shark Carcharocles angustidens, known from relatively abundant fossils around the stretch of coast our whale was collected from. C. angustidens is a close relative of the rather more famous Carcharocles megalodon which has the largest teeth of any known shark, living or extinct (some are over 18cm long!) You can see the sharp little serrations along the edge of the tooth which would have effectively sawed into the bone of its victim, leaving the grooves we see in the whale's bones today.

So we think that somewhere in the Late Oligocene, 24-27 million years ago, in a sea that covered what is now part of Victoria, a shark, Carcharocles angustidens, bit a Mammalodon whale and perhaps even killed it. It's amazing what we can infer from just a few scratches on bone.

Links:

MV Blog: Evolving the biggest mouth in history

Footage of tiger sharks scavenging a whale carcass in Queensland

Footage of sharks eating a blue whale alive

The Red-back Spider, Latrodectus hasselti, is a type of widow spider. It is closely related to the Black Widow (L. mactans), native to North America, and the Katipo (L. atricus), native to New Zealand.

This mature female Red-back has a dark-brown body and an orange-red dorsal stripe.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria

First described scientifically in 1870, it was thought that the Red-back may have been a recent arrival to Australia since it was first reported some time after European settlement, from the port town of Rockhampton in central Queensland. Widow spiders can survive for months without food, and this enables them to travel long distances in cargo. The Red-back, however, is considered to be an Australian native by most experts, because of some notably distinctive characteristics that it does not share with overseas widow spiders.

Adult female Red-backs have a body length that is three to four times that of adult males, with females typically being 10-15mm long. Only females possess bright red or red-orange markings. They are usually black (sometimes dark brown) when mature, whereas males are usually light brown with white markings.

Juvenile female Red-backs have different markings and colouration to the adults. This one is resting in the snare of her web.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Red-backs are found in all but the most inhospitable of Australian environments. They are usually found in their webs which they usually weave close to the ground in dry, sheltered areas, such as under rocks and logs, in junk piles, in sheds and outdoor toilets, and in empty tins and bottles. Electric lights and food scraps in people's houses and other buildings attract moths, flies, cockroaches and mosquitoes, which Red-backs feed on, and this may explain why these spiders prefer to live in and around places of human habitation over natural environments.

The Bugs Alive! Red-back display demonstrates a kind of habitat that Red-backs prefer. This one is littered with empty cans and containers and is kept relatively dry.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria  

The web of the female Red-back is an irregular mess of fine but strong silk. It usually contains a funnel-like upper retreat where the spider rests during the day, under which rests a mass of entangled, sticky strands that form a snare held to the ground or a wall by a number of trip-wires. These trip-wires contain globules of glue and are very elastic. When an insect or small vertebrate walks into one, the trip-wire snaps and catapults the victim into the snare above. Then the spider approaches its victim, wraps it in silk and bites it to envenomate and kill it. Male Red-backs do not spin webs and simply feed on prey items they salvage from the edge of the female's web.

The Red-back’s web enables it to catch prey much larger than itself. This immature female is feeding on a cockroach that is more than twice its own body length and also much broader.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

The venom of the Red-back is neurotoxic to humans, triggering an uncontrolled release of neurotransmitters – the chemicals that transmit signals between nerve endings. This can cause paralysis in the bite victim when the venom’s action severely depletes the neurotransmitter reserves required for normal muscle function. Most human victims of Red-back bites suffer little more than localised pain and swelling. In severe cases, however, bites can lead to chest and abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, fever, muscle spasms, convulsions, coma and death (more likely in the young, elderly and frail). Before the development of an antivenom in 1956, at least 12 deaths had been recorded. The antivenom is assumed to have saved many lives as there have been no deaths since it became available - despite an increase in the number of bites reported. This increase is thought to be a consequence of expansion of habitats suitable for Red-backs in the urbanisation of Australia’s cities, and associated increases in human urban populations.

Links:

Red-back Spider infosheet

"How fast can a mammal evolve from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant?" This question introduces a new paper published today by a group of international researchers led by Alistair Evans of Monash University, including Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at MV.

The world's largest mammal by weight, the Blue Whale, is about 61 million times heavier than the world's smallest, the Etruscan Shrew. Erich and his colleagues are interested in how such a range of body sizes evolved within the mammals, particularly the rate at which such evolution occurs.

Previous investigators have calculated rates of evolution using narrowly-defined parameters, whether within a shorter time scale or within a limited taxonomic group. This study is the first to tackle the larger picture, using data from a variety of species that lived over the last 70 million years.

The researchers found that it takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for terrestrial mammals to increase their mass 100-fold. To increase by 5,000-fold, it takes at least 10 million generations.

In contrast, the researchers found that land mammals can decrease in size more than ten times faster than the time it takes to increase to the same degree. Hypothetically, it could take 5 million generations for a species to evolve from rabbit size to elephant size, whereas in just half a million generations it could shrink back down again if selective pressures directed it thus. Smaller body mass gives a competitive advantage under certain conditions; this phenomenon, known as insular dwarfism, is seen in the now-extinct dwarf elephants that were stranded on Mediterranean islands by rising sea levels.

Left: Children riding on Queenie, an Indian Elephant, at Melbourne Zoo in 1917 (MM 004061). Right: Rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus.
Image: Unknown | Alex J.
Source: Museum Victoria | Used under CC BY 2.0 from a_jo.  

Interestingly, aquatic mammals such as whales evolved large body mass much faster than land mammals, taking about half as many generations to achieve the same scale of increase.

Says Erich, "Whales can get bigger because the water supports their bodies and so their maximum size is not limited by gravity." He explains that a huge body can also be an advantage for aquatic mammals because it loses less heat.

"There doesn't seem to be any slowing-down in evolution of maximum body size in whales. Land mammals may have reached a plateau enforced by gravity, but it's conceivable that the Blue Whale is not the largest possible whale. Nevertheless, energetic demands of feeding a body larger than that of a blue whale may mean that, in reality, the blue whale is as large as animals get."

Large land-dwelling mammals have a variety of solutions to the problem of gravity, explains Erich. "Some of the changes we see are extreme thickening of bones, changes in locomotion and major changes to organ systems." A gigantic rabbit wouldn't just be a large version of today's feral bunny; in fact, it would probably be unrecognisable as a rabbit. Fossils of an extinct giant rabbit described in 2011 show that it had a stiff spine to support its bulk, which meant it would not have been able to hop. Accordingly, we might need to rethink the way we portray the Easter Bunny.

Links:

Evans, A.R. et al. The maximum rate of mammal evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print on January 30, 2012.

Speed limits on the evolution of enormousness (Wired Science)

Science reveals the secrets of super-sized mammals (The Age)

Dr Erich Fitzgerald

Golden moles are burrowing mammals native to southern Africa that are completely blind. Yet, their fur produces "a rainbow of colours when viewed from various angles, much like the surface of a compact disc," according to Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals. This raises the question: why would an animal that lives in the dark, and can't see anyway, be brightly coloured? Kevin and his colleagues, including MV Research Associate Dr Karen Rowe, have published a new study in Biology Letters that considers the implications of how and why iridescence evolved.

Golden mole specimen from the Museum Victoria collection.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Many insects, reptiles and birds use iridescence to attract mates, but this depends on keen eyesight on the part of the viewer. Analysis under scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy showed that the golden mole's colourful sheen is produced by the same mechanism as other animals: microscopic surface structures that refract light. The minute layers of scales on the surface of each hair are "most likely to reduce drag and damage while the moles swim through sand and soil," explains Karen. "The colours they produce are merely a by-product."

Hairs from these four golden mole specimens were analysed with scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy in this study.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The only other known example of mammal iridescence is the 'eye shine' seen when torchlight reflects from the retina of nocturnal animals, a useful trick for spotting animals in trees. With more investigation, the researchers may find other species with true iridescence and thus piece together the story of its evolution.

Links:

Holly K. Snyder, Rafael Maia, Liliana D'Alba, Allison J. Shultz, Karen M. C. Rowe, Kevin C. Rowe and Matthew D. Shawkey (2012) 'Iridescent colour production in hairs of blind golden moles (Chrysochloridae)' Biology Letters

World's first iridescent mammal discovered

Media release

Collection Manager David Staples has recently returned from a six-week voyage with a team of British scientists studying the marine life on seamounts and hydrothermal vents in the southern Indian Ocean.

Hydrothermal vents are associated with active spreading centres of tectonic plate boundaries and are often referred to as black (or white) smokers because of the mineral-rich, super-heated fluids they spew into the water column.

A diverse and unique fauna lives in association with the vents and a short clip of what was seen on one of these vents at about 3km depth can be viewed here. Yeti crabs, sea spiders, scaly-foot gastropods, mussels, worms and shrimp can be seen moving quickly at the periphery of these high temperature plumes.

Video used with the kind permission of Dr Jon Copley, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Links:

Mountain life beneath the sea

Black smoker in Dynamic Earth

Happy Chinese New Year! In 2012 it's the Year of the Dragon. I've been stalking Wally the Gippsland Water Dragon in the Forest Gallery for days but couldn't get decent photo. I figured he should be the notional poster boy for this year's Chinese horoscope. Alas I am hopeless paparazzo because every time a customer service officer called me to say he was out and about and ready for his close-up, he would flee at the sight of me.

So I wandered down to the Live Exhibits lab to try get some tips on reptile whispering or to see if Wally had a stunt double, dead or alive. The staff responded by saying things like "oh, here I have a picture of Wally on my phone," and another said "here is a snap of another type of water dragon I took while bushwalking." You gotta love our museum staff.

1. Wally the Water Dragon only poses for visitors and Live Exhibits staff.

Wally's scientific name, Phisygnathus lesueurii howittii, has a connection to Museum Victoria. Our founding director Frederick McCoy named this species after "that excellent geologist, magistrate, and bushman, my accomplished friend Mr. A. Howitt... willing to aid in any scientific investigation of the natural products of Gippsland, and who with infinite difficulty succeeded in procuring three specimens for me of this River-Lizard."

McCoy also reported that that these lizards must have given rise to the rumours of crocodiles in Gippsland.

Wally the Gippsland Water Dragon.
Image: Caitlyn Henderson
Source: Caitlyn Henderson  

Wally's stunt double cousin, Eastern Water Dragon Physignathus lesueurii lesueurii.
Image: David Holmes
Source: David Holmes  

2. Chinese dragons have four claws and Japanese dragons have three.

Next time you find yourself in a dragon-slaying situation, take a moment to count the claws on the foot of the dragon. That way you will know the its origin; if it has four claws it is Chinese but if it has three claws it is characteristically Japanese.

Japanese dragon carving in wood with articulated body, limbs and tongue. (ST 018385)
Source: Museum Victoria  

3. Some dragons have fire in their bellies that sounds the passage of time.

Some dragons may breathe fire, but this Chinese dragon has fire in its belly; it's a reproduction of a Chinese fire clock. The dragon is boat-shaped with wires that support a burning incense stick or taper. This gradually ignites cords that then drop metal balls into a brass dish below.

Chinese fire clock replica, made by J. Bishop, Melbourne, 1959. (ST 024869)
Source: Museum Victoria  

4. Dragon's blood was once used to stain violins and treat diarrhoea.

Dragon's blood is a red resin prepared from the fruits of a climbing palm (Daemonorops draco). It is used for colouring mahogany, varnishes, for staining marble and in the preparation of lacquers and dentifrices. It was also used medicinally for the treatment of diarrhoea and severe syphilis!

Glass jar containing Dragon's Blood used in the pharmacy of a mental health hospital, Victoria, Australia, circa 1900 (SH 850502).
Source: Museum Victoria  

5. Dragons are from mythical lands and Victorian coastlines.

The Victorian marine emblem is the Weedy Sea Dragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus). These wonderful fish are residents of Westernport and Hobsons Bays as well as Geelong and Portland.

Like most fish, sea dragons swim horizontally rather than in a vertical position, like seahorses. However, like seahorses, male seal dragons do the egg-carrying duty.

  Seagrass habitat with two sea dragons.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

So in the tradition of Chinese New Year, forget all grudges, wish peace and happiness to all, and sweep away ill fortune to make way for incoming good luck.

Links:

Gippsland Water Dragon

Frederick McCoy's debunking of the Gippsland crocodile myth

Question of the Week: Dragon's den

Your Question: Why do scientists study animal poo?

Poo is truly fascinating stuff. Each deposit contains a minefield of information about its owner and the environment it lives in.

Animal poos (scats) come in a multitude of different shapes and sizes. Each species produces its own unique parcels. You can therefore discover which species are present in an area (and how abundant they are) by looking at what they leave behind.

The square droppings of a Common Wombat, Vombatus ursinus
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife  

The relative size of a deposit can also give you an idea of the age/size of he/she who dunnit. Sometimes, it's even possible to determine the sex and reproductive receptivity of the animal (by the smell).

The condition of the scat (taking recent weather conditions into account) will tell you how recently the animal was there – if it's still fragrant and sticky, you know you're fresh on the trail.

An animal's poo can also reveal the diet of the depositor. Long-term studies of scats can provide information about how animals' diets change over time and the seasonal abundance of their food sources.

A broken-up scat of a Thorny Devil Moloch horridus, revealing that it has fed exclusively on ants.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife  

The scats of carnivorous (meat-eating) animals can be an invaluable source of information about the presence and abundance of their prey species. Fur, teeth and bones are not usually digested as they pass through the digestive system and come out relatively intact. As foxes and owls are far better at finding small animals than we are, scats can contain crucial records for scientists studying endangered species.

The scat of a European Red Fox Vulpes vulpes
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Poo is also a useful indicator of animal health. Scats contain parasites, hormones and DNA (in the animal's own skin and hair cells). Scientists can therefore use the clues in poos to monitor infections, perform genetic analyses and gather information on stress levels and reproductive state, all without touching or even seeing the animal.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Square Poo

Dinosaur Poo 

Karen Rowe is a Research Associate at MV where she studies evolutionary ecology and behaviour in birds and mammals.

January 20th is an auspicious day for birding enthusiasts, marking Penguin Awareness Day. With 17 species currently recognised, members of the family Spheniscidae (pronounced sfen-IS-kuh-dee) are found only within the southern hemisphere. While most of us think of penguins as cold-adapted animals, surviving long treks over ice to breed and raise their young in the middle of winter, many species live further north, among the islands off of Antarctica, along the coasts of New Zealand and Australia, and one species is found on the Galapagos Islands (the aptly named Galapagos Penguin).

Royal Penguins (Eudyptes schlegeli) – among Elephant Seals on Macquarie Island.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

As a group, penguins possess an amazing array of adaptations, uniquely suited to their predominately marine existence. Unlike other birds, penguins have solid, rather than air-filled bones, to help them dive in the water. They have highly modified feathers that form a thick insulating layer that cover the body, rather than growing in the well-defined feather tract found in other birds. They also have unique eyes that allow them to see clearly both on land and in the sea. And while their short legs and feet make them seem awkward on land, many species actually travel tremendous distances over land and rocks to reach their breeding sites – some even traveling as far as three kilometres from water.

Captive Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) floating in the water. The coloured flipper band allows zoo keepers to distinguish between individuals.
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

Extant species show a wide range of body sizes, from our own Little (or Fairy) Penguins, weighing 1.1 kg and standing 40 cm tall, to the largest species, the Emperor Penguin, at a whopping 30 kg and up to 115 cm tall.

Little Penguins (Eudyptyla minor) in captivity. These coloured leg bands are another way to tell individuals apart.
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

But even the Emperor Penguin is dwarfed in size by some of the extinct fossil penguins, including a 15-million-year-old giant penguin (Anthropodyptes gilli) from Victoria that may have approached twice its size. Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Dr. Erich Fitzgerald studies fossil penguins here at Museum Victoria. "Victoria was home to a remarkable diversity of penguins over the last 20 million years," says Dr. Fitzgerald. "The tiny Little Penguin living in Australia today is an oddity on a geologic timescale. The fossil record tells us that most penguins that have lived in Australia were large to huge in size and that at any one time there were perhaps two or more species coexisting here." Currently, Dr. Fitzgerald and his student, Travis Park, are working on six-million-year-old fossil penguins found in Melbourne on the shores of Port Philip Bay that are thought to be the size of the living Gentoo and Emperor Penguins.

The upper wing bone (humerus) of living penguins compared with their fossil counterparts from Victoria. From left to right: the 18-million-year-old fossil Anthropodyptes gilli; the living emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri; the living fairy penguin Eudyptula minor; the living gentoo penguin Pygoscelis papua; and the 6-million-year-old fossil Pseudaptenodytes. Credit: Photograph by Erich Fitzgerald
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

Emperor Penguin and chick, Antarctica.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

The unique ecology of penguins makes them particularly susceptible to a variety of human-induced threats. In particular, commercial fishing, often leading to death through by-catch or competition for prey items (which include fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods), directly impacts their survival. Penguins are also dependent on breeding grounds close to the shore and habitat loss is a major source of population declines. Smaller and fewer breeding grounds also promotes disease, as most species of penguins breed in large colonies.

Royal Penguin colony. This species is endemic to Macquarie Island and this is the largest Royal Penguin colony with over 180,000 breeding pairs. The fluffy young penguin in the front on the right is in moult.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

Although little research has been done looking at the impact of climate change on penguins, their specialised lifestyle suggests that climate change could have dramatic impacts on their distribution and abundance. "Penguins are an ancient group of birds, with a history stretching back some 65 million years to the extinction of the dinosaurs," says Dr. Fitzgerald. "In southern Australia they have persisted through the last 20 million years of major climatic changes, but it is unknown how they will respond to the current human-exacerbated wave of environmental upheaval. It would be a terrible shame to see this ancient and superbly successful group of birds become threatened with extinction within our lifetime."

Adelie Penguin, Bechervaise Island, Antarctica.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

Links:

Emperor Penguins in the Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world

Penguins on Atlas of Living Australia

Happy Feet Two at IMAX Melbourne

Dr Joanne Taylor has had a busy few months; just before Christmas the book that she co-edited was published, and now she has been selected as a 2012 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Rubenstein Fellow!

This prestigious fellowship is awarded by the Smithsonian Institution to support scientists to upload information about the species they study into the EOL. As a Rubenstein Fellow, Jo will be adding over 400 species of squat lobsters to this amazing resource about the world's biodiversity.

In 2009, Jo started a postdoctorate project to produce the first comprehensive book about this group of colourful crustaceans. The resulting book, The Biology of Squat Lobsters, was published by CSIRO last year.

Dr Jo Taylor in late 2011 with her hot-off-the-press preview copy of her book, The Biology of Squat Lobsters.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Congratulations Jo!

Links:

MV News: New squat lobster species

MV News: Butterflies of the sea

Encyclopedia of Life

The Biology of Squat Lobsters, edited by Gary C B Poore, Shane T Ahyong and Joanne Taylor. CSIRO Publishing, 2011.

In October 2011, 50 scientists and volunteers performed a rapid biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory in partnership with Parks Victoria. In this video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts talk about the mammals of Wilsons Prom, particularly the small mammals: native rats and antechinus.

 

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Prom Bioscan

Paradise Valley

Historian at the Prom

Hunting for herpetiles

Crayfish climbing trees

Your Question: What are these swarming beetles in my garden?

The Discovery Centre has received many enquiries over the last few weeks about swarms of beetles in suburban gardens in and around Melbourne; they are Plague Soldier Beetles, Chauliognathus lugubris.

Plague Soldier Beetles
Image: Peter Saunders
Source: Peter Saunders  

This flattened, elongated, soft-bodied beetle has a thin yellow-orange stripe across the back of the pronotum. It has metallic olive green elytra (hardened forewings), covering most of a yellow-orange abdomen. The legs, head, antennae and rest of the pronotum are black and the beetle is usually about 15mm in length. This native species has earned its common name of the Plague Soldier Beetle not as a result of bringing or spreading any dangerous plagues, rather due to its habit of forming huge mating swarms.

Plague Soldier Beetles
Image: Peter Saunders
Source: Peter Saunders  

The larvae of this species live in the soil and feed on soft bodied invertebrates, while the adults feed on pollen and nectar. The species is found across large parts of the country including urban areas and adults can be seen from spring through to autumn. During their mating periods they can appear in such large numbers that it is not uncommon for them to weigh down the limbs of weaker plants.

Their bright colour warns off predators as they are capable of releasing distasteful chemicals and would not make a good meal. For homeowners who may be hosting huge numbers of this colourful species, don't be too concerned, following the mating swarm the beetles tend to disperse.

Got a question? Ask us!

Kevin is the Senior Curator of Mammals at Museum Victoria. He reports on his recent expedition to the mountains of Sulawesi, Indonesia in this series of blog posts.

Last Sunday was the birthday of Alfred Russel Wallace who, along with Darwin, co-founded the theory of natural selection. As Ursula reported, Wallace's expedition through the Malay Archipelago (modern-day Indonesia) also prompted him to develop the field of biogeography and to define the zoogeographical regions of our planet; that is, where groups of animals are found and why.

Wikimedia Commons. " title="Click here to view larger image."> Wallace's world map showing the zoogeographical regions in different colours.
Image: A.R. Wallace
Source: Copyright expired. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

Biogeography proposes that the species native to a particular region are determined by geographic processes such as vicariance (isolation) and dispersal (colonisation). Natural selection then drives species to evolve traits suited to survival and reproduction in their environments available in their geographic context. Biogeography and natural selection combined often result in species from different regions converging on similar morphological solutions to similar selective pressures.

Consider the mammals of Australia, which are the product of millions of years of natural selection acting on a set of species determined by biogeography. Australia, along with New Guinea, comprises the continental shelf of Sahul that today, as well as in Wallace's time, is separated by the Indonesian archipelago from the Asian continental shelf, Sunda. During low sea levels of the Pleistocene (the last 2 million years), Australia, New Guinea, and adjacent islands were one continuous landmass as were Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, and Borneo on the Asian side. Between them was Sulawesi, the Moluccan islands and the Lesser Sunda islands (Nusa Tenggara) all separated by deep ocean channels. This region at the interchange between Asia and Australia is referred to as Wallacea.

Map of Sunda and Sahul and the Wallace Line, the Lydekker Line and the Weber Line.
Image: Maximilian Dörrbecker
Source: Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons.  

85 million years ago Australia was connected to Antarctica and via Antarctica to South America. When a meteorite crashed into the Yucatan peninsula of North America 65 million years ago annihilating the dinosaurs (except a few feathered and crocodilian ones), Australia was already starting to drift away from Antarctica. For 40 million years Australia drifted in isolation and only about 10 million years ago began to collide with Asia. The mammals that made this journey survive today as the marsupials and monotremes that are unique to Australia and New Guinea. The marsupials have evolved to fill many ecological roles with adaptations similar to placental mammals on other continents, a process driven by natural selection leading to convergent evolution.

An example of convergent evolution. The Thylacine (left) and the Red Wolf (right) occupy similar roles in the ecosystem and have similar dog-like characteristics, even though they belong to entirely different groups of animals.
Image: Left: Heath Warwick | Right: ucumari
Source: Left: Museum Victoria | Right: Used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 from ucumari.  

The native terrestrial mammals of Australia, however, are not just the result of isolation but are also descended from a select group of intrepid colonisers from Asia. These are the native bats and rats that account for nearly half of the mammal species of Australia. The rats are remarkable because they are the only non-flying, terrestrial mammals to colonize Australia before humans and they did it twice; once 5 million years ago (Rowe et al, 2008) and again 1 million years ago (Rowe et al, 2011). Both colonisers clearly came from Asian sources but the details of how they crossed multiple ocean channels and archipelagos are still unclear. In part this is hindered by our limited understanding of rat diversity from Wallacea, a condition that I and my colleagues endeavor to correct with our recent expeditions to Sulawesi.

Links:

More on convergent evolution of marsupial and placental mammmals

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

Today is the birthday of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was born on 8 January, 1823. While he isn't terribly well known today, at the end of the 19th century he was one of England's best-known naturalists – which is saying something considering that he was a contemporary of people such as Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker. In fact, Wallace’s famous letter to Darwin prompted the latter to write On the Origin of Species after a joint presentation of their work to the Linnean Society. This post, however, is about another of Wallace’s important contributions to biology.

Photograph of Alfred Russel Wallace, taken in Singapore, 1862.
Source: In the public domain, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

After trying his hands at a few trades, Wallace became a field collector – a career that combined his desire to travel with his passion for natural history. After four years collecting along the Amazon River (and an eventful return voyage to England in which he spent 26 days in a lifeboat after his ship caught fire and sank!), Wallace set off for the Malay Archipelago – what is now Malaysia and Indonesia – and spent nearly eight years collecting shells, insects, reptiles mammals and birds for sale in England. The book he published about this trip, The Malay Archipelago, the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise; a narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature, was one of the best selling travel books of the nineteenth century.

Museum Victoria has around 200 bird specimens collected by Wallace on this trip that were sold to John Gould and then donated to the museum. Birds are very important in Wallace's story - not only was he looking specifically for the highly sought after birds of paradise on his trip so he could sell them to collectors in England, but his observations about the distribution of birds amongst the islands he visited were highly important in allowing him to develop the theory we today call biogeography – the science of where animals live and why.

A shelf of bird mounts collected by AR Wallace in the Museum Victoria collection.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

In June of 1859 Wallace made an unscheduled trip between the islands of Bali and Lombok when he couldn't find a direct boat from Singapore to Makassar (at the south end of the island of Sulawesi, then called Celebes). He noticed that even though the islands are within sight of each other and very similar in size, elevation and climate, the bird species on Lombok were very different from those he'd seen on Bali. Wallace came to the conclusion that the two islands belonged to distinct Zoological provinces. He wrote in The Malay Archipelago:

I may mention that during a few days' stay in the island of Bali I found birds of the genera Copsychus, Megalaima, Tiga, Plocus, and Sturnopastor, all characteristic of the Indian region and abundant in Malacca, Java, and Borneo; while on crossing over to Lombock, during three months collecting there, not one of them was ever seen; neither have they occurred in Celebes nor any of the more eastern islands I have visited. Taking this in connexion with the fact of Cacatua, Tropidorhynchus, and Megepodius having their western limit in Lombock, we may consider it established that the Strait of Lombock (only 15 miles wide) marks the limits and abruptly separates two of the great Zoological regions of the globe.

In a paper about the distribution of birds in 1868 T.H. Huxley labelled this boundary that Wallace had described between the Asian and Australian biological regions as 'Wallace's Line', the name by which we still know it today. Since then we've discovered that there are other boundaries passing through the archipelago that are relevant to groups other than birds, but Wallace's Line remains the best known and the area is still an important location for research today.

Bird specimen, an adult female Eclectus Parrot, in the MV collection that was collected by AR Wallace.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Meet Me at the Museum: Birds of Paradise

Capturing Paradise: Alfred Russel Wallace's Red Bird of Paradise

Ornithology Collection

Entomology Collection

Wallace's books available as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg

Kevin is the Senior Curator of Mammals at Museum Victoria. He reports on his recent expedition to the mountains of Sulawesi, Indonesia in this series of blog posts.

I recently returned from an expedition into the heart of Sulawesi's central mountain forests. Shrouded in the cool moisture of clouds, these forests appear to be made of moss erupting from the ground. Halfway between Asia and Australia, the native species on this island are neither Australian nor Asian but a unique mix of lineages from the two great continents.

The mountain rainforest of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Together with Anang S. Achmadi, Curator of Mammals from the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense (the national museum of Indonesia) and a team of local guides, I hiked two days from the rice fields of Mamasa to a field camp at 2600 m in the mountains above.

The Sulawesi expedition team.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Base camp for the Sulawesi expedition.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Led by our local guides, including 84 year-old village-elder, Pak Daud, we encountered a pristine, primordial forest rich in biodiversity. Streams dissect the plateau spreading the daily afternoon showers across the landscape and to the fertile rice fields in the valleys below. The endangered mountain anoa (a pygmy water buffalo found only in the mountains of Sulawesi) run in large numbers, bear cuscus (relatives of Australia's brushtail possums) climb through the tree tops, dozens of orchid and pitcher plant species cling to the moss that covers everything, and a diverse assemblage of rodents survive in large numbers. We came in search of these rodents found nowhere else on earth, but which may help us understand the relationship between Australia's native rodents and Asia's.

Hiking through mountain terrain in Sulawesi.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Over three weeks of surveys in these remote forests, we detected 34 species of small mammals (< 1 kg), a healthy number for any forest. Consider that there are about the same number of small mammals across the entire State of Victoria. The rodents in these mossy mountain forests are characterised by a range of morphological oddities, such as giant woolly rats, Eropeplus, small arboreal mice, Haeromys, spiny rats, Maxomys, tiny arboreal squirrels, Prosciurillus, large terrestrial squirrels, Hyosciurus, and a collection of shrew rats that, like shrews, specialise on eating invertebrates. These shrew rats include two species of the soft-furred Tateomys and one species of the short-legged Melasmothrix.

Rodents of Sulawesi. Left: small arboreal mouse Haeromys montanus. | Right: giant woolly rat Eropeplus canus
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Two species of shrew rats from Sulawesi. Left: Tateomys rhinogradoides | Right: Tateomys macocercus
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

We also detected two shrew rat genera that have not been seen since the 1970s including three individuals each of the puppy-faced Crunomys and the rare, worm-eating, gangly-legged Sommeromys, previously known from a single specimen.

Two general of shrew rats that were found for the first time since the 1970s. Above: Crunomys sp. | Below: Sommeromys sp.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Prickly Katydids, or Spiny Tree Crickets, occur from the rainforests of northern New South Wales to Iron Range in Far North Queensland. There are four species of Prickly Katydids but the most common is Phricta spinosa. It has the rather long official common name of Giant Spiny Forest Katydid and is found from Innisfail to Cooktown. Those that know and love this species simply call it Phricta.

The spiny countenance of a Prickly Katydid.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Patrick Honan  

During the day, Phricta sits motionless on bark or amongst twigs with its legs held out straight where it is remarkably well camouflaged. Some bird species, particularly Black Butcherbirds, move up and down tree trunks trying to disturb the insects so they will give themselves away. When threatened, Phricta will point its back legs skyward, revealing rows of sharp spines and red patches at the bases of the legs. These red patches appear to discourage predators.

The legs of this adult male bear the black and orange markings of its startle display.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Patrick Honan

Adults have a body length of 10cm or so, and their highly sensitive antennae may be three times that length. Adults are normally found high in the rainforest canopy, but after mating, the female glides to the ground to lay her eggs in the soil.

An adult female pushes her abdomen into sandy soil to deposit a batch of eggs
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Patrick Honan  

The young Phricta feed low in the understorey on the constant 'rain' of flowers and buds from above.

Phricta moult several times before reaching adulthood. Moulting takes place during the first part of the night and they are very vulnerable to predators at this time. The elongated antennae may take a long time to withdraw fully from the old skin.

Phricta moulting at night.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Patrick Honan  

The colours of juvenile Phricta are variable and help camouflage them against tree trunks and lichen-covered bark.

Juvenile Phricta are often beautifully patterned with greens and browns. The budding wing pads can be seen between the spines of the legs and thorax.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Patrick Honan

After reaching adulthood, Phricta can be found higher in the canopy, feeding on the young leaves of trees and shrubs. On particularly windy or stormy nights, they will move down into the lower canopy or into tree holes to shelter from the weather.

Like most katydid species, male Phricta call loudly to attract females in the rainforest at night, a sound familiar to people who frequent these forests. Females possess an auditory tympanum (or ear) on their forelegs to pick up the call.

Parasites on the thorax of juvenile Phricta.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Patrick Honan  

Phricta are attacked by owls and other predatory birds, as well as honeyeaters and brush turkeys. They are also host to parasitic mites, which gather sometimes in large numbers on the top of the thorax. The effects of these mites on the insects are not known.

Phricta can be seen in the 'Diversity' display in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum. Despite being very common and widespread in North Queensland rainforests, this species was not described scientifically until 2005, an indication of how much is still to be discovered and catalogued by science.

Further reading:

Rentz, D., 1996, Grasshopper Country: the Abundant Orthopteroid Insects of Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 284pp.

Rentz, D., 2010, A Guide to the Katydids of Australia, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, 214pp

This week the Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS) released a study that presents some interesting figures on the declining number of year 11 and 12 students in Australia who are studying science – it was a hot topic in the Museum Victoria offices!

The name of the report, The Status and Quality of Year 11 and 12 Science in Australian Schools, may be a bit dry, but the findings are very relevant to us all.

One of the main recommendations was to involve students in science at an earlier age and to make learning about science an active experience as opposed to a spectator experience. This approach is very dear to the museum, so as the year draws to a close, we asked some of our experts in science education to give their highlights of programs that actively engage students in science.

Priscilla Gaff, Program Coordinator - Life Sciences, Melbourne Museum

'I enjoyed the program, because even though it was about science it was turned into something fun,' said a Year 9 student after participating a new science and multimedia program at Melbourne Museum, 600 million years in 60 seconds.

Ouch! The science-loving teacher within me is astounded that the quote doesn't read more along the lines of 'because it was science it was fun'. But the realist within me knows that that actually this quote offers cause for celebration, especially in light of the new report from the AAS showing the dramatic fall in the number of students choosing to study science.

In 600 Million Years in 60 Seconds, groups of three students are given a mission: to produce a 60 second science clip about evolution to show to the rest of their class... in 25 minutes! And they do it – fabulously! – using the real objects and research on display in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves.

Secondary school students using cameras and movie-making kits as part of 600 million years in 60 seconds.
Image: James Geer
Source: Museum Victoria  

The education program movie-making kit.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

This program offers this age group exactly what the report recommends: science education that captures the interest of year 7 to 10 students. It allows students to be creators and investigators, rather than simply consumers of facts.

Pennie Stoyles, Public Programs Manager, Scienceworks

Two years ago the team at Scienceworks changed the ways we communicate with students about science. The aim was to develop programs that encourage students not to think of science in a fixed way, but rather approach it as one does problem-solving – by making mistakes and learning from them. This is how Scienceworks promotes 'active science' in education.

For example, our Experiment Zone provides hands-on enquiry-based science and maths activities for students from across Victoria – and it features chemicals and robots (what more can you ask for?). In 2011 we've seen students from years 3 to 6 investigate soil chemistry by devising a fair test to measure water retention.

Benjamin Quint studies a model robot controlled by an iPad from the Robot Reboot education program at Scienceworks.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria  

Middle year students have used data loggers to measure, record and analyse physical phenomena and to better understand graphing as a scientific and mathematical tool.

Life sized models and puzzles inspired students to actively learn about problem solving as a mathematical process... and then we have the previously mentioned robots.

Robots were used to find 'hidden treasure' in a program where students also learn about problem solving and the use of robots in the mining industry. The idea was to get students programming the robots, and in the process making mistakes and trying again.

The skills learnt in these programs encourage engagement with science, and help students to translate the information into real life problem solving.

Mirah Lambert, Online Learning Manager, Museum Victoria

A student from Lara Primary School participating in the Biodiversity Snapshots fieldwork project.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

It seems almost everyone has a mobile device nowadays, so why not tap into that in learning? Biodiversity Snapshots is a mobile tool that enables students to observe and report biodiversity in their school, local park or bushland. It contains a field guide with more than 650 species, observation reports and the ability to upload data.

Biodiversity Snapshots was developed by Museum Victoria to assist students and teachers to take field trips and report on their local fauna. It is intended that a broad range of environments in south-eastern Australia will be surveyed, including urban, bushland and coastal areas.

With nearly 1000 observations reported, and almost 200 species identified, Biodiversity Snapshots has demonstrated that through the use of mobile technology, primary and secondary students can build environmental awareness and become real citizen scientists.

At Museum Victoria, we encourage students to investigate, construct and test explanations about the natural world using real specimens, experiments and new media. We hope that by continuing our work in this area we can help more students get excited about science!

Links:

Bridge Building

Biodiversity Snapshots

The Status and Quality of Year 11 and 12 Science in Australian Schools (PDF, 2.41 MB, via Australian Academy of Sciences)

Where would we be without our donors? Thanks to the generosity of our supporters and donors, Museum Victoria's collections (and thus, the collections belonging to all Victorians), research, exhibitions and facilities are much enriched. To acknowledge our donors and express our gratitude, we held an official thankyou event at Melbourne Museum last month.

Guests viewing Twycross collection objects at the donor thankyou event.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Sarah Myer (Trustee, Yulgilbar Foundation and Myer Foundation, wife of Baillieu Myer) and Tim Hart (Director IMT) at the event.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Recent donations to Museum Victoria include:

• An omnicycle from 1880
• An important collection of butterflies
• A slab of tiger eye that features in Dynamic Earth
• Pendle Hall Dolls' House
• Support for a research fellowship
• Assistance with the upgrade of the Immigration Museum Discovery Centre
• The Twycross Collection of decorative arts
• Support of the Bunjilaka redevelopment

On the evening, Senior Curator Lindy Allen toured the guests through the Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic exhibition and specially selected Twycross Collection objects were on display.

Lindy Allen (Senior Curator - Anthropology Northern Australia) talking to donor Ross Field and his wife in the Ancestral Power exhibition. Ross donated a significant selection of butterflies to MV.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Many of our donors have given objects of tremendous personal significance to the museum, and it is quite an honour to be entrusted with them. Financial support has enabled valuable research projects and much-needed exhibition renewal. As MV CEO Patrick Greene said, "It was wonderful to meet so many of our generous supporters, and be able to thank them personally. Whether the donation is a priceless object or financial support, it is greatly appreciated and supports the work of our exhibitions, research and programs."

Martin Carlson (Treasurer, Hugh D. T. Williamson Foundation), with Will and Margie Twycross beside selected items from the Twycross collection they donated to MV.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Donate to MV

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go on a dinosaur dig? Recently I went on a fossil-hunting adventure with a crew of 12 Museum Victoria staff and volunteers at a site called Eric the Red West in Cape Otway National Park.

120 million years ago this part of Australia was a river valley surrounded by forest. When the valley flooded, the remains of dinosaurs, small mammals, pterosaurs and forest plants (which became the coal that we see in the rock) were washed into the river. Eventually some of these bones, as well as those of animals such as fish and turtles that were living in the river, became covered by sand and mud. Over time the sediment became the grey sandstone that is exposed on beach today.

The crew heads down to the site.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

When we first arrived on site we unloaded all of our gear and took it down onto the beach. Before we started any digging we prospected along the beach for fossils that were naturally exposed through weathering of the rock.

Left: Lesley Kool and Mary Walters in search of fossils weathering out of the rock. | Right: Part of a dinosaur limb bone.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Next it was time to bring out the heavier equipment to remove rock and search for fossils that were still buried. We used large rock saws, small electric saws, sledgehammers and chisels to remove large chunks of the fossil-bearing rock.

Travis removes sand from the rock with a shovel and Gerry removes chunks of rock with a sledge hammer and chisel.
Image: Liza Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Left: David Pickering uses a small electric saw to delicately remove a fossil. | Right: Dr Erich Fitzgerald uses a larger rock saw to not so delicately (but precisely) remove a fossil.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

When large chunks of rock have were removed and checked for fossils, the rest of the crew used smaller hammers and chisels to carefully break the rock down to sugar-cube sized pieces in search of tiny fossils.

Left: David Pickering uses a hand lens to inspect a newly exposed fossil. | Right: Astrid patiently chisels away at rock in search of delicate fossils.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

And we were well rewarded for our efforts:

Dr Erich Fitzgerald points to a fossil fish jaw he has just discovered in the rock.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Despite the rain and cold it was a wonderful experience. My friends and colleagues often ask me, 'doesn't it get boring breaking rocks on a beach all day?' but it never does. You never know when the next strike of your hammer and chisel may reveal a new fossil that hasn't seen the light of day for 120 million years. You never know, it may even be a completely new species.

You can see some of the fossils that have been found along Victoria's coastline in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves at Melbourne Museum.

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming Blog

MV Blog: Dinosaur Dreaming Dig

Infosheet: Inverloch fossil site

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

There was a flurry of excitement among our moth team over the diversity of moths and some exciting new records for the region and state. Members of the Entomological Society of Victoria, Marilyn and Dean Hewish, Grace Lewis, Ken Harris and Josh Grub, set up night light stations with bright mercury vapour lamps in front a large white sheet. They run all night, as different groups of moths arrive at different times of the night. They clocked up over 120 moth species.

Left:Sceliodes cordalis | Right: A perfectly camouflagued Convolvulus Hawk Moth, Agrius convolvuli.
Image: M. Hewish
Source: M. Hewish  

There are several theories on why moths come to human light sources. The generally accepted theory is that moths use points of light in the night sky (such as the moon) to orient their flight paths. They keep the brightest light at a particular angle to their flight direction in order to fly straight. As they go past our electric lights they keep turning inwards to maintain the correct angle until they spiral into the porch light or the light station sheets.

The arriving moths came in all shapes and sizes. Two of the weirdest were the Twisted Moth and the plume moths. The Twisted Moth contorts its body as part of its camouflage to look very not-moth-like. The plume moths have long narrow wings with the rear pair hidden under the front pair. They get their name from the feathery tips to their wings.

Above: Twisted Moth, Circopetes obtusata looks just like a dry eucalyptus leaf. | Below: A plume moth, Stenoptilia zophodactylus
Image: M. Hewish
Source: M. Hewish  

Colour patterns ranged from the excellent camouflage of the hawk moths that perfectly match the grey tree bark to brightly coloured forms including some with false eye spots, known as ocelli.

Two brightly-coloured Neds Corner moths. Left: Pale Spotted Tiger Moth, Amata aperta | Right: Grammodes ocellata with beautiful eye-spots, or ocelli.
Image: M. Hewish | D. Hewish
Source: M. Hewish | D. Hewish  

The wood moths (family Cossidae) caused the most excitement. These beautiful moths are not particularly common and the three species found included two ornately-patterned species and a third smaller species that is a new record for Victoria. The males of these moths (and many other moth groups) can be recognised by their large feather-like antennae. These are the chemosensory organs of the males, used to 'smell' the pheromones released by the females. By contrast, females have much narrower, less-feathery antennae.

Two wood moths. Left: Endoxyla sp. | Right: Endoxyla neuroxantha representing a new Victorian record for this species.
Image: M.Hewish
Source: M. Hewish  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Here is episode two of 'Meet Me at the Museum', a video series about our collection.

We marvel at how particular specimens made it into our collection.

Let us know what you think in the comments section. And be sure to see our previous episodes if you haven't already.

Watch this video with a transcript.

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

One of the priority groups of animals for the Bush Blitz surveys is the primitive mygalomorph spiders, such as trapdoor spiders and tarantulas. This group of spiders have large fangs that point down and can only be used to pin and pierce their prey. The 'modern' spiders (araneomorphs) have fangs that turn towards each other, so can be used more easily to grab their prey. We found only one small mygalomorph spider species.

Mygalomorph spider
Image: M Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Wolf spiders are the other focus group for these surveys and we found them everywhere. Dr Barbara Baehr from Queensland Museum was the wolf spider expert on the team. On night walks the blue eye shine of hundreds of wolf spiders can be seen over the ground and in the trees. Some larger ones build trapdoors over their burrow, complete with a perfect hinged lid.

Left: Wolf spider | Right: Wolf spider burrow with trapdoor
Image: Patrick Honan | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The huntsman spiders here were very impressive, being among the largest in Australia with the females reaching 20cm across. Close-up images showed that many had small red mites crawling over their bodies.

Huntsman spider
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

A Redback Spider nest was found by BHP participant Paul Simper where a large female was guarding two round egg masses while the tiny attendant male sat nearby.

A Redback Spider family - the large female is in the centre, with the small male to the left and an egg sac to the right.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

The list of other spider types at Neds Corner is long, and includes ant spiders, ant-mimicking spiders, jumping spiders, orb weavers, social spiders, crab spiders and cellar spiders.

Ant spider (family Zodariidae).
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Neds Corner Station

I just found out what you get when you combine a talented underwater photographer, the keen interest of a year 10 student volunteer, and a museum expert: five species new to science!

My schematic of this discovery, which also explains why I'm a scientist not a cartoonist.
Image: Blair Patullo
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the latest Museum Victoria Memoirs there is a report that describes five new marine species, two of them from Victoria. Perhaps not that amazing considering that's partly what museums do – we discover and describe new species – but this report needed the help from two members of the community.

Firstly, a student volunteer spent over 30 hours looking down a microscope studying the species. And by chance, we also received an image from a recreational diver, participating in Reefwatch Victoria, that showed one of the species spawning in the wild. The result is a perfect combination of scientific detail and real life underwater action.

The sea cucumber Paracaudina bacillis spawning at Rye Pier in Port Phillip Bay.
Image: D. McKenzie
Source: D. McKenzie  

The new species are all sea cucumbers from the genus group Paracaudina. They were previously thought to be the same as the tropical species Paracaudina australis, which this report now confirms is unlikely to live in Victorian waters. These Paracaudina are some of the largest sea cucumber species in Australia.

Links:

P. Mark O'Loughlin, Shari Barmos and Didier VandenSpiegel. The paracaudinid sea cucumbers of Australia and New Zealand (Echinodermata: Holothuroidea: Molpadida: Caudinidae). Memoirs of Museum Victoria 68 :37-65 (2011) (PDF, 2.86MB)

Reefwatch Victoria

MV Blog: Skeletons of sea cucumbers

MV Blog: Trepang today

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

I’ve been asking the people who work with MV collections what some of their favourite items are, starting with Dermot Henry, the Manager of the Natural Sciences Collections.

Dermot's speciality is geology and he’s looked after the geosciences collections for many years. When asked what his favourite item was he took care to tell me that he didn’t have a favourite because there are so many fascinating objects, but when pressed he picked the Murchison meteorite as "probably the most famous and scientifically important rock in the collections."

The Murchison meteorite is one of 16 meteorites known from Victoria, and is rare in that it was actually observed falling, rather than just being found on the ground, so it came to scientists fresh (other than some surface dirt from falling into mud and cowpats and the like). It exploded in the atmosphere over Murchison, Victoria, about 160km north of Melbourne, on 28 September, 1969 and fell over an area around 35km². So when we talk about 'it' we’re really talking about lots of broken pieces of a single object.

  Display in Dynamic Earth.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

These pieces are on display in Dynamic Earth and are just a very small portion of what was collected. The largest piece found weighed nearly 7kg though many more were just a few grams each. In total, around 100kg was collected and over 80kg of that made it into science collections. While a lot of the material went overseas (mostly to the Field Museum in Chicago who have nearly 52kg and the Smithsonian in Washington DC who have nearly 20kg) some remained in Australia. Over 7kg stayed at the University of Melbourne and much of this was later donated to Museum Victoria. We have about 3.5kg and only the largest pieces that are on display; we also have lots of smaller pieces.

Drawer containing pieces of Murchison meteorite.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

Most of the pieces of rock in this drawer are parts of the Murchison meteorite (though not the big rock on the right – that’s actually a different meteorite of a similar type called Rainbow that was found in Victoria in 1994). Opening the sealed tubes, you can still smell, very faintly, what Dr. John Lovering from the University of Melbourne who organised the collection of the meteorite pieces in 1969 described as "just like methylated spirits – very strong". This was the first indication that the meteorite he was looking at was a rare type called a carbonaceous chondrite. Unlike more common rocky meteorites, a carbonaceous chondrite is packed full of organic molecules and a lot of water; this one is eight per cent water.

The year after it was collected, papers began to appear in scientific journals describing the chemical composition of the meteorite and excitement about its scientific significance began to grow. A paper in the journal Nature describing the discovery of amino acids of extra-terrestrial origin in the meteorite made, if you’ll pardon the pun, quite an impact, and was widely covered in the press, even making it into Time Magazine. Papers are still being published on it – one came out in August this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a new chromium sulfide mineral, Murchisite (Cr₅S₆), was just reported in American Mineralogist.

To date over 70 amino acids have been identified from the meteorite, only 19 of which are known from Earth. These, and the many other chemicals that have been identified, suggest there could be thousands of complex organic chemicals present. What’s so interesting about these molecules is that they demonstrate that the simple chemical building blocks necessary for life on Earth seem to form quite easily in other places.

It isn’t just the origins of life that the Murchison meteorite may tell us about. It contains tiny pre-solar grains – nano-diamonds and silicon carbides, among others, that formed in supernovas long before our own sun appeared – which tell us a lot about how our own, and other, solar systems formed. But not only that, information from the pre-solar grains in the Murchison meteorite has been fundamental in figuring out a lot about how elements are originally produced and a lot about the structure and mechanics of stars.

So the Murchison meteorite is definitely pretty cool – biologists, chemists, astrophysicists and those of us who just think rocks that fall out of the sky are fascinating all agree on that. As Dermot says, "it’s so unusual and it’s yielded so much information about cosmology, element formation and how the universe works – it’s probably generated more publications than any other meteorite. And it’s Victorian!"

Two pieces of the Murchison meteorite in Dynamic Earth.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Infosheet: Meteorites

Video: The Murchison meteorite story

Dermot A. Henry, 'Star Dust Memories - a Brief History of the Murchison Carbonaceous Chondrite'. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2003. 20: vii-ix (PDF, 1 MB)

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

The range of invertebrate animals that we found at Neds Corner was spectacular. At the robust end of the scale were the Rasping Crickets with their big jaws and impressive biting powers. We encountered pairs of these large crickets, the females having the long egg-laying ovipositor off the tip of their tail.

Rasping Cricket
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

We also found the delicate pottery brood chambers built by potter wasps. They build these perfect small chambers to contain their young and then bring food to the developing grubs.

Above: Adult potter wasp | Below: The nest of the potter wasp.
Image: Patrick Honan | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Grace Lewis from the Entomological Society of Victoria witnessed the life and death tug-of-war between a spider wasp and meat ants over a paralysed wolf spider. The ants won.

Above: Antlion larva in its conical pit | Below: Winged antlion adult
Image: David Paul | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The ants were not so lucky in the many antlion pits we found scattered in the red sand. Antlions are the juvenile stage of an insect related to the lacewings (order Neuroptera). The young antlions with their big jaws dig a conical pit in the sand and sit in the bottom waiting for ants to slide in. The flying adults were attracted to our night lights. We also saw another related insect known as a mantis fly or mantispid – it has a lacewing body with the attacking front end of a praying mantis.

Mantispid or mantis fly
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The centipedes were beautiful and fast, with lots of legs for running. We also found small red-eyed cicadas everywhere and saw them emerge from their wingless cases.

Colourful centipede
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr John Stanisic of the Queensland Museum was pleased with his tally of ten land snail species including some of the smallest animals imaginable. Our photographer David Paul has perfected photographing "gliding sand grains".

Tiny land snail
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Every day we found more radical colours, shapes and sizes amongst the invertebrate fauna than the day before.

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

By 25 November, rain drenched Neds Corner and the clay turned to slippery mud. Great weather for frogs. With the rain's arrival, frogs emerged from the mud as our vehicles sank into it.

Rain at Ned's Corner. Left: The view from the homestead porch | Right: Boggy road
Image: M. Hewish / M. Cheng
Source: M. Hewish / M. Cheng  

Pobblebonk frogs turned up everywhere. In our pitfall trap lines, 30 pits contained 37 frogs. These frogs bury into the soil in the dry weather and wait for the rains. Then they emerge to feed and mate.

Pobblebonk Frog (Limnodynastes dumerili) at Neds Corner.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

The other frogs we encountered were the Spadefoot, Spotted and Barking Marsh Frogs, Peron's Tree Frog and a froglet (genus Crinia). The tree frogs can be recognised by their padded toes, good for climbing.

Peron's Tree Frog (Litoria peroni) with beautiful green spots.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

The wetter weather was also good for the fungi and Dr Teresa Lebel from the National Herbarium of Victoria found many new records for this region. In arid country many types of fungus rest under the soil in a shrivelled state. As soon as the water reaches them, their stalks hydrate and the heads of species like puffball fungi emerge above the mud to release their spores.

Fungi after rain at Ned's Corner. Left: Fruiting bodies of the Earth Star fungus | Right: Tinder Conch fungus
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

One of the fungus highlights was finding fallen white shelf fungi at the bases of big River Red Gums. The spongy dead fungus is called Tinder Conch fungus as Aboriginal peoples used it for carrying the slow-burning coals needed for fire starting.

Our survey team was not as well-adapted as the frogs and managed to bog three cars in one day, but a combination of winches and effort got us all home safe and sound.

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Frogs of Victoria infosheet series

Royal Botanical Gardens Fungimap

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

With the warm weather we experienced at the start of the survey, the Neds Corner Bush Blitz team clocked up an impressive tally of reptile species. Being in the driest corner of Victoria, the desert influence is obvious in a wonderful range of skinks, dragons, geckoes and snakes.

Four of the larger lizards have been found. The Inland Bearded Dragon has the scales and scutes of the best fictional dragons and has been found sunning itself on dead logs and fence posts. From above these spikes help them blend against the background. The Shingleback with its bright blue tongue has been observed many times living up to its other name (Sleepy Lizard) by sleeping or slowly loping on the roadsides. They are often in pairs. This species mates for life and can live to up to 50 years old. Sand goannas and a large Lace Monitor have also been recorded.

Shingleback Skink
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Five gecko species (Bynoe's, Thick-tailed, Tree Dtella, Tassellated and Marbled) have already been found through night walks or searching under bark and through leaf litter. They are a mix of ground dwellers (with normal claws) and tree-climbers with their fat fleshy toes. Many gecko species store fat in their tails and our ones seem well fed. We've been finding some very pregnant females bulging with the two eggs they lay at a time.

Thick-tailed Gecko
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

In addition to the Shingleback, five other skink species have been found including Tree Skink, Boulanger's Skink, Carneby's Wall Skink and several yet-to-be resolved Ctenotus species.

Boulanger's Skink
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The snake highlight has been a Curl Snake, a small species around 30 cm long. It was found while researchers Patrick Honan and Chloe Miller were searching at night for tiger beetles on clay pans. Though small, this species is highly venomous and has caused human fatalities so we handled it very carefully. It is listed as threatened in Victoria under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.

Curl Snake
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

Researchers from the museum's Sciences and Live Exhibits departments have gathered in the far north-west corner of Victoria to survey the wildlife of Neds Corner Station on the state's desert fringe. The Neds Corner survey is part of the Bush Blitz program, a biodiversity discovery partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia. It aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. The 30,000 hectare reserve is managed by the Trust for Nature, an independent not-for-profit organisation that purchases and permanently protects properties to conserve nature.

Saltbush at Ned's Corner
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The survey encompasses animals, plants and fungi, so the museum team has joined scientists from the National Herbarium of Victoria, the Queensland Museum and the University of New South Wales. They have also been joined by five staff from BHP's Environmental Division around Australia, who will be aiding the researchers in the field and lab.

The Ned's Corner Bush Blitz team.
Source: Museum Victoria

The aim is to survey across the many arid fringe habitats found in the Neds Corner reserve including saltbush plains, mallee scrub, clay pans, sandy rises and amongst the River Red Gums and Black Box eucalypts that line the adjacent Murray River.

Habitats at Ned's Corner. Above: River Red Gum forest. Below: Black Box eucalypts.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The survey runs from 21 November to 2 December and the museum team are using extensive visual and acoustic surveys, pitfall trap lines, small mammal traps, baited cage traps, bat sonic listening devices and moth light stations to census the wildlife.

Two types of traps in use at Ned's Corner. Above: small mammal trap Below: pitfall trap
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Following on from the student hand-in trifecta post, here are two more Masters projects recently completed by students working in the museum’s Natural Sciences Department. Both students performed genetic analysis on local lizard species.

Pete Smissen examined the geographic movement of the Lace Monitor (Varanus varius) over time. About 25,000-20,000 years ago, Australia experienced its Last Glacial Maximum, when the climate was colder and drier than it is currently.

Pete's fieldwork with Lace Monitors. Left: Weighing an animal in the field. Right: A Lace Monitor basking in a sunny tree.
Image: Peter Smissen
Source: Peter Smissen  

Analysing mitochondrial DNA (which is only passed down maternal lines), Pete found that there are three genetically distinct groups of Lace Monitors in Australia that have been evolving independently since the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. This suggests that the species persisted through these cold times in small refugia then dispersed broadly as temperatures increased. When he looked at fast-evolving nuclear DNA, (which is inherited from both parents), he found similar population clusters across Australia, but little genetic structure in a smaller geographic area in Gippsland. This lack of structure is a different pattern to that found in many other species, but is consistent with Lace Monitors being large, mobile, generalist animals.

Luisa Teasdale examined the variable colouration found in male Tawny Dragons (Ctenophorus decresii). Some males have vibrant orange patches on their throats while others are quite drab.

The four distinct throat colour morphs in Tawny Dragons.
Image: Luisa Teasdale
Source: Luisa Teasdale  

By analysing digital photographs for colour and pattern combined with genetic tecniques, she found evidence that there are four distinctly different morphs that seem to be genetically clustered. This suggests that even though there is one interbreeding population, the lizards breed preferentially with their own morph. Her work poses some interesting questions about how the four morphs differ in other respects, such as behaviour or life history, and what keeps them separate even within the same population.

Congratulations to Luisa and Pete for completing their fascinating projects!

Links:

Information for prospective students

Lizards of Victoria infosheet series

David helps manage MV's Marine Invertebrates collections. He has specialist knowledge of the pycnogonids, or sea spiders.

So, what am I doing here seemingly in the middle of nowhere, 2000km south-east of Capetown and 1500km south of Madagascar?

I have joined an expedition aboard the 95m British Royal Research Ship ‘James Cook’ with a team of scientists exploring seamounts and hydrothermal vents along the South West Indian Ridge (SWIR). Seamounts are mountains under the sea, while hydrothermal vents are fissures in the Earth’s surface from which water heated by volcanic activity issues.

The Royal Research Ship ‘James Cook’ in calm seas.
Image: David Staples
Source: Museum Victoria  

The SWIR is the tectonic plate boundary that bisects the ocean between Antarctica and Africa and links the Mid-Atlantic ridge and Central Indian Ridge systems. The Central Indian Ridge runs below Australia (as the South Eastern Indian Ridge) and it is speculated that these ridges and the currents they generate may be migration pathways for seamount and vent fauna between the Atlantic, Indian and ultimately the Pacific Oceans.

The proposed route for the research cruise exploring the South West Indian Ridge south of South Africa and Madagascar.
Source: IUCN  

The main focus of this expedition is to investigate the benthic assemblages on these seamounts using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). The ROV being used is the German ‘Kiel 6000’ which comes with a crew of eight technicians. As its name suggests, this ROV is capable of reaching depths of 6000m.

Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) ‘Kiel 6000’, built by Schilling Robotics, Germany and owned and operated by GEOMAR.
Image: David Staples
Source: Museum Victoria  

On board are oceanographers, geophysicists and biologists all contributing their expertise. We are presently above the Coral Seamount, the top of which comes to within about 300m of the surface; much shallower than the 750m of ocean typical of the seamounts south of Tasmania. While at greater depths some aspects of the fauna are common to both regions, the abundant and diverse fauna found on the upper reaches of this seamount are quite different. It is rare to be able to study fauna at these shallower depths.

In 1999 two moorings, each carrying packets of whale bones and mango wood logs, were experimentally deployed on this seamount and on the Atlantis Bank in expectation that the bones would be colonised by as yet undescribed specialist organisms, such as polychaetes and bivalves. We located the Coral Seamount mooring on our third dive and part of today’s program has been to collect the bones and wood for later analysis. Collections and data from this region are of great interest internationally but closer to home they provide valuable information for the museum’s own scientists for their research projects.

For those interested in keeping abreast of events, Aurélie Spadone (representing the International Union for the Conservation of Nature) is keeping a blog of the expedition.

A YouTube video, Octopus Walks on Land at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve is doing the rounds at the moment and generating a bit of online discussion about this fascinating behaviour.

Dr Julian Finn filmed a similar event in Broome a few years back where a small, unnamed octopus (Abdopus sp.) crawled between rock pools at low tide. He says that it's not uncommon for intertidal octopuses to roam between pools in hunt of prey such as crabs or fish. They may also flee their tide pool to escape the attention of bigger, hungrier octopuses! In this video, he explains more about these terrestrial adventures.

Watch this video with a transcript

Like all cephalopods, octopuses breathe through gills and won't survive for long out of water. Julian has only seen octopuses crawl over dry land where the chance of them being trapped out of water is minimal. In captivity, it's not unknown for octopuses to turn up in strange places after breaking out of their tanks – including one that was found in a staircase!

Links:

MV Blog: Blue-ringed octopus project

MV News: Argonaut buoyancy

MV News: Tool use in Veined Octopus

Roll over Drop Bears, there's a new, real threat in the trees of Wilsons Promontory - freshwater crayfish!

I reckon the best story from the recent Prom Bioscan for Parks Victoria is the discovery of freshwater crayfish climbing trees. Forget that a huge whale washed ashore nearby, forget the species found that had never been recorded from the area, and ignore all the hype around helicopters, it should be all about these partly arboreal crustaceans that are only known from the Prom.

Freshwater crayfish Engaeus australis at Wilsons Prom.
Image: Adnan Moussalli
Source: Museum Victoria  

Our freshwater ecologist Dr Richard Marchant was among the researchers to see the Engaeus crayfish on tree trunks and branches. He's worked around streams and rivers throughout Victoria for over 25 years and this is the first time he's seen this.

"It's a mystery why this mainly burrow-dwelling species would be in the trees when their food is on the ground. Clearly there's something new here that we didn't know about this Prom population. Unfortunately on this trip there wasn't time to find out more." said Richard.

"It has been only recently appreciated that from an evolutionary point of view insects are just 'flying crustaceans'. While tree-climbing crayfish suggest a hankering for an aerial existence among crustaceans there is no evidence that this is how they took to the skies and evolved wings!" said Dr. Gary Poore, another of the museum's crayfish experts, when he heard of the finding.

When I heard the story, my thoughts went immediately to the mythical Drop Bear - a furry clawed beast the size of a dog that, legend has it, lives in trees in Australia and drops down on people as they walk below. At only a finger-length long, perhaps 8cm or so, these little crustaceans wouldn't do much damage if they did drop on someone, but you still might be at risk of a nip from their tiny claws on your shoulder if they did.

Normally sticklers for poking around in rivers and digging burrows with mini mountains of mud as entrances, the aquatic Engaeus crayfish were seen in a remote area of the Prom off limits to the public, so rest assured – hikers and campers this summer will be safe.

Freshwater crayfish Engaeus australis at Wilsons Prom.
Image: Adnan Moussalli
Source: Museum Victoria  

The species in the trees was Engaeus australis and is only known to occur at Wilsons Prom. A few other Engaeus species also live at the Prom, but they also occur elsewhere in Victoria. Engaeus crayfish are related to yabbies (genus Cherax) and the larger Murray River and Spiny crayfishes (genus Euastacus). There are 22 Engaeus species that occur in several parts of Victoria, and about 10 other species of crayfish, together making Victoria one of the world's most diverse areas for freshwater crayfish.

Links:

Infosheet: Land crayfish

Engaeus australis on the IUCN Redlist

Australian Museum: Drop Bear

Bugs Alive! highlights not only the highly venomous Sydney funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus), but also the diversity of Australian funnel-web spiders. There are currently 35 known species in Australia, and it is likely that more await description. Many southeastern Australians may not be aware that they too may have funnel-web spiders living in their backyard. Don't panic, aside from the Sydney Funnel-web, the majority of Australian funnel-web spiders do not pose a threat to us. In fact, most spiders are harmless. Of the estimated 10,000 species (only about 3000 have been named) that are native to Australia, only two pose a serious threat to human life.

The Australian funnel-web spider family Hexathelidae belongs to the primitive infraorder Mygalomorphae, which includes the trapdoor spiders, mouse spiders, and the large theraphosids (better known as tarantulas). Mygalomorphs can be distinguished from other spiders by having paraxial or parallel fangs (chelicerae), and an extra pair of book lungs.

A typical funnel-shaped entrance to a funnel-web spider burrow.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

To keep our spiders healthy and stress-free, we rotate them off display so that each individual is on show only one month per year. To do this we must collect spiders from the wild to ensure that we have enough to keep the rotation flowing smoothly. Chloe wrote in April about a previous spider-hunting trip. Last week we went to the Nariel Valley in northwest Victoria, Violet Town in central Victoria and the Central Highlands (Narbethong-Acheron Gap, Victoria) to collect three different species of funnel-web spiders.

Not all burrows contain funnel-web spiders. This one we dug up was occupied by this beautiful Alpine Wolf Spider (Lycosidae).
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Our first stop was the Nariel Valley where we searched for the mighty Alpine Funnel-web (Hadronyche alpina). This is a newly-described species that is found, you guessed it, in the alpine environments of Victoria and N.S.W. They are impressive spiders with big black hairy bodies, and a mean temper to boot!

After collecting our quota of H. alpina, we drove west towards Violet Town, near Benalla, in search of the Central Victorian Funnel-web, H. meridiana. We had heard reports that a resident in Violet Town had found some in her backyard, and upon contacting her, she agreed to us collecting them. After lifting some old carpet lying on the ground, we found burrows galore! It didn't take us very long to collect all the spiders we needed before setting off to track down our third target species H. modesta.

Exciting stuff! Live Exhibits keeper Adam Elliott excavating a burrow belonging to H. meridiana.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Funnel-web spider (H. meridiana) about to be removed from her burrow.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Hadronyche meridiana showing off her threat display. If you look closely you might be able to see the paraxial chelicerae that define the mygalomorph spiders.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

H. modesta, or the Southern Victorian Funnel-web can be found around Victorian cool temperate sclerophyll forests ranging from just north of Melbourne, to the eastern end of the Strzelecki Ranges in South Gippsland. Unfortunately, after much searching, we failed to find any H. modesta. We are always on the lookout for any reports of glossy black spiders that burrow, so, if you live in the eastern or northeastern suburbs and see this spider around, let us know and we might come pay you a visit!

Further reading:

Walker, K.L., Yen, A.L. & Milledge, G.A. 2003. Spiders and Scorpions Commonly Found in Victoria. The Royal Society of Victoria. (Beginner)

Grey, M. R. 2010. A Revision of the Australian Funnel Web Spiders (Hexathelidae: Atracinae). Records of the Australian Museum. Vol. 62: 285–392. (Advanced)

Congratulations to Katie Smith, Natalie Calder and Skipton Woolley for handing in their postgraduate theses in the last fortnight. All three have done major pieces of research that combined new field studies with Museum Victoria Natural Sciences collections.

For her PhD, Katie Smith assessed the hybrid zone between two closely-related south-eastern Australian tree frogs, Litoria ewingi and Litoria paraewingi. A hybrid zone is an area where the geographic distribution of two species overlap in a narrow contact zone. They subsequently share habitat and sometimes cross-breed.

Top: Litoria ewingi calling. Bottom: Litoria paraewingi. Can you spot the difference between these two species?
Image: Katie Smith | Fran Lyndon-Gee
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the 1960s, Murray Littlejohn first reported hybridisation in these species in the Kinglake area, collecting specimens and recordings of the male advertisement calls in the 1960s. Katie built upon Murray's work, performing genetic and acoustic analysis on the original specimens and recordings and recent samples to compare the hybrid zone then and now. Says Katie, "it makes you realise what a good job Murray did! It's amazing that he even worked out they are different species because their appearance and calls are so similar."

Main: Murray Littlejohn recording frog calls in the 1960s. Inset: Katie Smith recording frog calls for her PhD.
Source: Murray Littlejohn | Museum Victoria  

Katie found that the hybrid zone is quite stable which is particularly interesting because the Kinglake area has changed dramatically over the decades through agricultural and residential development. Her fieldwork, completed before the 2009 bushfires, can't comment on the effect of fire on the hybrid zone but she hopes that ongoing surveys will keep an eye on the situation. When she handed in her thesis, her colleague Susi made a special batch of hybrid frog cupcakes to celebrate!

Hybrid frog cupcakes for afternoon tea!`
Image: Susi Maldonado
Source: Susi Madonado  

Natalie Calder's Masters thesis investigated how larval fishes use tide cycles to disperse in Port Phillip Bay. She worked at Governor Reef, near Indented Head on the Bellarine Peninsula, measuring where these tiny hatchlings place themselves in the water column.

As Nat explains, "Upon hatching larvae are translucent, lack scales and are usually less than 1mm long. Studies throughout the first half of the 20th century assumed that larvae were passive particles, at the mercy of tides and currents, with little or no control over where they dispersed."

Three larval fishes. Top: Zeidae (dory family) without fins, jaws or pigmented eyes. Middle: Hemiramphidae (garfish or halfbeak family) in relatively late stage of development, with visible muscle bands. Bottom: Triglidae (gunard or sea robin family) with partially-developed fins, well-developed eyes but still-visible egg yolk sac.
Image: Natalie Calder
Source: Museum Victoria  

Since then, scientists have observed that fish larvae display more complex behaviour, and Nat's research contributes to this body of knowledge. She found that fish larvae are quite selective and effectively 'surf' the tides in and out of Port Phillip Bay by exploiting properties of the currents. They rise in the water column to catch fast-moving surface waters during incoming tides, ensuring they stay in the bay rather than be swept out to sea. This better understanding of how larval fish disperse could help ensure the network of marine protected areas are sufficiently connected to keep fish populations healthy.

Another major piece of Masters research with implications for marine reserves was completed by Skipton Woolley, who used marine worms called polychaetes to model the biodiversity of large-scale ecological systems. Using data from museum collections and from new fieldwork in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, he tested whether polychaetes are a good group to use when assessing biodiversity. The idea is that it's not often practical to count every species in an ecosystem, but if the diversity of one group correlates with biodiversity overall, they become a handy indicator that can be used to compare between regions.

By examining 342 species from seven families, he found that that polychaetes are indeed a useful group, because where you find numerous species of polychaetes, you find numerous species of other animals, such as echinoderms and crustaceans. Thus, concludes Skip, "worms are amazing!"

A scaleworm from Skip's Masters project, Iphione muricata (family Polynoidae). The numerous white hairy structures, or chaetae, are what give this group their name - the polychaetes.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Amazing too are our students who contribute so much to the museum's research work. Well done Katie, Nat and Skip!

Links:

Information for prospective students

MV News: Victoria frogs and bushfires

WA Museum: Marine Life of the Kimberley Region

During the recent Prom Bioscan biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory, Dr Joanna Sumner led the herpetology (reptiles and amphibians) group. She and her troops - Katie Smith, Claire Keely, Susi Maldonado, Maggie Haines and Parks Victoria's Steve Wright – used a combination of trapping and active searching to find nine skink species, three elapid snake species and five frog species over several survey sites.

  Claire and Susi checking funnel traps opposite Lilly Pilly Gully carpark.
Image: Jo Sumner
Source: Museum Victoria

Reported Jo,

We captured, tissue sampled and released 59 individual reptiles and amphibians. Tissue samples will be put in our frozen tissue collection and used in research on species identification of some these groups. The overall diversity of reptile species in the Prom is very low compared to other areas in Australia. We sighted all three snakes previously recorded, 50% of known frog species and 75% of skinks known to the area. We did not record any of threatened species previously recorded on the Prom however, such as Litoria raniformis and Egernia coventryi.

If you're ever wondered what herpetology fieldwork looks like, here's a video from Wilsons Prom where Jo explains how she traps skinks and takes tissue samples.

Watch this video with a transcript

On Wednesday 9 November an asteroid is going to fly past Earth.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft was sent to the Asteroid Belt to obtain close-up images of Vesta.
Source: NASA

But not this one! This is a picture of Vesta, the third largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt, located about 200 million kilometres away. This lovely picture was taken by the Dawn spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Vesta. It shows what a large asteroid looks like from a distance of just 5,200km.

 Radar image of the near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 when it was 2.4 million km away.
Source: NASA/Cornell/Arecibo

The asteroid that is going to fly past Earth is known as 2005 YU55. This radar image of the asteroid was made last year using the Arecibo Radar Telescope in Puerto Rico. At 400m across this near-Earth asteroid is over 1,000 times smaller than Vesta. Rather than having to send a spacecraft out to it, this asteroid is coming to us.

But there’s no need to go crazy - the closest the asteroid will get is 325,000 km from Earth. That’s just a little closer than the Moon which on average is 380,000 km away. It won’t pose any threat to Earth or have any noticeable gravitational effect. But we should get a great look at it.

NASA scientists will be using antennae from the Deep Space Network to bounce radio waves off the space rock. The data is then used to create a three-dimensional  model of the asteroid and with the asteroid being so close it should provide us with a really detailed image so we can learn more about it.

Hundreds of asteroids have been observed using radar astronomy and the interesting thing is that asteroids can be so different. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with some having very smooth surfaces and others being rough and textured. Radar astronomy can also be used to determine the composition of an asteroid and it's even discovered some asteroid moons.

Most importantly of all, radar astronomy gives us the best insight into an asteroid’s trajectory. That’s how we can work out that this near-Earth asteroid won’t harm us and provides the lead time to prepare for great science observations like this one.

I look forward to the day when astronauts will once again take the leap beyond Earth orbit. Many say that after the Moon, the next step for astronauts should be a near-Earth asteroid. The information that’s gathered now could one day be used to choose just which asteroid we'll be visiting.

Links

JPL’s Asteroid Watch Page

NASA’s Near Earth Object Program

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

Given that they're the subject of some major research at the museum there's been a lot of talk about blue-ringed octopuses around the Sciences Department at the museum recently. As I grew up in the UK, I've never seen one so when I heard that there was one on display in Melbourne Museum I headed down to find it so I could see what these fearsome beasts I'd heard so much about look like in the flesh. But to my surprise it didn't look as exciting as I had expected - there was not a blue ring to be seen.

So now I know what any Victorian schoolchild should be able to tell you: a blue-ringed octopus only displays those eponymous blue rings when it feels threatened or disturbed and most of the time it's just a plain brown or greyish colour.

Blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) specimen in a jar on display.
Image: Genevieve Ooms
Source: Museum Victoria  

Despite this specimen's disappointing colouration though, it does have a fascinating story attached to it. Look closely at the label in the picture and you can just see that it bears the slightly ominous "...bit and caused paralysis" which is a transcription of the note made in the museum registration book when this specimen was donated: "This specimen bit and caused paralysis in its captor". As it happens, this is the actual individual, collected on Christmas Day, 1962, that lead to much of the public awareness about the dangers of the blue-ringed octopus.

It perhaps seems a little strange that it wasn't known that this species is so dangerous until so recently - despite the southern species being described in 1883, it wasn't until 1954 that the bite of any blue-ringed octopus was discovered to be deadly. The first recorded fatality – one of only two in Australia to date – was in spring 1954 near East Point, Darwin, but the culprit was originally misidentified because it got away and was then identified based on another octopus the victim's friend pointed out as looking the same. The victim, a 21 year old seaman, Kirk Dyson-Holland, died within two hours of being bitten after picking up an octopus while spearfishing.

For a while, it was largely assumed that the danger of death-by-octopus was restricted to the north or perhaps to people with specific allergies, but then nearly a decade later, on Christmas Day 1962, Arthur Thompson, then 33, was bitten on the hand by a southern blue-ringed octopus at Ricketts Point, Beaumaris in Port Phillip Bay just round the coastline from Melbourne (where they are still found – there was a report in a local paper of one being picked up by a 4 year old just this May). The Registrar of the Alfred Hospital Clinical Research Unit where Mr. Thompson was taken reported:

The patient held it on the back of the hand for a minute of two, and after putting it down noticed a speck of blood on his hand, there had been no sensation of sting or bite. A few minutes later he felt a prickling sensation around his mouth which rapidly became generalized and within fifteen minutes was almost completely paralysed.....Just after admission spontaneous respiration ceased and he was respired for about an hour. Thereafter he made a steady and uneventful recovery of his muscle power. He was well the next day, chest X-ray was clear and he was discharged.

Happily, Mr. Thompson recovered after an hour of artificial ventilation while the poison wore off and nobody has actually been killed by one in Victoria, but the story of this octopus, reported widely in the news, lead to a much greater awareness of the danger of disturbing the blue-ringed octopus. There has only been one reported fatality in Australia since, near Sydney in 1967, partly due to better understanding of the dangers and partly because the blue-ringed octopus is, fortunately, really quite laid back and won't bite unless provoked.

Mr. Thompson's brush with death obviously wasn't the first time someone was bitten by one of these octopuses and it is likely that there have been other deaths before and after, many of which would have been reported as unexplained. In fact, there was an incident a year earlier in December 1961 at Cowes, Phillip Island, with almost identical results: the victim was bitten, felt gradual paralysis until he stopped breathing, was given artificial respiration for a couple of hours and then recovered to be discharged from the hospital on Christmas day exactly a year before Mr. Thompson was admitted. That octopus wasn't kept so we don't know for sure what species it was, but it seems likely that it was also our friend the blue-ringed octopus.

So next time you visit the museum, keep an eye out for this specimen in the Port Phillip Bay cabinet on the ground floor – just turn left as you come past the ticket desk. It won't bite!

Blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena maculosa.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria  

References:

Report of the first fatality in Australia: Flecker H, Cotton BC (1955). Fatal bite from an octopus. Med J Aust 2:329-331.

Injuries to man from marine invertebrates in the Australian Region. Cleland, J. B. and Southcott, R. V. 1965. National Health and Medical Research Council, Canberra, pp282.

Links:

Australian Women's Weekly article from 1967

Report from the Moorabbin Leader from May 2011

MV Blog post about Julian's research

Marine Life exhibition

(Warning: this blog contains graphic images and bad puns.)

On 19 October I heard exciting news leaking down the underground corridors of Melbourne Museum and into the Live Exhibits Lab. Word that a Humpback Whale had beached itself on the western end of the Ninety Mile Beach in eastern Victoria, set my plan in motion to become involved in its subsequent recovery. I bailed up (approached) the Preparations Department manager Peter Swinkels in one of the corridors and offered my assistance. Fortunately he said yes and that if I could handle a tight squeeze in the car, I was welcome to come along and help out.

So we left the Museum the following Monday and headed for McGaurens Beach, a small stretch of coast located between Yarram and Sale. The car ride down was a bit of a squeeze with Peter Swinkels, Steven Sparrey (Preparation), Brendon Taylor (Preparation), Michael Pennell (Image Management & Copyright) and I (Live Exhibits) all stuffed into the Hilux for the three hour trip down to McGaurens Beach. We arrived around lunchtime, and started to inspect the dead whale and the surrounding conditions (such as the tide) to plan our course of action.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) belong to the suborder Mysticeti, the group known as the baleen whales. Baleen is the keratin (the same material your fingernails) plates that the whales use to filter their food (krill, other zooplankton and small fish) with. Adult humpback whales can measure between 12-16 metres, and can weigh over 30 tonnes!

When we arrived at McGaurens Beach the whale sat just above the low tide mark. It would make it very hard to work on the whale when the tide came in, so we decided to move it higher up the beach and out of reach of the tide. This way we could work on it all day.

The Humpback Whale 6 days after it had died.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

To avoid damage to the flippers we removed them before the excavator dragged the whale up past the high tide mark. Although the excavator weighed 25 tonnes, it still struggled to pull the whale 50m up the beach.

Cutting off the flippers to enable easy movement up the beach.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

To cut off the flippers and through the flesh we used very large sharp knives and a special knife shaped like a hockey stick, called a flensing tool. Flensing tools were what whalers used to use to cut the blubber off whales before commercial whaling was banned in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Some legal whaling still continues today in indigenous communities as traditional hunting, and through exploiting legal loopholes under the guise of scientific research.

Manager of Preparation, Peter Swinkels, with a traditional flensing tool.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

After dragging the body past the high tide mark we took measurements of different parts of the whale. These measurements will be added to a big database full of information that helps us understand these wonderful creatures of the sea.

Measuring the width of the tail flukes.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

After all the measurements had been recorded it was time to remove the skeleton. Firstly, we needed to find some small vestigial bones that are the remnants of the whale's hip and hind legs. Millions of years ago the ancestors of the modern whales we see today had front and rear limbs, and while the forelimbs slowly evolved into flippers, the hind limbs slowly disappeared and all that is left is a few tiny bones.

Peter Swinkels holding the vestigial hind limbs.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

After cutting away most of the flesh and blubber we removed the vertebrae (the backbone). Slowly and carefully, we removed the ribs, the skull, and the mandible (the jawbone). All the fleshy waste was returned to sea, where it would be eaten and broken down by scavenging animals and bacteria.

The pile of blubber we made after removing it from the carcass.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Once we had all the bones, we dug a big hole and put the bones into it. We bury the bones so that bacteria and other flesh eating organisms can clean the bones for us. In about six months, we will return to where the bones are buried and bring them back to the museum for a few touch ups and further measurement. Perhaps one day they will be put on display at Melbourne Museum for you to see.

All the bones about to be buried in order to let the flesh decompose before taking them to Melbourne Museum.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

ABC Gippsland: radio interview with Erich Fitzgerald

ABC Gippsland: photos and story about whale recovery

Infosheet: Blue Whale

MV News: Rare whale retrieved (2008)

MV Blog: What's that smell?

Maik is an Assistant Keeper with the Live Exhibits Unit.

Live Exhibits recently acquired some Flinders Ranges Scorpions. They are not on display to the public but will be used for educational purposes.

The Flinders Ranges Scorpion (Urodacus elongatus) is one of Australia's largest scorpion species, with males growing up to 120mm long. Females are usually shorter and more full-bodied. The adults of both sexes are uniformly brown in colour.

These scorpions are found throughout the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. Sexual dimorphism is obvious in this species with males having a very elongated tail, which is where the species name elongatus comes from.

Sexual dimorphism within the Flinders Ranges Scorpion Urodacus elongatus. Male on the right with elongated tail.
Image: Maik Fiedel
Source: Maik Fiedel

Being a temperate species, it can be found living under rocks and logs in the moist gully areas of the ranges. They are territorial and usually solitary. These scorpions build a scrape under rock, creating a shallow burrow. In order to maintain a stable microclimate, they seal off their burrows as temperatures rise.

Scorpions are negatively phototaxic (moving away from light) and they hunt for their prey at night. It is possible for scorpions to overpower prey that is larger than themselves, such as skinks or centipedes, however, they prefer food items roughly 50 per cent of their own body size. Females will also eat their own offspring if stressed or starved. Scorpions drink water droplets off rock surfaces and also obtain water via osmosis. During the cooler months of the year, the scorpions are less active and will generally feed less.

Urodacus elongatus feeding on a cricket.
Image: Maik Fiedel
Source: Maik Fiedel  

As part of courtship, an interesting 'mating dance' is performed. The male takes hold of the female and stings her claw, which has a calming effect. This is necessary because if she becomes aggressive she will attempt to kill the male. In order to mate successfully the scorpions need to be positioned on an even rock surface. The male looks for the correct surface, without breaking his hold of the female. When it is found he deposits his spermatophore onto the rock surface and he drags the female over the top for fertilisation. Once the female has received the sperm the male releases his hold and departs.

A pair of Flinders Ranges Scorpions prior to engaging in the mating ritual, which includes the mating dance and the sexual sting.
Image: Maik Fiedel
Source: Maik Fiedel

After about 18 months, the female gives birth to 20-50 live young which climb up onto the her back. They leave her back at two months of age, to go their own way. Flinders Ranges Scorpions reach maturity (adulthood) after four years and can easily live up to eight years.

Australia's scorpions are not considered dangerous to humans, however, scorpions are venomous. There is still a possibility that you may be allergic to their venom, like some people are allergic to a bee sting. You should never touch a scorpion with your bare hands.

Like all scorpions, Urodacus elongatus will fluoresce under UV light.
Image: Maik Fiedel
Source: Maik Fiedel  

Further reading:

Newton M.A. 2008. A Guide to Keeping Australian Scorpions in Captivity, Mark A. Newton Publishing

Links:

Infosheet: Scorpions

Infosheet: Scorpion facts and fallacies

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

October is an important time of year for bird migration. In the southern hemisphere birds head for their summer breeding grounds. Most species of cuckoo are migratory and the Long-tailed Cuckoo (Eudynamys taitensis) is the greatest traveller of the southern hemisphere cuckoos. It is added to the Australian list owing to its seasonal presence on Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands. Museum Victoria has several specimens of this species, mostly from New Zealand.

Long-tailed Cuckoo skins in their drawer.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some of the specimens are over a hundred years old. Not unusually one of the skins is from John Gould, acquired around 1860, another from James Cockerell, a pioneering nineteenth century collector who gained his specimen in the Solomon Islands in 1879; others are of more recent origin. They almost radiate with a sense of history, and perhaps some mystery too.

Long-tailed Cuckoos spend the winter months in the more tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, mainly in Polynesia. Their spring migration takes them to New Zealand and its surrounding islands. From French Polynesia, the islands around Tahiti, the distance is over 3000 kilometres, a route over open ocean. It is in this group that it is thought the New Zealand Maoris had their ancestral home, the paradisiacal land of Hawaiki.

Some students of Polynesian voyaging have theorised that the original discovery of New Zealand was made by following cuckoo migration. But it is a controversial idea. Maori mythology is replete with stories of ancestral voyaging. The mythology also acknowledges the existence and character of the Long-tailed Cuckoo, 'a lazy parent'. But there does not appear to be any definitive link between them and the voyaging.

Nevertheless, it is a persuasive idea. Long-tailed cuckoos are land birds. Individual Pacific Islands hold relatively few bird species, especially land birds. However unpopulated New Zealand was heavily forested, with a bountiful range of host species which cuckoos could parasitise; the result – lots of cuckoos. Their presence and movements in the islands would have been prominent. Also they migrate over a period of two or three weeks, usually in October. They fly day and night, low over the ocean, calling loudly to each other as they go in a way that can be heard on the water in the dark.

A remarkable Australian, Harold Gatty, was probably the most prominent proponent of the bird migration theory. As a young man he had gained a thorough knowledge of navigation. He emigrated to the United States and rose to fame in 1931 as the navigator on a historic flight around the world in eight days. Along with the pilot, he was given a ticker tape parade in New York and a medal by President Herbert Hoover. Later he served with Macarthur's headquarters in the South Pacific.

In 1943 Gatty published The Raft Book, a survival guide for airmen at sea. It was standard issue in the life rafts aboard all Allied aircraft in the Pacific. The book includes Gatty's ideas about how to navigate using the techniques of 'the greatest pathfinders in history', the Polynesians. As Gatty says, they understood bird migration long before Europeans, understood there was land where the birds were seen to go to, and then return from. They were an adventurous people and brave sailors in canoes that they said 'dared the clouds of heaven'.

Just imagine you are far out from any known land at night, the infinite starry sky above and a seemingly infinite world of water around you, your next landfall an unknown distance away -and nothing but a bunch of cuckoos to guide you on your way. Brave sailors indeed.

Two Long-tailed Cuckoo specimens mounted for exhibition.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Whatever the truth about Maori migration, it is certain that the adult birds in the Museum Victoria collection would have made great voyages across the South Pacific. There is a Long-tailed Cuckoo in the Amazing Animals of Australasia, Oceania and Antarctica in Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world.

Further reading:

Harold Gatty, Nature is Your Guide: how to find your way on land and sea, Collins, London, 1958

David Lewis, We, the Navigators: the ancient art of landfinding in the Pacific, ANU Press, Canberra, 1972

For the sceptical view:

Andrew Sharp Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1963

Avvy is a Programs Officer at Scienceworks. She develops science-related activities and shows for visitors, and organises various community science events.

There was an assortment of chills, thrills and spills at the 2011 Victorian Model Solar Vehicle Challenge held at Scienceworks on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 October.

Scienceworks Arena is transformed for the solar vehicle challenge.
Source: Dione Read

This competition, now in its 19th year, brings together teams of school students from all over Victoria to race solar powered model cars and boats that they have designed, built and tested throughout the year. The two-day event allows participants to discover who is the ‘fastest under the sun’.

Two solar boats prepare to race.
Source: Museum Victoria

In what has almost become tradition for this solar-powered event, the weather on Saturday morning was overcast, cold and drizzly. This did nothing to dampen the spirits of over 700 students and their supporters, fiercely competing in a number of different divisions – primary school teams start their model solar education building junior boats, while the more complex cars and advanced boats are usually built by secondary school students. Teams spend several months building their vehicles, working with science and technology teachers, parents and lab techicians.

Two solar cars competing on the race track.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Taking on the challenge, one of the solar cars that competed at Scienceworks
Source: Museum Victoria  

The patchy conditions and rain over Saturday led to some accidents, as cars that had been tweaked to deal with low levels of sunlight found it hard to maintain a solid grip on the slippery track, while other cars had difficulties to facing the challenging slope of the track. However, Sunday dawned bright and sunny, allowing the solar vehicles to perform at their zippy best – sometimes to their detriment, with some speedy cars losing grip when cornering and spilling off the track.

Scienceworks Arena is transformed for the solar vehicle challenge.
Source: Museum Victoria

After many rounds of knockout races, ‘Comet’ from Geelong College emerged victorious in the car division. ‘Rainbow Warrior’ from Ruskin Park Primary was the winner of the junior boats category, while ‘Interim Name’ from Torquay College took the trophy for advanced boats. These top competitors will receive invitations and sponsorships to attend the national championship in Hobart in November.

Links:

Victorian Model Solar Vehicle Challenge

Bec is working on the history of Museum Victoria's Science Collections and all the people who have been part of them since the museum's origin in 1854.

As a history curator, the dizziest height I usually get to is the top shelf of the archive. So flying over Wilsons Promontory with the Prom Bioscan team last week was a true adventure. 

My job, History of Science Collections Curator, often involves following the archive trail of past scientists to establish the what, where and how behind the specimens in our collections. The history of Wilsons Prom is interwoven with the history of Museum Victoria. Three former directors were instrumental in the establishment and ongoing development of the park. In the 1960s Charlie Brazenor led a museum team survey whose report initiated many of the park's innovations such as a permanent ranger/manager, proper signage and even a small museum at Tidal River.

Charles Brazenor, Curator of Mammals and later Director (second from right) oversaw the museum survey in 1950.
Image: Hope McPherson
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Prom Bioscan represents the next phase of the museum's work at the Prom so I just had to be there to document it. We hold some magnificent historic images of the Prom and it was also a great opportunity to re-shoot some of those locations to get a sense of how the park has changed over time.

Jim Whelan, former chief ranger at the Prom and local keeper of Prom history, has been gleefully working with me on a short history of field surveys at the Prom and was the ultimate guide on my travels.

Jim Whelan, Operations Manager, Wilsons Prom Centre for Excellence sharing his knowledge of the Prom.
Image: Rebecca Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

We flew by helicopter from Tidal River over most of the park, skirting the coastline looking for the rock formations in the historic images I had brought with me. Some locations were simply too difficult to land so we had to hover over the trees and take the photos through the little window of the chopper. Other locations, like Mt Oberon car park, which can't be accessed by road since the floods, were the perfect spot to land the chopper and walk or bushbash to the spots we needed. Jim has every tree; every rock imprinted in his memory and the journey through his memories was as interesting as the chopper ride.

Our longest stop was at Sealers Cove. Having been there many times on foot it was spectacular to see the cove open up before us as we rounded the coastline.

Pilot Ed parked the chopper next to iconic Whale Rock on Sealers Cove beach.
Image: Rebecca Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

I wanted to find remnants of the old wooden tramway used by the mill in 1800s but the terrain was impenetrable. I did, however, find a couple of little wooden posts sticking out of the sand where the massive jetty that serviced the mill once stood. The jetty was built by King and McCulloch in 1903 and extended 800 metres into the cove.

The Sealer's Cove jetty in the 1920s.
Source: Jan Phelan  

Bec Carland getting down and dirty photographing the remnants of Sealers Cove jetty.
Image: Anna McCallum
Source: Museum Victoria  

The last remnants of the Sealers Cove jetty.
Image: Rebecca Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

So today, back at my desk staring out at the Royal Exhibition Building I can still hear the sea and the echo of the radio calls from the chopper headphones buzzing in my ears and if I squint a bit, the cream REB against the blue sky looks a little like the sands of Sealers Cove. The recreated photos are looking good and some truly fascinating moments in the Prom's history are coming together as a series of videos for Collections Online.

On Wednesday a small team - five scientists and two rangers - were allowed into into the protected heart of Wilsons Prom as part of the Prom Bioscan project. The Vereker Creek Reference Area, colloquially known as Paradise Valley, is largely untouched by recent human activity. It is afforded the highest level of conservation protection and access is strictly limited to infrequent scientific research. The purpose of keeping areas such as Paradise Valley closed is to maintain a pristine reference point against which the impacts of human activity can be measured.

The area contains a stand of Antarctic Southern Beech trees (Nothofagus cunninghamii) and thus the possibility of Gondwanan wildlife. Rare and endangered mammals might still persist there. It's a very exciting opportunity for the specialist team but the first obstacle is getting there. There are no tracks to Paradise Valley, just a long hike through swordgrass taller than their heads after being dropped by helicopter on Five Mile Beach.

Wayne and Richard in their helicopter suits waiting for their turn in the chopper.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

I didn't make the cut for the team going in to Paradise Valley, but there was enough room in the helicopter for a couple of us to tag along for the drop-off, which was an adventure in itself. Seeing the Prom from the air was simply amazing.

The beautiful Five Mile Beach seen from above.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

Jim Whelan of Parks Victoria and our pilot Ed in the helicopter.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

Helicopter taking off for Five Mile Beach carrying field gear and three days' food in a sling beneath it.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

Tomorrow I'm heading to Sealers Cove with about half of the MV scientists for more survey work. We'll be back in the middle of next week with much more to report on the Prom Bioscan.

Lantern slide, about 1920, looking out over Sealers Cove (BA 2950)
Image: A.G. Campbell
Source: Museum Victoria  

Museum Victoria has partnered with Parks Victoria for a two-week intensive biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory National Park. The Prom Bioscan project, from 16 to 28 October, is targeting terrestrial, freshwater and marine wildlife and visiting some remote and rarely-visited sites. This rapid census will help Parks Victoria assess the environmental impacts of recent extreme weather events: the 2005 and 2009 fires and the floods in early 2011. On 23 September the southern part of the Prom reopened to visitors after six months of flood repair. Many riparian zones (near creeks and rivers) have changed proundly since the flood, their vegetation and beds scoured away the 370mm of rain that fell in one day in February.

Wilson's Prom is one of Victoria's oldest National Parks. It was first designated a National Park in 1898 due to its unique wilderness, stunning natural beauty and its ease of isolation from the mainland. Its habitats - heathlands, swamps, grasslands, forests and more - house numerous species of plants and animals.

A skink from Wilsons Promontory.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

A lacewing caught at Wilsons Promontory.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Researchers have worked here for decades to document the life and environment of the Prom. The Prom Bioscan is a special case: it's rare to have so many experts working simultaneously across the park. Over 40 Museum Victoria staff and volunteers and 15 Parks Victoria staff are participating.

Karen, Lara and Karen checking mammal traps.
Image: Michela Mitchell
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the first few days, the scientists have observed 69 species of birds, two types of rats, Gondwanan snails, numerous skinks and much more. Some specimens will become part of the Museum Victoria collections whereas others are released after a small tissue sample is taken for genetic research. The days in the field are long, especially for those who follow animals that are active at dawn and dusk, but the stunning surroundings more than make up for it.

Granite boulders, wildflowers and blue sea at Wilsons Promontory.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

You can follow #PromBioscan on Twitter. Tweet your questions for MV scientists about the project to @museumvictoria. 

Links:

Parks Victoria: Wilsons Promontory National Park 

When you see sausages at a butcher, or purchase a barbecued fundraising snag, spare a thought for the sausage-shaped marine animals that formed one of Australia's first export industries. The trade in trepang between Chinese, Macassan and northern Australian Aboriginal people is the focus of the Trepang exhibition at Melbourne Museum which closes on 16 October.

The trade of trepang or sea cucumbers dates back before 1700. The product is known by several names: trepang (Indonesian), bêche-de-mer (French), hai-sum (Chinese) and namako (Japanese). While the live animals are shaped like a sausage, the product that is eaten is usually the dried skin (body wall) or pickled intestines. In Japan they are generally eaten fresh.

Namako (sea cucumber) for sale in a Japanese supermarket.
Image: Hector Garcia
Source: Used under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) from kirainet  

Today, trepang fisheries exist throughout the Indo-Pacific area, including Madagascar, Ecuador, Canada, New Zealand and northern parts of Australia. The products are most often consumed in China, Korea, Japan, and some smaller Indo-Pacific islands such as Samoa and Indonesia.

The Australian trade began with 600 tonnes in the early years – about six million live animals – to 11,000 tonnes in the 1990s. This high demand resulted in over-exploitation in some areas because the animals were easy to collect, slow growing and had low reproductive rates. As a result, today's fisheries target deeper water species and are carefully managed, but some species are still over-fished.

A sea cucumber (Stichopus mollis) in its natural habitat.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria  

So they look like sausages but do they taste like sausages? I asked around. The closest response was from Mel, one of the museum's marine collection managers who has lived in Japan.

"I've only eaten sea urchin [a related echinoderm group] which tasted like mushed-up prawns, but I've heard sea cucumbers taste rubbery."

Nonetheless they are a delicacy for some. Sea cucumbers are rumoured to have anti-inflammatory and aphrodisiac properties, although the latter may be based more on the shape and behaviour of the live animal rather than any scientific proof.

Exhibitions about science and technology are notoriously difficult to keep up-to date because those scientists just won't stop discovering and inventing things! Curator Kate Phillips encountered an example of this last week, after someone spotted a discrepancy between two Melbourne Museum exhibitions, Darwin to DNA (2000) and 600 Million Years: Victoria Evolves (2010).

Both exhibitions compare the similarity of DNA between chimpanzees and humans. The earlier exhibition states that there is less than two per cent difference while the more recent exhibition declares a 96 per cent similarity. While the numbers don't seem to agree, they're not necessarily incorrect because they compare different aspects of the genomes.

Young adult male chimpanzee.
Image: Frans de Waal, Emory University
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from Wikimedia Commons.  

Kate explains:

"The discrepancy comes about because these two exhibitions were developed ten years apart and the understanding of DNA has changed over that time. In 2001 the draft human genome was published and a final version in 2004. In 2005 the draft chimp genome was published and could be accurately compared to the human one. The percentage similarity that came out of this comparison was 96 per cent. Before this time the similarity was probably based on comparing known genes, and therefore was working with less information."

"However the percentage you come up with also depends on how you make the comparison – on which bits of the genome you compare and that could also account for the discrepancy. If you compare genes, we are more similar, if you include the non-coding sequences, we are slightly less similar. Really 98 per cent and 96 per cent are both indicate great genetic similarity."

Chromosomes of a human male. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and chimpanzees have 24 pairs.
Source: National Human Genome Research Institute  

We love that someone noticed this because it means that people are reading exhibition text closely, and keeps us on our toes. It's also, as Kate concludes, a pointed demonstration of "the scale of scientific discovery in the area of genome research over the last ten to twenty years."

Links:

The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (2005) 'Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome' Nature, Vol 437 pp 69-87.  (PDF, 4.3 MB)

Media release from NIH News, 'New Genome Comparison Finds Chimps, Humans Very Similar at the DNA Level' (2005)

Artist Joceline Lee has spent her last few Wednesdays in the basement of the Royal Exhibition Building among the palaeontologists, geologists, rocks and fossils. She is working on drawings for her first solo exhibition, Rendered Bones.

Joceline draws skeletons and anatomical forms in pen and ink which makes palaeontological specimens the ideal material for her. When I visited her at work, she was drawing an echidna skeleton that she'd selected from the collection. She was accompanied by her mentor Rob Delves, a sculptor who has worked with Joceline for seven years at Art Day South. This project is run by Arts Access Victoria in Melbourne's south-east to give artists with disabilities opportunities to develop their artwork through workshops, mentorships, collaborations and exhibitions.

  Joceline Lee and Rob Delves working on an echidna skeleton in the Museum Victoria Palaeontology Department.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Rob said that when she first came to Art Day South, her drawings were intricate and very tiny. "Her linework was amazing in these little drawings and they just said 'skeletons'." He started bringing her photographs and models of animal skeletons about three years ago, and Joceline was hooked. "Then we brought in bigger things and it's grown from there." In July this year, MV's Discovery Program visited Art Day South bringing a tortoise shell, a huge model dinosaur leg, fossils and more for the artists to explore.

Joceline works slowly but steadily for hours at a time, with each drawing taking two to three weeks to complete. Rob loves her unique style of drawing. "She goes off in beautiful directions, with all this contrast... dark and fine lines."

Rendered Bones is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival program from 4 to 9 October in the No Vacancy Project Space in the Federation Square Atrium. Be sure to visit the exhibition if you'd like to see Joceline's distinctive interpretation of fossils, bones and skeletons.

Flyer for Rendered Bones exhibition.
Image: Arts Access Victoria
Source: Arts Access Victoria

Links:

Melbourne Fringe Festival: Rendered Bones

No Vacancy Gallery: Rendered Bones

This post is by Melvin Patinathan, Assistant Keeper with the Live Exhibits Unit.

The Giant Burrowing Cockroach (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), also known as the Rhinoceros Cockroach, is one of Australia's treasures. It is the world's heaviest cockroach, weighing up to a whopping 30g. Although it is not the longest, it still can get up to 70-80mm in length (the longest is probably the winged Giant Brazilian Cockroach, Blaberus giganteus, growing up to 90mm). This giant critter is wingless and heavily armoured, which helps it withstand predator attacks – if that doesn't work it can emit a hissing noise which can be quite startling.

Giant Burrowing Cockroach (Macropanesthia rhinoceros).
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

I recently took the specimen below to Scienceworks for the Inspiring Scientists weekend, where he was a giant hit with hundreds of young visitors. Although I'm fond of many of the animals we keep at Live Exhibits, Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are one of my favourites.

The handsome hand shows how big a male Giant Burrowing Cockroach can get.
Image: Adam Elliot
Source: Museum Victoria  

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are found in dry eucalyptus scrubland of northern Queensland; Cape York to Rockhampton and the Whitsunday Islands. Male cockroaches have a prominent ridge on their pronotum (an extended first segment of the thorax of the insect that forms a shield over its head) where females do not have a distinct ridge but tend to be larger and heavier than males.

A few sub-adults collecting dry eucalyptus leaves on the soil surface.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

Like their name suggests, they are burrowing creatures and use their shovel-like pronotum and large spiny powerful digging legs to dig burrows as deep as one metre. The cockroaches line their burrows with twigs and dry eucalypt leaves that they gather from the surface. These gentle giants are specialist feeders; they only eat dry, crisp eucalypt leaves.

Giant Burrowing Cockroach emerging from its burrow in a terrarium.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are nocturnal and spend most of their time hidden in their burrows. They are most active at night when they come to the surface to feed; these giant cockroaches have been mistaken for small turtles when crossing roads.

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches generally do not venture too far away from their burrows except during breeding season when it is warm and humid, especially after rain. The warm humid climate provides ideal mating conditions and mating occurs at night. Once the female is gravid (pregnant) she will prepare her burrow by dragging down leaves to feed her young. This species of burrowing cockroach are oviviparous, which means that the eggs are incubated within the body and are sustained by yolk sacs.

Juveniles and their mother at the entrance of their burrow.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Unusual among insects, instead of laying eggs, females of this species give birth to live young. The female giant burrowing cockroach will produce up to 20 live young and she will care for them for up to a year. Juvenile cockroaches reach maturity at about three or four years of age and best of all apart from being the heaviest cockroach in the world, these amazing cockroaches can live up to ten years.

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are permanently on display under the 'Diversity' exhibit in Bugs Alive!.

Further reading:

Henderson A., Henderson D., & Sinclair J. 2008. Bugs Alive: A guide to keeping Australian invertebrates, Museum Victoria pp. 47

Rentz D.C.F. 1996. Grasshopper country: the abundant orthopteriod insects of Australia, University of New South Wales Press, pp. 225-228

Rugg D. & Rose H. A. 1991. Biology of Macropanesthia rhinoceros Saussure (Dictyoptera: Blaberidae). Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Entomological Society of America, pp. 575-582

Links:

Question of the Week: How to sex a cockroach

Question of the Week: Cockroaches

Last week was pretty special. Over at ACMI, they celebrated the launch of their fantastic new exhibition, Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen. To help them out, they had the real deal in town – someone who has experienced space, not just seen it in the movies – a NASA astronaut.

Mission Specialist Rex Walheim, has flown in space three times. It so happened, that each of his trips was on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, including the final ever flight of the space shuttle program. That last mission was just over two months ago.

NASA astronaut Rex Walheim.
Source: NASA 

I remember staying up until 1.30am on that July evening to watch Atlantis’ final launch – little did I know that I’d soon meet one of the amazing people that I saw zooming into space that morning.

At the opening of the Star Voyager exhibition, Rex won our hearts as he described seeing the aurora australis on his recent trip into space. He noticed Melbourne had left its lights on for him and said how much he’d hoped he would get to visit the city that looked so beautiful from space.

The aurora australis as seen during the final flight of Atlantis. The space shuttle is in view on the right and one the space station's solar panels can be seen on the left.
Source: NASA 

There are so many things you want to ask an astronaut and so many amazing things to learn. It’s refreshing to hear that even astronauts have to pinch themselves before take-off, to be certain they’re really there. And encouraging to know that when you practise hard enough, even a spacewalk ends up feeling commonplace. Like with anything else, all that practice just kicks in and you simply realise you’ve done this a hundred times before, once more will be a breeze.

We all imagine how hard it must be do to all the everyday things of life in space – but it seems that adjusting back to Earth is also quite a challenge. As someone who loves their sleep, I was surprised to hear that sleeping in space is easy - as long as you tie your sleeping bag down so you don’t float away. Whereas, it’s when you get back home and have to deal with gravity pushing against you, making your head feel like lead against the pillow, that sleep is hard to find.

Rex Walheim working on the Columbus Laboratory outside the International Space Station in February 2008.
Source: NASA 

What a difference a day makes! This is the same spacewalk as above but since the ISS orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, the astronauts work in the sunlight for 45 minutes, followed by 45 minutes of night.
Source: NASA

But the best thing for me, was hearing how zero-gravity works from someone who has been there and done that. Now believe me, I’ve described this effect many a time, but there was something special hearing it first hand and the way Rex set it up was just perfect.

If you could take an elevator 350km up into the air (that’s how high the International Space Station flies above us) and you were silly enough to step out, Earth’s gravity would grab you just as you’d expect and send you plummeting back to Earth. Of course, it's kind of obvious, but what an image it creates! And I did the maths – at that height the gravitational force is only 10 per cent smaller than what we feel on the ground. Your instincts would be spot on.

Of course the trick of zero-g is the speed at which Atlantis or the ISS are travelling, and here Rex fell back to Isaac Newton’s famous description. But where Newton used a cannon, Rex described a tennis ball. Using his fist as the Earth, he got us to imagine throwing that ball hard into the air. It might manage to fly a little way before falling back on our knuckles. Throw it harder and it might go half way round our fist. Throw it at 28,000 km/hour, the speed of the shuttle, and it will keep going, forever circling the Earth and always falling, just never re-connecting with the ground.

Newton's description of free-fall using a cannonball that's shot around the Earth.
Image: Brian Brondel
Source: wikimedia commons 

When we watch astronauts floating around it looks like zero-g. But it isn’t. We’re told microgravity is the correct term, but I must admit, that never really did work for me. Both those terms seem to say that the gravity up there is insignificant. From now on, I’ll always call it free-fall. That experience of falling without ever hitting the ground because speed has overwhelmed gravity. Rex says it's just like being a kid and dreaming you can fly.

NASA’s been under some criticism as it closes-out the shuttle program with only a hazy view of what might come next. But with people like Rex Walheim involved, you can but hope that NASA gets the support and backing it needs to build a future just as amazing as our science fiction dreams.

 Rex Walheim enjoys a final look at Earth from inside the cupola on the ISS, as he completed his week long visit to the Station.
Source: NASA

Links:

MV Blog: Chat with an astronaut

Today, students from Spotswood Primary School attended Scienceworks to participate in an online conference with NASA astronaut, Rex Walheim. Rex is in Australia as a guest of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) to launch their new exhibition Star Voyager, Exploring Space on Screen.

To coincide with the launch, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development organised an online conference using their Elluminate software. Rex was speaking to students in the ACMI theatre at Federation Square. Scienceworks' Program Coordinator, Bronwyn Quint organised for Spotswood PS students to participate in the session which was projected onto the big screen in the Auditorium. MV Astronomer, Dr Tanya Hill was also on hand to answer questions from the Spotswood students.

Bron Quint and Tanya Hill preparing for the online conference (fingers crossed that the technology works).
Image: Pennie Stoyles
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Tanya Hill answering questions from Spotswood PS students.
Image: Pennie Stoyles
Source: Museum Victoria  

Over 100 other schools throughout the state also participated. Many questions were submitted throughout the 45-minute session and those that could not be answered by Rex during the presentation will be posted on the DEECD website.

Astronaut Rex Walheim answering student questions via online conference.
Image: Pennie Stoyles
Source: Museum Victoria  

We've lent a number of objects to ACMI for the Star Voyager exhibition, including a space glove, a large number of magic lantern slides, a urine collection device and an altitude and azimuth instrument.

Altitude and Azimuth Instrument - Troughton & Simms, London, circa 1836 (ST 022216)
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Rex Walheim's Biography

Star Voyager, Exploring Space on Screen.

MV Blog: Lost in Space

Recently, a visitor to Bugs Alive! asked me whether daddy long-legs are spiders. The answer depends on what one is referring to when employing the term "daddy long-legs". It can be used to refer to a group of close relatives of spiders known as the harvestmen, which are arachnids (as are spiders) but are nonetheless not spiders. It can also be used to refer to crane flies, which are insects and not arachnids. The term is, however, most commonly used in Australia to refer to a species of spider known scientifically as Pholcus phalangioides. P. phalangioides is also sometimes known as the grandaddy long-legs, the cellar spider or the house spider, and is commonly found in houses in its irregularly structured webs which it often weaves in dark areas, such as under desks and behind bookshelves, or in the corners of ceilings in disused rooms.

The spider Pholcus phalangioides is commonly referred to as the "daddy long-legs".
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria

Harvestmen, however, live in vastly different environments than does Pholcus phalangioides. They have been found in moist leaf litter, under rotting logs, under rocks and under the bark of trees. Unlike spiders, which are classified under order Araneae, harvestmen are classified under order Opiliones. The cephalothorax (the anterior/front body segment) of harvestmen is fused broadly with the abdomen (the posterior/rear body segment) to form a body which seemingly lacks a waist, whereas there is a distinct division between these two body segments in spiders. Furthermore, harvestmen have two eyes which are each positioned on the end of stalk-like projections found in a region approaching the top of the cephalothorax, as compared with spiders, which generally possess eight eyes attached directly to the anterior (front) region of the cephalothorax.

Harvestmen are commonly referred to as “daddy long-legs” but they are not spiders. The above specimen’s second right leg appears blurry because harvestmen use their second pair of legs much like antennae, constantly waving them around.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria

The two body segments of harvestmen are fused to give the appearance of a body with a much reduced or absent waist.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

Unlike spiders, harvestmen do not produce silk, and they are omnivorous, having been known to feed on other invertebrates, plant matter, and the rotting carcasses of birds and mammals. They are non-venomous but can chew their food, whereas spiders must use venom injected by their fangs to convert their prey to liquid which they drink. Male harvestmen have a penis, which facilitates the direct transfer of sperm (from the genital region) to the female, whereas male spiders must use their pedipalps (which encircle the mouth) to do this indirectly.

The distinct division between the two body segments of Pholcus phalangioides gives the appearance of a waist.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria

The bulbous terminations to the male’s pedipalps of Pholcus phalangioides are used to transfer his sperm to the female.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria  

The pedipalps of harvestmen are used for food-handling only as males have a penis which enables the direct transfer of sperm to females.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Live Exhibits department sometimes has harvestmen in its collection. We are considering the merits of putting them on display in the near future, possibly to illustrate the differences between spiders and harvestmen.

A harvestman I recently found inside a house, oddly enough.
Image: Tim Blackburn
Source: Museum Victoria  

Further reading:

Harvey, M. S. And Yen, A. L. (1997) Worms to Wasps. Oxford University Press, Oxford: p. 86-87.

Milledge, G. A. and Walker, K. L. (1992) Spiders Commonly Found in Melbourne and Surrounding Regions. Royal Society of Victoria, Melbourne.

Links:

Question of the Week: Daddy long-legs spiders

Harvestmen (CSIRO)

Harvestmen (Wikipedia)

Pholcus phalangiodes (Wikipedia)

Pholcidae (Wikipedia)

When Natural Sciences Collection Manager Dermot Henry heard a radio report about efforts to salvage gold from the Royal Charter shipwreck, the story rang a bell. "I had recollections of seeing a little gold specimen that had come from a shipwreck." Sure enough, in the Geology Collection he located a small nugget with a curious label explaining that it was a survivor of the Royal Charter, which was lost off the coast of Wales in 1859. The typed label probably accompanied the nugget on display at the former Industry and Technology Museum. It reads in part:

One of the passengers had a part of his property in a belt round his waist, and in swimming ashore was dashed against the rocks and the belt burst where this was picked up but his life was saved after being three times washed back into the sea off the rock. Name of above passenger W. J. Ferris.

The ship was just three hours from its destination in Liverpool when a terrible storm drove it onto rocks. Carrying over four hundred people and gold worth millions in today's money, the loss was a terrible one for Australia and England. Many of the passengers were returning home after striking it rich in the central Victorian goldfields. Just a handful of people survived including the man on the label – William J. Ferris, a Ballarat shopkeeper.

The gold nugget that survived the Royal Charter shipwreck. It is 17mm long and weighs about 4g.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dermot tracked the specimen back to a donation to the Public Library, Melbourne, from Mr Gordon Thomson, reported in the Argus in 1874. "We don't know how Thompson ended up with the gold," says Dermot. The report says that the two men met in Ireland but the nature of their transaction is not recorded.

Thomson himself was quite a character with a habit of collecting curious things. Irish-born into a wealthy family, he spent much of his life travelling the world and amassing ethnographic objects. His "very fine mansion" in Belfast called 'Bedeque-house' held "rich stores of curiosities and relics gathered from many lands." Among the relics were at least two treasures from Victorian history from his first visit to Melbourne in 1835, when the city was in its wattle-and-daub infancy. There he befriended William Buckley, who absconded from imprisonment to live with the Aboriginal people of Port Phillip Bay for more than 20 years. Buckley gave Thomson a greenstone axe-head that had "passed 20 years of its life of usefulness in Buckley's belt." The axe head and the Royal Charter gold specimen ended up in the Belfast museum along with hundreds of other objects Thomson collected on his travels.

When Thomson decided to return to Melbourne to live, he requested that the Belfast museum return the colonial objects, believing that they rightly belonged in their home country. Thus, in 1874, they travelled back over the oceans and were deposited in Melbourne public collections. We still have the gold but Buckley's axe has been missing for many years, its whereabouts unknown. Thomson built another 'Bedeque-house' in Dudley Street, West Melbourne. His 1886 obituary mourned the "death of one of the oldest Melbourne residents."

Links:

'Gold rush ship yields its treasures' - The Age, 18 July 2011

Report of Thomson's donations, The Argus, 23 Octopber 1874

Thomson's obituary, 'Death of one of Melbourne's Oldest Residents' - The Argus, 8 Jun 1886

William Buckley on Australian Biography

Further reading:

Winifred Glover, In the Wake of Captain Cook: The Travels of Gordon Augustus Thomson (1799 - 1886) Ulster Historical Foundation, 1993

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

13 September this year marks the 150th anniversary of the day that Alfred Howitt and his party reached the dig tree at Fort Wills, where the missing explorers Burke and Wills and their party had made their base for the trek to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Two days later a member of Howitt’s party, Edwin Welch, found John King alive and being cared for by the local Aboriginal people. The remains of both Burke and Wills, who had died around the end of June, were found and buried a few days later.

As noted in a previous post, Museum Victoria holds a small but interesting group of specimens that Howitt collected on two expeditions to Cooper Creek.

The bird specimens Howitt dispatched to Melbourne are shown here in taxonomic order.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Howitt's specimens include two specimens of the Spinifex Pigeon, Geophaps plumifera. The species had been described as the Plumed Pigeon by John Gould as early as 1842, from a specimen collected by Benjamin Bynoe, the ship’s surgeon on the Beagle, a man who had treated Darwin for illness on its historic voyage. However it was known to the explorers of the 1860s as ‘Sturt’s Pigeon’.

Howitt's two specimens of the Spinifex Pigeon Geophaps plumifera.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some years later, Howitt wrote that when he reached the dig tree he found 'the loose sandy soil was so run over by the tracks of birds and small animals that no traces of footprints could be seen'. He and Welch both noted in their journals the presence of ‘crested pigeons’ in the area. Howitt says they were 'numerous', Welch that they were in 'immense numbers'. The Crested Pigeon Ocyphaps lophotes was certainly present; there are two in the upper right corner of the collection pictured. But Howitt specifically states that it was the 'small crested pigeon, spoken of by Sturt' to which he referred.

Welch also remarked that the pigeons were a first-rate change of diet, roasted on coals. Sturt’s party had also enjoyed them, unlike the O. lophotes which he found 'neither tender nor well-flavoured'. Why Burke and Wills were unable to exploit this source of food as Howitt’s party had done remains a mystery. Their deaths were the result of starvation. Is it possible the pigeons had only arrived in the area of Fort Wills in such numbers in the intervening eleven weeks since the deaths?

Sturt first encountered the bird in 1845 during his search for an inland sea. It was on his third and final exploration from Fort Grey, his last base camp near what is now the meeting of New South Wales, South Australian and Queensland borders. At the eastern end of Cooper Creek (which he named) he realised, with advice from local Aborigines, that no substantial body of water was to be found and began what was to prove his penultimate retreat. On the way back down the creek, 4 November 1845, he recorded in his daily journal: 'Mr Stuart shot a new and beautiful crested pigeon'. (John McDouall Stuart would himself achieve great fame as an explorer.) Four days later another was shot and he recorded a description of its behaviour. There is a colour plate illustration of it in the Narrative of this journey that he published in 1849, written up from his journal.

Colourplate of Sturt's Pigeon from MV's copy the original 1849 edition of Sturt's Narrative.
Image: pigeon-colourplate.jpg
Source: Museum Victoria  

The appendix to this two-volume work includes a description of the birds encountered on the expedition. He states the pigeon was 'entirely confined to about thirty miles along the banks of that creek'.

The species is now known to be mainly sedentary. It is highly unlikely they would have suddenly arrived in this area during the winter months; most likely they were present all along. Sturt was the first to note their quail-like flight; strictly ground-feeders, they would flush suddenly, fly a short distance, then go to cover and be difficult to flush again, preferring to run off through the scrub. Sturt also repeatedly noted the shyness of birds in his explorations throughout the region; it was difficult to get a shot at them. He described his pigeon as 'very wild'. These pigeons may well have eluded the exhausted Burke, Wills and King, along with other potential food sources such as the cockatoos and parrots that would also have almost certainly been in the area;  they only seemed able to shoot a few crows that no doubt came nosing around too close to their camps.

Howitt’s collection at Cooper Creek extends the range of the pigeon somewhat further south than it is usually found today. Their main range extends further north into the driest stony deserts where there is often no vegetation at all. They like rocky outcrops and are typically seen perched on a rock in the blazing sun in forty degree heat. It was in such a region that Sturt was forced to abandon his search for the inland sea and wrote in his weekly letter to his wife: 'The scene was awfully fearful, dear Charlotte. A kind of dread...came over me as I gazed upon it. It looked like the enrance into Hell'. His pigeons were perfectly at home around the ‘entrance into hell’. Paradoxically, in spite of their fondness for blazing deserts, they are never far from water. But unlike Sturt, a muddy little puddle is enough for them.

Sturt's Pigeon mounted specimen.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Prior to becoming a keeper with the Live Exhibits team at Melbourne Museum, my knowledge of grasshoppers was quite limited. Locusts were probably the type of grasshopper of which I was most aware, due to their high numbers during the warmer months. They are also responsible for the must-have car fashion accessory adorning the front of vehicles, in the form of flywire to stop cars from overheating. In truth, locusts are just one of an estimated 700 species of grasshopper in Australia.

The Common Toad Hopper (Buforania crassa) is an inquisitive creature.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria  

Live Exhibits keeps many different types of grasshoppers and I am quite intrigued by them all, but the species which first caught my attention was the Common Toadhopper (Buforania crassa) from Central Australia. They are not particularly big - females are approximately 60mm long and males 40 mm long - and contrary to their name they rarely hop or jump, preferring to walk around. They have been described as an inquisitive grasshopper and that is what drew me to them. As with pets at home, if you are looking after an animal and you buy it a new toy or feed it a new food then you hope that they will enjoy it or get a reaction from it. I found that not too long after I added food they would be on it or in it. This included pollen, orthopteran mix (made up of muesli, fish flakes and other ingredients), and various forms of foliage, such as abelia, emu bush, acacia, and callistemon. You soon find out that they have their favourites - I would say that callistemon is in the top two.

Common Toad Hopper (Buforania crassa) eating callistemon, one of its favourite foods.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria  

Like most grasshoppers, Common Toadhoppers use camouflage to hide from predators. As you can see from the picture, once they are perched on a rock or stick during the daylight hours they can be very difficult to see. If they are brought up on a light sand substrate then their colours will reflect that.

Common Toadhoppers are masters of camouflage. Their colours can vary depending on what colour substrate they are brought up on.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

Toadhopper perfectly disguised to match the branch it's sitting on.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Their reproductive cycle is very interesting. Grasshoppers generally breed in the summer months with the male perching on the female's back, either mating or guarding her from other males. The female then deposits her eggs in the soft sand and plugs them with a foamy substance. Our toadhopper populations here at Melbourne Museum vary seasonally and in some enclosures we currently have none at all, but we can see where females have deposited their eggs. Grasshopper eggs are good at withstanding drought periods. Normal incubation time for Common Toadhoppers is 1-3 months but it can be as long as 1-2 years, the eggs simply waiting for the right conditions. We can recreate those conditions, simulating warmer days with longer heat and light periods, and heavy rain through flooding the enclosures with water. Then hopefully not too long afterwards, little toadhopper nymphs will appear and even though they may not live up to the second part of their name, these grasshoppers certainly love eating grass.

A young Common Toadhopper.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the meantime, come along to Melbourne Museum and visit our male Common Toadhopper, featured in the arid section of our Habitats display in Bugs Alive!.

Toadhoppers are in the arid habitat display in Bugs Alive!.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria  

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

Amongst the greatest treasures of the museum are its bird egg collections; their delicate beauty is outstanding. A number of the collections were made privately before the practice was ended by government in the 1950s, one the best of them by Norman J. Favaloro. He was a solicitor in Mildura and a leading field ornithologist. He published many papers on his work and was appointed an Honorary Associate in the Ornithology Department in the then National Museum of Victoria. His position enabled him to continue collecting, and towards the end of his life he presented his collection to the museum, complete with detailed documentation. It is one of the largest collections with 1500 clutches nestled in boxes neatly aligned within finely crafted glass-topped drawers in a cedar cabinet, one of the most beautiful in the bird room.

Favaloro's cabinet.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Amongst the thousands of specimens I find one particular treasure that draws my eye. Set marks were used by collectors to identify clutches. On this one is pencilled: "C.A. Red-tail Cockatoo, 17.5.1919, C.S." The Red-tailed Black Cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksii (once known as Banks' Cockatoo for Joseph Banks) is one of the most magnificent of the cockatoo family. It is under threat in parts of Australia, especially Victoria, but central Australia is one of its strongholds, where it is associated with rain in Indigenous culture.

  Mounted specimen of Calyptorhynchus banksii macrorhynchus, one of five sub-species of the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Like most collectors Favaloro swapped items with others to build his collection. In this case he has acquired an egg originally collected by one "C.S.". The data slip states: "Chas. Strehlow. Egg rested on wood dust in a hollow spout of a Red Gum at height of 20 feet up. Bird seen leaving nest." In 1919 Strehlow, a tall, strong man was 47 years old. But without doubt the egg would have been collected by an Aboriginal companion.

Strehlow's egg.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

'Charles' was the Reverend Carl Strehlow, a German missionary who ran the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg from 1894 until his death in 1922. He was also an ethnologist, and has been a rather forgotten figure in the broader discipline of anthropology in Australia. Strehlow's mission was among the central Australian tribes, in particular the Arrernte (or 'Aranda' to use his own spelling). They were the same people studied by Walter Baldwin Spencer, a long serving (1899 to 1928) and perhaps the most famous of Museum Victoria's former directors, and his colleague Frank Gillen.

Strehlow published the results of his ethnological fieldwork in German only, in a series of tomes from 1907 to 1920. They were a major resource for such luminaries of the time as Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud and Bronislaw Malinowski. But continental schools of thought were rejected by British-oriented social anthropologists who saw themselves as supporters of Darwinian science.

In the early years of the 20th century there was much controversy over the nature and origin of  religion among tribal peoples. Strehlow became embroiled in it. His reputation suffered from a clash with Spencer. Then World War I came. He was shocked by the outbreak of anti-German sentiment. Alhough a naturalized citizen, he found himself obliged to register as an enemy alien. By the time he collected the egg near the mission in 1919, he was hardly even a footnote in the literature of Australian anthropology.

Spencer continued on his illustrious and productive career until his death at Tierra Del Fuego in 1929. Strehlow's fate was not just obscurity, but a painful end. Just three years after collecting the egg, in October 1922 the strains of his work and life in general brought on an attack of the condition then known as dropsy, a massive swelling of the body due to accumulation of fluid. Strehlow needed hospitalisation urgently. His body was so bloated he could only travel strapped in a chair perched in the back of the old horse-drawn mission cart.

He left the mission for the last time with an Arrernte choir singing a hymn derived from J. S. Bach. As he was taken down the dry bed of the Finke River every bump on the track caused pain in his body, every thought the torments of Job. His family and their Arrernte friends were trying to get him to Oodnadatta and the train down to Adelaide. But when they reached Horseshoe Bend he died. The episode is recounted by his son Ted Strehlow in a great memoir, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. The story has what may be thought of as an operatic tragedy about it, and indeed a cantata of the same name was written by the Australian composer Andrew Schultz with the librettist Gordon Kalton Williams, and performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2003.

It is a rich and fascinating part of Australia's history, all there in one little egg in that beautiful Favaloro cabinet.

Links:

Spencer and Gillen Project

Ornithology Collection

Imagine that your face was articulated so that your jaw could split down the middle and expand sideways until the tips were out as wide as your ears. Imagine that you could move all the bones of your face... not just the soft tissue, but the bones themselves.

Sound bizarre? Alien, even? Yet this is exactly what happens every time a Blue Whale takes a gulp of water. The filter-feeding whales, otherwise known as baleen whales or mysticetes, have feeding adaptations that are unique among mammals. Their intriguing evolutionary history is the subject of Dr Erich Fitzgerald's research, and today he's published a paper that overturns a long-held belief about how the baleen whales evolved.

Illustration of the biggest mouth in history at work. The Blue Whale can expand its mouth to gulp huge volumes of krill-filled water.
Image: Carl Buell
Source: Museum Victoria

For several years, he has worked on an extraordinary 25 million-year-old species known from fossils that were found in the 1990s near Jan Juc on Victoria's west coast. Called Janjucetus, this early baleen whale predated the evolution of baleen – the hairy structure used by modern baleen whales to filter tiny crustaceans from the sea. Instead, Janjucetus had the large eyes and ferocious teeth of a hunter.

Dr Erich Fitzgerald holding the jaws of Janjucetus with Melbourne Museum's massive Blue Whale skeleton in the background.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

There are two key changes in the skull that permit the filter feeding of modern whales. The first is a lower jaw that can split down the middle. In humans, the seam (or symphysis) where the two halves of the jawbone meet at our chin is fused, thus our jaws are rigid. In contrast, baleen whales have greatly elongated jawbones that do not meet in the middle. The second change is in the width of the upper jaw; baleen whales have evolved a wide mouth, allowing them to engulf massive volumes of water.

"Previously it was thought that the origins of both features were intimately linked to filter-feeding and that's what differentiated baleen whales from toothed whales and dolphins," explains Erich. His research has just overturned this theory since Janjucetus had a wide upper jaw yet its lower jaw had a tightly connected, immobile symphysis. "So, the loose symphysis is not typical of all baleen whales, it's a later innovation. The earliest baleen whales could not expand and contract their lower jaws so were anatomically incapable of filter-feeding, yet they had these wide upper jaws."

The fossilised jaws of Janjucetus, clearly showing the immobile symphysis at the tip.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

What Erich describes is an elegant example of an exaptation, where a feature evolved to serve a particular function but was later co-opted into a new role. Erich believes that its wide jaw helped Janjucetus to suck in large singe prey items, such as squid or fish, and didn't evolve for filter-feeding at all.

Says Erich, "Charles Darwin reflected upon this in The Origin of Species. He wondered how you could go from a whale that has big teeth like Janjucetus does and catching fish and squid one at a time, to something like a modern Blue Whale that feeds en masse. This is the kind of fossil palaeontologists dream of finding because it shows a transitional form."

"It's an exciting discovery, but actually not as surprising as you might think," concludes Erich. "Evolution by natural selection implies that we should expect to find these kinds of fossils in the rocks." The next question he looks forward to answering is how whales shifted from suction feeding to filter-feeding. "I think we're really close to finding a transitional series of fossils that illuminate this."

Erich's paper about this discovery, 'Archaeocete-like jaws in a baleen whale', is published today in Biology Letters.

Links:

Video: Erich discusses whale evolution

MV News: Ferocious fossil

Dr Erich Fitzgerald's staff biography

Baleen and toothed whales

Following Dr Mark Norman's Warrnambool pub chat about chemistry and communication in deep sea animals on 2 August, the second Backyard Science at the Pub rolls into Bendigo tonight.

Geologist Dermot Henry will explore the origins of crystals and minerals found in central Victoria. The geological processes that made central Victoria such a booming gold-mining area also produced all kinds of other fascinating minerals; studying these helps us understand the rich chemistry of the Earth.

 Fluorapatite, Dolomite and Quartz minerals from 1,200', Diamond Hill area, Bendigo.
Image: Frank Coffa
Source: Museum Victoria

Dermot has worked at Museum Victoria since 1982 and has managed Museum Victoria’s Natural Science collections since 2001. He was responsible for the development of geological themes and content and the selection of specimens for the Dynamic Earth exhibition at Melbourne Museum.

Backyard Science at the Pub is part of National Science Week 2011 and will be held Tuesday 16 August 6pm – 8pm at The Foundry Hotel, 366 High Street, Bendigo. For enquiries or to register your interest, please email or telephone 0412 607 525.

A group of miners at 'crib time', Bendigo, Victoria, circa 1908 (MM 6962).
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Backyard Science at the Pub event on Facebook

Super Science Month

Dermot Henry's staff biography

When Dr Tony Martin joined MV palaeontologist Dr Tom Rich and volunteer Greg Denney on a four-week examination of Victoria's Cretaceous coastline last year, he was hoping to find dinosaur burrows. He didn't expect that he'd find the most significant dinosaur track site in southern Australia instead.

Dr Martin of Emory University, Georgia, was at Museum Victoria recently to examine some trace fossils in the collection. Trace fossils are his speciality and he's spent many years studying the burrows, tracks and trails of prehistoric animals preserved in the fossil record. Decades of searching for tracks at palaeontological sites worldwide means that he has an eye for spotting these subtle and sometimes cryptic trace fossils.

Late in the day during the third week of the Cretaceous Walk, Dr Martin saw something unusual in a slab of rock. Because of the low light he didn't trust his eyes and starting feeling the surface. "I was in awe at first," he says. "One of the things I did was I put my fingers into the indentations and thought OK, that's a track. Then I traced back and found two more, identically sized, making this the first Victorian trackway we know of where there's an actual sequence of steps."

Dr Tony Martin with the dinosaur trackway he found on Melanesia Beach.
Source: Museum Victoria

Until that moment, only four individual dinosaur tracks were known for all of Victoria. But that wasn't the only discovery of the day. Greg Denney long-time local collaborator on the Dinosaur Cove digs, spotted something else. "He saw there was another slab nearby of the same thickness, with the same layers, but upside down. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and flipped it over - and there were seven more tracks on it."

All up, the two slabs have increased the number of Victorian dinosaur tracks by 85 per cent. "They're only about 1.1 square metres but it was a busy little piece of real estate, because there are approximately 24 tracks within that." Some of the footprints are partial tracks and many are very faint but they still reveal a lot about the Victorian environment over 100 million years ago. The dinosaurs in question were small predatory dinosaurs, ranging from about the size of a rooster to the size of a cassowary. They belonged to a group of animals called the ornithomimosaurs, or bird-mimics. Dr Martin postulates that the individuals may have been different ages, and they were walking over swampy areas left on receding snowmelt floodplains in springtime.

In March 2011, Museum Victoria retrieved the two slabs for the palaeontology collection as they were at risk of being lost from erosion and burial. A scientific paper by Dr Martin, Dr Rich and three other experts that describes the amazing find was published in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology yesterday. As Dr Martin summarised it, "I've made other discoveries in my life, and I wouldn't like to rank them, but this one's way up there. It's one I feel very satisfied with that it added quite a bit to what's already a huge wealth of information that's come out of this part of the world."

In this video, Tom Rich talks more about the trackway and the effort to remove the slabs from Melanesia Beach.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Martin, A.J., Rich, T.H., Hall, M., Vickers-Rich, P. & Vazquez-Prokopec, G. A polar dinosaur-track assemblage from the Eumeralla Formation (Albian), Victoria, Australia. Alcheringa, 1–18.

The Age: 'Walking in their footsteps on Victoria's dinosaur trail'

Dinosaur Walk

Karen Rowe is a Research Associate at MV where she studies evolutionary ecology and behaviour in birds and mammals.

Record levels of rainfall in the Northern Territory have brought forth one of Australia’s rare and unique native mammals, the Long-haired, or Plague Rat (Rattus villosissimus). These herbivorous rats feed largely on stems and leaves and, with consistently high rainfall, large areas of the desert landscape have become lush with food. Coupled with an unusually high reproductive rate, where a single female can produce more than 200 young in one year, these rats are capable of large-scale population explosions leading to rapid dispersal over huge distances. They have even been documented moving as much as 3 km in a single night.

In the past, these rodents have spread across the arid regions of Australia, including eastern Western Australia, the Northern Territory, eastern Queensland and parts of South Australia. Historic plagues have been documented as far back as 1847, with others occurring in 1916-18, 1930-32, 1940-42, 1948, 1950-52, 1956, and 1966-69.

Once the plague recedes, they vanish almost as quickly as they arrived and during non-plague years, they become rare and hard to find, persisting in only a few locations.

Taking advantage of this unique opportunity to document the latest plague, I joined MV mammal curator, Kevin Rowe, and collections manager, Wayne Longmore, to try to find these rats in the Northern Territory, along the Finke River.

MV curator, Kevin Rowe (left), and collections manager, Wayne Longmore (right), trapping rats in the desert rain.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

We found them in abundance – nearly all of our live traps contained a long-haired rat, and one had two!

Rattus villosissimus caught along the Finke River.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

We even found part of the skeleton of one in a bird pellet – the undigested material regurgitated by a bird, particularly in birds of prey.

Bird pellet before dissection.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

After dissection – most of the skull and jaw were intact (on left).
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

Long-haired rats build burrows in the sand, consisting of meters of tunnels with multiple entrances and exits. They use these burrows extensively, spending nearly 80% of their time underground.

Rattus villosissimus burrow entrance.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

At the Finke River site, the sandy soil made it easy to see footprints into and out of these burrows.

Rattus villosissimus footprints.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

Kevin and Wayne are still on the hunt for the plague rat, hoping to find more populations in the Barkly Tablelands and central NT. By studying these rats from throughout the state and recording natural history data such as behaviour and habitat, as well as traits of the rats themselves, including age and reproductive state, we can better understand the ecology and biology of this unique, native, and (most of the time!) rare mammal.

Links:

MV Blog: On rats

A photograph by museum entomologist Dr Ken Walker has just won a coveted place in the annual international Leica calendar. In 2012, the company’s calendar will feature microscope photographs, and Leica put out a call for entries. Ken’s photograph of the head of a tiny, undescribed lichen moth in the genus Chamaita (family Arctiidae) was one of 12 selected.

The winning photograph of the head of a male lichen moth.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

The photograph, as well as being incredibly beautiful, is an important diagnostic tool.  This species is a pest in palm plantations in New West Britain, Papua New Guinea. To assist those who need to identify it, the species has its own page , featuring the winning photograph and others, on PaDIL (Pests and Diseases Image Library).

Says Ken, "It’s a great recognition for the photographic skills we have developed here over the past six years to have an image to be used in the high-quality calendar." The competition was open to anyone using Leica microscope and camera equipment; the prize is a Leica EZ4 dissecting microscope. This prize will go right back into PaDIL’s suite of specialist technical equipment to create more photographs like this one. 

Links:

PaDIL

The Australian node of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is now live!

BHL is a project started by a consortium of American and English museums and herbaria that wanted to make historical biodiversity texts available online. These important books and journals are scanned, uploaded to the Internet Archive, and made available through the first BHL website. It's especially useful to scientists needing historical information about species, distributions and taxonomy, but it's also a fascinating site for anyone interested in natural history or rare books. Museum Victoria is managing the Australian part of the project in conjunction with the Atlas of Living Australia.

Since late last year, MV Online Developer Michael Mason has been creating a mirror site of the USA/UK original, ready to receive scans of Australian books later this year. At present, the Australian site provides everything the original site provides but with a different interface. "We started with the US model and changed the appearance and some parts of the functionality," says Michael.

Online developer Michael Mason.
Source: Museum Victoria

The first difference you'll notice is the local influence; the page is adorned with beautiful illustrations of Australian wildlife by Gould and Australian books are featured. Michael has also worked with designer Simon O'Shea to overhaul the way the book viewer looks and works to make it more user-friendly.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia website.
Source: Museum Victoria

At present, the 34,596,227 pages in the BHL-Australian node come from libraries in US institutions so there is plenty of Australian content yet to be added. First off the rank in this national project are some of the in-house journals that have already been scanned by other museums including those of the Queensland Museum and the Western Australian Museum. Museum Victoria, with new book-scanning equipment, will be leading the development of new scanning projects starting with the complete archive of Memoirs of Museum Victoria containing the first scientific descriptions of many Victorian animal species. This will be very handy for biologists worldwide who don't have ready access to hard copies of this journal. Later on, rare books from MV and the libraries of other Australian institutions will be scanned and uploaded.

The high-quality scans are not just useful, but often quite beautiful. You get the whole book – covers, library labels, marbled endpapers and marks of age – not just the text within. Michael's favourites are the 1600s books in Latin with fantastical illustrations. "You'd never get to see these in a library, they're too fragile and valuable," he says. BHL puts these wonderful books in the hands of anyone.

Links

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia

Biodiversity Heritage Library

MV News: BHL visitors

In 2007, Museum Victoria research scientists described the world's tiniest starfish, the Paddle-spined Seastar. Here are three of them under the microscope last week, filmed by Ben Healley.

Like all starfish, these animals are powered by many legs called tube feet. Each has a sucker on the tip which is how they crawl around and hang upside down under rocks. On the video they appear transparent so are difficult to see moving out from underneath each arm. They stick to the glass and drag the animal across the surface.

They don’t have eyes but they do have eyespots. You can also see these on the video. They are the dark patches at the tip of each arm, on top of the animal. Detecting light and dark, they help the animal tell if it is under a ledge or on top of it, or whether something large, like a possible predator, is passing overhead.

Interestingly, the individual pictured in reports when this species was discovered has five legs, not six. According to MV curator Dr Tim O'Hara, "it’s typical for this species to have six arms but every now and then, you’ll get an uneven split during reproduction and end up with a five-armed individual.”

Links:

MV News: Tiny star

As I collected my boys from after school care the other evening, my seven year old stopped in the middle of the playground and cried out “Mum, what’s that in the sky? It looks like a rocket!”

He had stumbled upon the International Space Station, and let me tell you, it really couldn’t be missed. It was shining more brightly than any star and of course, it was moving. We stopped to watch it for a minute or so, as it slowly made its way across the sky before becoming lost in cloud.

 Sunlight glinting off the International Space Station.
Source: NASA

The boys were thrilled, especially when I told them that people were living up on that shiny dot of light. Right now, it’s home to “Expedition Crew 28”, made up of six astronauts who will live on the station from May to September.

We wondered what kind of view they were getting of the Earth. Perhaps looking down on us and seeing the twinkling lights of Melbourne and the other capital cities.

The Expedition 28 crew members (from left to right): Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa, Mike Fossum, Ron Garan, Alexander Samokutyaev, Sergei Volkov and Commander Andrey Borisenko
Source: NASA

Maybe, like us, the astronauts were looking forward to dinner. The boys were chuffed to discover that even astronauts can eat Spaghetti Bolognese (a favourite in our household). Of course, up there you have to bolt your dinner plate down or have it float away.

If you haven’t seen the ISS, I really suggest you try. We might have lucked upon it, but there are great websites like Heavens Above that give the precise time and direction for your next chance to see it.  

And while you stare up at that bright little light, travelling steadily across the night sky, I encourage you to imagine what it might be like to trade places, just for a moment, with a spacefaring astronaut. 

Garden Wolf Spiders, Lycosa godeffroyi, are commonly found on the prowl around Victorian gardens at night.They are modern spiders, or araneomorphs, in the family Lycosidae and they differ from many other spiders through their prey capture technique. Wolf spiders are active hunters that chase down their prey.

Wolf spider, Lycosa godeffroyi
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

During the day wolf spiders seek cover in vertical burrows, often utilising discarded invertebrate burrows, however they will dig their own if necessary.

Wolf spider emerging from its burrow
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Wolf spider peering out of its burrow, using its posterior eyes
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Wolf spiders are attractive spiders, ranging in colour from black to orange-brown with striking grey patterns on their carapace. Males have large bulbs on their pedipalps and females are typically larger and more robust than males. They are common throughout southern Australia in a range of habitats.

 Wolf spider
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Males court female through a series of leg drums and vibrations while ‘dancing’ with his forelegs.  If the female is receptive she will allow him to approach.  The male will then present the female with a sperm package on one of his palpal bulbs, (as spiders do not have penises) which she will store and use to fertilise her eggs.

Female wolf spider carrying her egg sac
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Sometime after fertilisation the female produces an egg sac, which she carries with her (even while hunting) under her abdomen. 30 – 40 days later the eggs hatch producing up to 200 spiderlings. The spiderlings do not immediately disperse; instead they ride on their mother’s back for a few weeks.  When they are ready to fend for themselves they disperse via silk strands.

Female wolf spider covered in her spiderlings
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Female wolf spider carrying her spiderlings
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Wolf spiders are not aggressive by nature; they will however defend themselves if provoked. The anatomy of their feet – they have three claws and no hair tuffs on the tips of their legs – means they cannot negotiate slippery surfaces. This makes them good pets because they are easy to house and care for in a glass jar or terrarium.

Wolf spider, Lycosa godeffroyi
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Victorian Spiders

Wolf spider infosheet

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the day Alfred Howitt left Melbourne to search for Burke and Wills. By the time the explorers had returned to the Dig Tree in April 1861 there had been no news of them for six months. Public pressure had mounted and the exploration committee responsible sent out Howitt as leader of the Victorian Contingent Party. They would in fact discover the fate of Burke’s party in September that year.

Subsequently Howitt gathered a small but interesting collection of natural history specimens that were delivered to Museum Victoria. Only two mammal species were included: one of two known species of stick-nest rat Leporillus sp. [pictured in a cheeky pose here as a mount by an unknown nineteenth century preparator], and the White-footed Rabbit Rat Conilurus albipes. The Lesser Stick-nest Rat and the White-footed Rabit Rat were once widespread across parts of Australia but have long since been regarded as extinct.

Stick-nest rat Leporillus sp. collected by Alfred Howitt.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria

But there is some good news about rats! The species that the Burke and Wills Expedition knew best was the Long-haired or Plague Rat Rattus villosissimus. The ‘plague’ epithet came not from its carrying any disease, but its tendency to population irruptions reaching plague proportions, as we are currently witnessing with the introduced House Mouse Mus musculus. Burke and Wills travelled through the Channel Country after good rains, similar to the current environment. The rats swarmed over their first camp at Cooper Creek, attacking explorers and their supplies so relentlessly that they were forced to move to the site that subsequently became known for the Dig Tree.

The Long-haired Rat had hardly been sighted since the 1970s, especially during the long drought, and was feared to be heading for extinction. Now there are recent reports that the House Mouse is not the only rodent on the move. Zoologists are delighted that Long-haired Rats are now beeing seen in numbers again in Central Australia, including Alice Springs township. At least one of our native rodents is still out there.

Links:

Australian Dictionary of Biography: Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908)

The body of an enormous female Leatherback Turtle was brought to Melbourne Museum on Thursday last week after washing up at Airey’s Inlet.

The two metre female Leatherback Turtle in the Preparation Lab at Melbourne Museum.
Image: Veronica Scholes
Source: Museum Victoria

A member of the public spotted the ailing turtle while it was still alive. Local authorities called the Melbourne Aquarium, which runs the Turtle Rescue and Release Program that rehabilitates tropical turtles that have strayed into cold southern waters. Unfortunately the Leatherback Turtle was too unwell to save and it lived just a few more hours. It was brought to Melbourne Museum early on Thursday morning for post-mortem examination to work out why it died.

Melbourne Aquarium vet, Dr Rob Jones, says it’s only the second Leatherback Turtle to wash up in Victoria since 1999, with smaller species such as Green Sea Turtles and Loggerhead Turtles more commonly assisted by the successful Turtle Release and Rescue Program.

Dr Jones examined the turtle on Thursday afternoon. “The age is difficult to guess,” he explains. “She had an inactive ovary, so she was possibly still immature or had laid eggs within the last six months. But at two metres long, the size suggests she was mature.” He found a small ulcer in her intestine that was probably from parasite, and signs of dehydration, but no clear cause of death. “It was disappointing not to be able to find the answer.”

The skeleton of the turtle will become part of the Museum Victoria research collection, since complete skeletons of this species are rare. The museum will also retain soft tissues for the DNA collection and barnacles and mussels from its shell for the Marine Invertebrates collection.

Barnacles on the turtle's shell.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) is the largest living turtle and has the widest distribution of the sea turtles. Their soft shells are unique; other species have tough protective plates called scutes as a kind of external armour, but Leatherback Turtles have small bones embedded in tough leathery skin. Another distinctive feature of these animals is their diet – they eat mostly jellyfish and have evolved a mouth full of fleshy spines to grip their soft prey. They migrate long distances in search of food, often visiting southern waters near Victoria between January and May when the sea is warm.

Inside the mouth of a Leatherback Turtle. The fleshy spines are adaptations to a jellyfish diet.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

Leatherback Turtles are critically endangered and have suffered serious declines due to human activity. They are often drowned in fishing nets or choke when they mistake plastic bags for food.

Marine wildlife in need of rescue should be reported to the Department of Sustainability and Environment. 

• Report stranded, entangled or sick penguins, turtles and seals to DSE on 136 186. 
• Contact the Whale and Dolphin Emergency Hotline on 1300 136 017 if you find stranded, entangled, sick or injured whales or dolphins.

Links:

Melbourne Aquarium Turtle Rescue and Release Program

WWF: Leatherback Turtles close to the brink

Shark Bay World Heritage Area: Leatherback Turtle fact sheet

BIRD: Leatherback Turtle

In March this year, MV scientists spent 10 days surveying the biodiversity of the Lake Condah area in a program called Bush Blitz. The project could never have happened without the collaboration and assistance of the Gunditjmara community, the Traditional Owners of Budj Bim lands around Lake Condah.

On Friday last week, the museum was pleased to return the hospitality and show a group of Budj Bim rangers and Traditional Owners around the collection stores and laboratories of the Natural Sciences Department.

Budj Bim rangers in the Ornithology store, surrounded by the museum's collection of bird specimens.
Source: Museum Victoria

Head of Sciences, Mark Norman, led a tour through the ornithology, entomology and marine collection stores. The bird collection was their favourite but the giant squid in its huge tank of ethanol was a special highlight too.

 Mark Norman showing an amazing but somewhat pungent giant squid specimen.
Source: Museum Victoria

Today’s visit was a chance to show the rangers what has happened to the Lake Condah specimens they helped to collect, and the sort of research done in the museum. We hope they’ll visit us again soon. Until then, here's a reminder of the significance of Lake Condah and the aquaculture practiced there by Gunditjmara people for thousands of years. In this video, Joseph Saunders explains eel farming and traditional life at Lake Condah.

Links:

Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape

Poking around in Victorian coastal tide pools is good fun. You can feel the sucker feet of a sea star as it walks over your hand, or watch crabs scuttle about grazing on algae. But one thing you should never do – and I remember being told this from a very young age – is bother a blue-ringed octopus. Blue-ringed octopuses (genus Hapalochlaena) are some of the most venomous marine animals in the world yet we don’t know much about them.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay during the day.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

There are currently four species of blue-ringed octopus recognised but MV curator Dr Julian Finn reckons he’s about to change this. He has just received a three-year grant from the Australian Biological Resources Study to sort out how many species there are worldwide. From his preliminary studies, he estimates there could be closer to 20 species with over half of these living in Australian waters.

With joint investigators Dr Mark Norman, Head of Sciences, Dr Jan Strugnell from La Trobe University, and Professor Chung Cheng Lu of National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, Julian will use comparative anatomy and molecular techniques to confirm how many species there are. He’ll map the distribution of each species and produce an identification key to help others identify blue-ringed octopuses.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay at night.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Julian will also assay the venom of each species to determine which are the most toxic to humans. The bite of a blue-ringed octopus delivers a hit of tetrodotoxin which is found in the octopus’s saliva. Tetrodotoxin has a devastating effect on the nerve system; it blocks sodium channels and causes breathing difficulties, numbness and paralysis. There is no antivenom and without immediate medical intervention, the risk of death is high. Thanks to this project, we’ll better understand one of our most notorious marine creatures and have more information to assist with treating blue-ringed octopus bites.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay at night.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Australian Venom Research Unit: blue-ringed octopus

A rare event happened this morning... when my 1 year old started calling out for Mummy just after 4am, the usual dread of having to face another cold and early start was gone, replaced by the thrill that my little guy was just the perfect astronomer!

This morning we were treated to a total lunar eclipse and it began with a beautiful starry, but certainly cold, morning sky. Just before 4.30am a small chunk was seen to be missing from the top right of the Moon. The first sign that the Earth's shadow had found its target.

The Earth's shadow hit its target.
Image: Tanya Hill
Source: Museum Victoria

Lunar eclipses occur on those rare occasions when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in perfect alignment. They only ever happen at the time of Full Moon, when the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the Earth. Most of the time the Earth's shadow misses the Moon, falling either above or below it, but this morning it was right on track.

By 5am, the Earth's shadow was covering more than half the Moon and a reddish glow was already beginning to appear. The stars was twinkling perfectly, with one of my favourite constellations, that of Scorpius, sitting directly to the left of the Moon, and the centre of the Milky Way right above it. Totality officially began at 5.23am and the Moon was certainly an eerie red colour.

Where does that red come from? Well the only way sunlight can now reach the Moon is by passing through the Earth's atmosphere. That light gets bent and scattered, so only the reddest light can make it through. Particles in our atmosphere, like the volcanic ash that's been annoying so many air travellers these last few days, added to the scattering effect, making the eclipse redder and darker than the last few that I remember.

For those who love statistics, totality was due to last 100 minutes, making it the longest lunar eclipse since 2000, which clocked in at 106 minutes. A rough rule of thumb is that totality generally takes around 1 hour, but a couple of times each decade we get a good one lasting 90 minutes or more. This was one of those.

Except for those pesky clouds that rolled in just after 6am, blocking the view for those who got up at their usual time. They were obviously in need of my own precious little alarm clock.

I was fortunate enough to attend a session of Fresh Science this week. The intensive program takes 16 early-career researchers from around Australia and develops their skill in science communication.

The participants are at the start of their scientific careers: some are part way through a PhD, some have completed PhDs, others are doing post docs or beginning work in leading science organisations. These people are creative and inspiring – the best, freshest minds that will lead Australian science into the future.

2011 Fresh Science participants at Melbourne Museum.
Image: AJ Epstein
Source: Science in Public

You may have heard on Monday about a smart bandage that changes colour when the wound is infected, or seen a saw shark on the news last night. These are just two of their discoveries with more to appear in the press in coming weeks.

The greatest part of the day was the opportunity to meet people from television, radio and newspaper. They told us how they hear about and choose the stories that make the news. Remarkable considering they have to make decisions before most of us even get out of bed!

Mount Stromlo Observatory, where one of the Fresh Science researchers is working.
Image: Lauri Väin
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 from Lauri Väin

The 'bootcamp in science communication', as the organisers phrase it, is supported by the Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, and New Scientist Magazine, with Melbourne Museum hosting a number of events for the program

Links:

Fresh Science

The Age: Chameleon bandage helps wounds to heal

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years. He wrote this piece for the Volunteer Newsletter in 2004.

Long-billed Corellas only ever seem to make the news when they are causing trouble. I guess this item won’t help their reputation.

I’m part of a project going through the Melbourne Museum’s vast collection of bird skins, checking their registration, or lack of it, in the EMu database. Historical specimens from legendary sources such as John Gould, William Blandowski, Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thompson are commonplace here, along with those collected by Museum staff and many collaborators in the birding community.

We all know how important the Museum is to safekeeping our heritage. We usually think of this happening in a rather abstract, institutional way, with these grand collections. But it can be quite personal.

Amongst the hundreds of items checked so far, it was a surprise to come across one specimen with a personal letter of introduction carefully placed beneath the reposing bird. “Cocky” was a Long-billed Corella (Cacatua tenuirostris) donated in 1980 by a family in Croydon. The letter is countersigned by Alan McEvey, a former Curator of Ornithology and a legendary bird man in his own lifetime. It gives us a brief biography of Cocky who had lived to the age of 80 or 90.

Cocky the Long-billed Corella with his letter of introduction.
Source: Museum Victoria

In his early life Cocky lived for many years in a hotel in Bridge Road Richmond. Eventually he was ordered from the front bar by the police for bad language. Apparently it shocked the ladies passing by. Was Richmond really more genteel in the early years of the twentieth century than now? Hard to believe.

After this indignity Cocky lived in the back shed of the hotel, where he picked up the talk from the two-up games, the sly grog and illegal betting. “C’mon Bill, put a bob on a horse,” he would urge, along with numerous other colourful sayings. All this could still be heard out in the street and the passing ladies were still getting upset. A woman who worked at the hotel as a maid eventually offered Cocky to take home for her 10-year old son. She was the widowed grandmother of the donor and Cocky was handed down in the family for the next 50 years.

Her son removed Cocky, hitherto immobile, from his small cage and exercised his wings and rubbed his feet with olive oil until he could walk. He would sleep on the boy’s bedhead. But he started tearing the skirting boards apart calling; “Rats, rats, scald the buggers!” so he was put in an aviary. When he swore a cup of water was thrown over him. He stopped swearing but still talked until the end.

The letter concludes: “I have looked after him for 20 years please take care of our friend”.

Links:

Ornithology Collection

Welcome to the first instalment of Museum Victoria’s Bug of the Month. At any time, more than 100 species of invertebrates are resident at Melbourne Museum, under the care of the Live Exhibits Unit. These creatures can be seen in Bugs Alive! and the Forest Gallery, and they pop up in other places such as the Children’s Museum and even Amazing Backyard Adventures, currently showing at Scienceworks.

Face to face with the Small Hooded Katydid.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

This month’s bug is the Small Hooded Katydid, also known as Phyllophorella. The name doesn’t adequately describe the large size of this species, which can grow up to 8cm long. Although this katydid has been around for millennia, it was only described by scientists and given an official scientific name two years ago.

Adult Small Hooded Katydid.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Small Hooded Katydids are found in North Queensland, from around Cairns all the way to rainforest near the tip of Cape York. They are one of the biggest katydids in Australia, but their closest relatives, the Giant Katydids (Siliquofera grandis) are easily the largest, measuring up to 13cm in length.

A katydid feeding on broad bean leaves. If you look closely you can see the katydid’s ear, a small opening located on its foreleg at the left of the photo.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Small Hooded Katydids are vegetarians, feeding on a range of rainforest plants amongst which they are remarkably well camouflaged. Some specimens even have irregular white or brown patches on their wings, which are identical to the spots found on leaves. The veins on the wings also mimic the vein pattern of leaves, so adults can be very difficult to find in the wild. For this reason, they were thought for a long time to be rare, but are actually quite common.

Close-up of a katydid’s wing, showing the leaf-like pattern of veins and brown spots.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Unlike most other katydids, males of this species don’t call to attract females, so no-one knows how they find each other in the rainforest at night. However, both adults and nymphs can produce a rasping sound when disturbed, by rubbing the bases of the back legs against the body.

A young nymph living behind the scenes at Melbourne Museum
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

The ‘hood’ of these katydids, after which they are named, is most obvious in juveniles such as these two below. The pointed spine on each side of the hood is also most prominent at this stage.

A juvenile female already bears the sabre-like ovipositor at the end of the body with which she will later lay eggs.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

A juvenile feeding on organic matter, photographed in rainforest north of Cape Tribulation
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Small Hooded Katydids are currently on show in the ‘Enormous Numbers’ display in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum.

Small Hooded Katydids in Bugs Alive!
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

References:

Rentz, D.C.F., Su, Y.N. & Ueshima, N., 2009, Studies in Australian Tettigonidae: The Phyllophorinae (Orthoptera: Tettigonidae: Phyllophorinae), Zootaxa, 2075:55-68

Rentz, D., 2010, A Guide to the Katydids of Australia, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 214pp.

The amazing French film Oceans opens in Melbourne on 26 May. This documentary about the wealth of life in seas was filmed over four years by a global team. MV’s Julian Finn and Mark Norman worked with the film crew as scientific consultants for several of the animals filmed. Two of these animals - Nomura's Jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai) and a blanket octopus (Tremoctopus gracilis) are often found together in the near-surface waters of the open ocean.

Underwater cameraman Yasushi Okumura filming a female blanket octopus.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Blanket octopuses are so-named because of the membranous webs that the females possess on two of their arms. This is a defence mechanism: a two-metre-long female blanket octopus can use her webs to mislead potential predators about her size and shape. If this doesn’t intimidate them, she can also shed off pieces of her web – ‘like sheets of toilet paper,’ according to Julian – which in turn stretch out into long, tangling filaments.

Detail of the female Tremoctopus web, showing the bands where bits of it can break off as a defence mechanism.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Another extraordinary thing about blanket octopuses is the size difference (or dimorphism) between males and females. We discussed size dimorphism on the blog recently but here’s the most extreme example we know of. In Tremoctopus, the male can be up to forty thousand times smaller than the female by weight!

Female Tremoctopus.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Now from the miniscule to the massive. Nomura’s Jellyfish is one of the largest cnidarians in the word. When these creatures invade Japan’s coastal waters, thousands of jellyfish can clog fishing nets, making the nets so heavy that fishing boats have overturned trying to recover them. Oceans includes footage of Julian diving with one so you can see for yourself just how huge they are.

A still from the film Oceans showing Julian Finn swimming with a giant Nomura's Jellyfish.
Source: courtesy of Galatee Films

Julian believes that Tremoctopus are able to survive in hostile environment of the open ocean through association with jellyfish, probably feeding on the small fish that live amongst the tentacles and within the bell of giant Nomura’s Jellyfish. Male and small female Tremoctopus harvest the stinging tentacles of another variety of jellyfish – the Portuguese Man-of-War (Physalia spp.) – to use for their own defence and/or prey capture, suggesting a long association between two quite different types of animals.

Special offer for MV Blog readers:
We have 200 two-for-one passes up for grabs courtesy of Hopscotch Films. For the chance to receive one, enter the draw here.

Links:

M. D. Norman, D. Paul, J. Finn & T. Tregenza. First encounter with a live male blanket octopus: the world’s most sexually size-dimorphic large animal. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 2002, Vol. 36: 733-736

Tree of Life: Tremoctopus

Oceans preview trailer

Nick Alexander from CSIRO Publishing visited the MV Library last week in search of gliding mammals. He’s working on the production of an upcoming book by Stephen Jackson called Gliding Mammals of the World.

The book will cover certain groups of mammals - squirrels, possums and lemurs - that have evolved traits for soaring between trees, such as extra folds of skin along the sides of their bodies. Victorian gliding mammals include Squirrel Gliders, Sugar Gliders and Yellow-bellied Gliders.

In Gliding Mammals of the World, 19th century artworks from our rare books will accompany an introduction to the historical context of gliding mammal studies. Some of the early European natural history illustrations are, in Nick’s words, 'rather fanciful' but the new book will be beautifully illustrated by Peter Schouten who is renowned for his accurate and naturalistic wildlife illustrations.

You can look forward to the publication of Gliding Mammals of the World later this year.

Links:

CSIRO Publishing

Stephen Jackson

Peter Schouten's site 

Have you noticed the unusually high population of golden orb-weaving spiders (Nephila edulis) in Melbourne this year? They're usually very rare this far south but I’ve spotted dozens of them in the inner-city suburbs over recent months. Our online visitors have too; in the past three months, we’ve received over 50 comments on this Question of the Week about these spectacular spiders.

Discovery Centre gets a lot of queries about spiders and whether they’re dangerous, often after they’ve received a lethal dose of insect spray, so it’s delightful to see that most of the recent comments simply marvel at the size, beauty and architectural skills of these spiders. Lots of people have told us they are quite fond of their backyard Nephila and some have even given them names! We’ve heard about Bertha, Gloria, Holly, and, I confess, I’ve named the one that lives near me Nefertiti.

Nefertiti the large female Nephila edulis.
Source: Museum Victoria

Because people are so interested, I thought I’d dig up a bit more about Nephila edulis. They are more often found in northern Victoria, NSW and QLD where there has been a bumper spider season, too. Professor Mark Elgar from the University of Melbourne has studied these spiders for many years, travelling to Euroa each spring to collect specimens for behavioural studies. He recently commented in the Shepparton News that high summer rainfall “has provided a lot more food for flying insects, which become food for spiders. They really are much more abundant than I've seen for a long time and next year we'll see the same thing.”

Nefertiti sits in her large golden web all day, unlike the nocturnal and more common Garden Orb-weaving Spider (Eriophora sp.), which tears down and rebuild its web almost daily. Nefertiti leaves her web up until it’s so ratty that it needs to be repaired and her home is adorned with a rather gruesome array of dead insects. Professor Elgar and his colleagues showed that this vertical band of detris is a stockpile of food but also serves another intriguing function; it attracts more food. The spiders deliberately incorporate bits of rotting vegetation to make their larders irresistable to flies.

The underside of a large mature female Nephila edulis on her web. In the background is her egg sac and hanging in her web is a detrius band of dead insects.
Source: Museum Victoria

Another fascinating aspect of Nephila biology is the difference in size between males and females. While females are generally much larger than the males, within males there is a big variation in size. Professor Elgar and colleagues investigate how this has evolved. It’s a complex question with no definite answers and lots of factors to consider.

A pair of golden orb-weaving spiders illustrating the difference in size between males and females. The tiny male is on the left while the large female, feeding on a moth, is on the right.
Image: Bill & Mark Bell
Source: Used under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) from Bill & Mark Bell

Male N. edulis have two strategies when it comes to approaching a female. The risk of being mistaken for her lunch is pretty high so it pays to be careful. One tactic is to crawl onto the web on the same side as the female, while another is to approach from the opposite side and cut a hole in the web. Small males are more common than large males and they tend to use the first strategy. They also mate for longer and father more of the female’s offspring. However there are costs to being small, too: smaller males are more often eaten by females than large males. Furthermore, if there are a number of males loitering around the edge of a female’s web, large males beat small males in the battle to reach the female.

I don’t know if she was courted by a large or small male (or both - these spiders mate several times), but Nefertiti has laid a clutch of eggs in a golden silk sac. In spring her eggs will hatch and her babies will disperse on the wind to start the whole cycle again. Keep an eye out for them later in the year! Meanwhile, if you’d like to see a golden orb-weaver up close, visit the Orb Wall in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum.

The golden silk egg sac of Nephila edulis.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Victorian Spiders

B. T. Bjorkman-Chiswell, M. M. Kulinski, R. L. Muscat, K. A. Nguyen, B. A. Norton, M. R.E. Symonds, G. E. Westhorpe and M. A. Elgar. 2004. Web-building spiders attract prey by storing decaying matter. Naturwissenschaften 91:245-248

J. M. Schneider, M. E. Herberstein,  F. C. de Crespigny, S. Ramamurthy and M. A. Elgar. 2000. Sperm competition and small size advantage for males of the golden orb-web spider Nephila edulis. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 13: 939-946

I recently accompanied Richard Marchant to the Shoalhaven River where he studies the animals that platypus eat. Thanks to the suction sampling tool we used, I'll never look at a common household vacuum cleaner the same way again.

The underwater vacuum we used is a quite different to that used to clean carpets: suction, in this case, created by bubbles are injected near the base of a pipe. The bubbles rise to the top, sucking water upward as they go.

Richard Marchant diving with the air-lift sampler, which works like an aquatic vacuum cleaner.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

When placed over a river bed or sea floor, small animals and sand are also sucked up with the water. A mesh bag covering the top of the pipe acts like a sieve; the sand passes out but the animals remain trapped.

This method of suction sampling typically nets catches of crustaceans, insects, and insect nymphs – important food chain species that can be identified and counted for research.

Emptying the mesh bag of the air-lift sampler.
Source: Museum Victoria

The machine sounds weird too: a dull rumble through a dive hood, perhaps a cross between a V8 car engine and thunder.

The air-sucking principle of the vacuum means people refer to it as an 'air-lift'. It’s a nifty invention and a system used by many aquatic biologists at one time or another in their career.

Links:

MV News: Linking the food chain

Video: Studying the diet of platypus

I learned this week that sea cucumbers slink along the sea floor with a hidden skeleton. Known to most of us as those sloppy, sausage-like things that sometimes wash-up on our beaches, sea cucumbers are pretty much a tube of muscle with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other. Underwater, they bury in sand or camouflage themselves against rocky reefs.

A colourful sea cucumber (or holothuroid).
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Rather than running through the middle of the body, the skeleton effectively surrounds the body to reinforce the muscular body tube. It is made up of tiny structures called ossicles, which can be fifty times smaller than a millimetre. They are like miniature fish scales, but more intricate in design and not usually visible. Some of the structures make some animals sticky to touch.

Here’s an example of the ossicles of an Antarctic species:

Ossicles from Sigmodota contorta, a species misidentified under about ten different names. Wheel and hook forms on the left from the body wall, and branched rods on the right from the tentacles.
Source: O’Loughlin and VandenSpiegel (2010) Memoirs of Museum Victoria 67: 61–95.

These weird and spectacular structures vary in form. Not only do they prevent the body from turning into a mush of intestine and muscle, but they are also a microscopic key to identify many species – so don’t be too disappointed if you can’t identify a sea cucumber when diving or looking in a rock pool!

Oh and if you're interested...

Sea cucumbers belong to a group of animals called holothuroids, part of the wider group of echinoderms – more commonly known for its sea stars and sea urchins. MV Honorary Associate Mark O’Loughlin is a world expert in identifying sea cucumbers. He has shown me a few tricks of the trade on his way to describing over 20 new species in recent years from Victoria and its neighbouring oceans. He is currently sorting out whether the common local species, Paracaudina australis, is actually multiple undescribed species. His work was recently published in the Memoirs of Museum Victoria.

Links:

O’Loughlin, P. Mark and Didier VandenSpiegel. A revision of Antarctic and some Indo-Pacific apodid sea cucumbers (Echinodermata: Holothuroidea: Apodida) Memoirs of Museum Victoria 67: 61-95 (2010)

Question of the Week: Aboriginal-Indonesian trade in sea cucumber

Reef Education Network: Sea cucumbers

This post comes from Leonie Cash, a librarian at the Museum Victoria library.

Thanks to the network of arts libraries, ARLIS, a trio of RMIT art academics visited the MV Library’s rare books collection recently to view examples of eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific illustration. Facsimiles of Albertus Seba and Maria Merian’s work were also on display.

Facsimiles of famous works by Albertus Seba and Maria Merian.
Source: Museum Victoria

The three visitors are associated with RMIT’s School of Art and all are practising artists with a keen interest in natural history, particularly natural history illustration.

Greg Moncrieff, work experience student Max and Louise Weaver examine the exquisite illustrations in MV's rare books.
Source: Museum Victoria

Greg Moncrieff was very pleased with the diversity of material available from the old books on display.

While looking at Gould’s humming birds, Louise Weaver was fascinated by the methods of layering of paint that reproduce the beautiful colours of these small birds.

Peter Ellis, Associate Professor and Studio Coordinator of Painting at RMIT, has written that the “experience of travel has had a profound impression on my work” and his visit to Museum Victoria’s rare books, though a short distance, has left him wanting to return again soon.

Fish illustration from 19th century America.
Source: Museum Victoria

The MV Library is happy to host visiting scholars by appointment; please contact us via email.

Links:

X Marks the Spot exhibition, 2006

During the recent Bush Blitz biodiversity survey at Lake Condah, there was one insect that intrigued even the staunchest vertebrate biologists — the Mountain Katydid (Acripeza reticulata).

In this video, Patrick, Rowena and David from Live Exhibits talk about these unusual katydids and how they're establishing a colony of them at Melbourne Museum.

Watch this video with a transcript

Katydids are in the family Tettigoniidae, otherwise known as bush crickets or long-horned grasshoppers due to their very long antennae. The name 'katydid' comes from the noise that they make by rubbing their wings together which, in some species, sounds like katy-did, katy-did.

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

Links:

Mountain Katydid on Caught and Coloured

MV Blog: Bush Blitz finds

MV marine biologist Dr Jo Taylor has reported a tropical stowaway in the warm waters around the Newport Power Station - the Sand Shrimp, Crangon uritai.

Sand Shrimp Crangon uritai blends in perfectly with the sandy habitats in which it lives.
Image: John Eichler
Source: Museum Victoria

This little crustacean with its cunning camouflage is common in East Asian coastal regions and is not native to Australia. Although other species belonging to the same family (Crangonidae) are common in Australian waters, including Port Phillip Bay, this is the first occurrence of this species anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

Reported this week in the online scientific journal, Marine Biodiversity Records, Jo and her co-author Dr Tomoyuki Komai suspect the shrimp was accidentally introduced to Port Phillip Bay. This new sand shrimp probably hitch-hiked in ship ballast while in its tiny larval form. It's only the second confirmed introduction of a shrimp to Australia.

Dorsal and lateral view of the Sand Shrimp.
Image: David Staples
Source: Museum Victoria

Three specimens were found in 2008 by members of the Marine Research Group and were identified after comparisons with specimens at the Natural History Museum and Institute in Chiba, Japan. Jo has alerted local biologists and ecologists to keep an eye out for the newcomer so we can track its movement, if any, in local waters.

Links:

Article in Marine Biodiversity Records (abstract only)

Infosheet: Introduced marine organisms in Port Phillip Bay

Sand Shrimp on PaDIL

In this video, Head of Sciences Mark Norman and Gunditjmara Elder Ken Saunders talk about the recent Bush Blitz project at Lake Condah.

Watch this video with a transcript

More Bush Blitz video is coming soon!

Bush Blitz is a three-year national project to document plants and animals protected in Australia’s National Reserve System. Bush Blitz is a multi-million dollar partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots. It involves Australia’s top scientists from museums, herbariums and research institutions across the country.

Links:

Bush Blitz

Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project

ABC Mission Voices: Lake Condah

The story of Leadbeater's Possum is so interwoven with the history of Museum Victoria that there was no better place to celebrate it than at Melbourne Museum last Sunday.

This tiny, highlands marsupial was first described by the museum's director, Sir Frederick McCoy in 1867, who named it Gymnobelideus leadbeateri after our first taxidermist, John Leadbeater.

By the 1900s, it was thought extinct. No one saw it for decades. Charles Brazenor, later to become director of the museum, published a plea in 1946 for naturalists to find the creature to no avail. In 1961, a young museum employee changed the fate of Leadbeater's Possum. The amazing story of its rediscovery is recorded in this short film by Curator of History of Science, Rebecca Carland:

On Sunday 3 April, exactly 50 years after his first glimpse of a wild Leadbeater's Possum, Eric was honoured at a ceremony jointly organised by Parks Victoria, Friends of the Leadbeater’s Possum and Museum Victoria. On behalf of the museum and the people of Victoria, Robin Hirst presented Eric with a print of Leadbeater's Possum from the Prodromus of Zoology.

L-R: Robin Hirst, Director of Collections, Research and Exhibitions; Eric Wilkinson; CEO Patrick Greene and curator Rebecca Carland.
Image: Liza Dale-Hallet
Source: Museum Victoria

Eric handed a young sapling of Mountain Ash as a symbolic baton of care to a representative of the of the group HELP (Help the Endangered Leadbeater's Possum). Four Year 7 students started HELP in 2009 to raise awareness of the plight of the species and to gather funds to assist in its future survival. Eric spoke about the inspiring work they've done so far, and the important role of the next generation in protecting our state's faunal emblem.

Jo Antrobus from Parks Victoria with students from St. Margarets School, Berwick, special guest speaker and environment ambassador Sheree Marris and Lake Mountain mascot Lenny Leadbeater. Lake Mountain is home to most of the remaining Leadbeater's Possum habitat.
Image: Liza Dale-Hallett
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

YouTube video - Leadbeater's Possum: Our state emblem under fire

The Age article: Hello, possums! Breed saved from extinction 50 years on

Leadbeater's Possum on Collections Online

Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum

I just heard of a crab species with the scientific name Tutankhamen. Crab Tut! Kind of cool considering we are about to open the world-famous Tutankhamun exhibition.

Tutankhamen cristatipes has a spiny triangular body, pointed nose (the rostrum) and elongated claws that look like a plumber’s wrench. It is quite small, with a body 15 mm wide and legs about 30 mm long

Tutankhamen cristatipes
Source: Rathbun, M.J. (1925) The spider crabs of America. United States National Museum Bulletin, 129, 1-613

Tutankhamen cristatipes was named in 1925 by Mary J. Rathbun (1860-1943). In total, she described 1147 new species and subspecies, 63 new genera, one subfamily, three families and a superfamily.

“A few years earlier, King Tut’s tomb was uncovered and I think she could have named it in the Pharaoh-fever that swept the world at that time,” crustacean expert and PhD colleague Anna McCallum tells me.

Mary Jane Rathbun at work. She began as an unpaid assistant to her brother, Richard Rathbun, and was later employed as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution.
Source: Smithsonian Institution Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

Crab Tut is almost as rare as King Tut too - it is known from only two specimens. Both Tuts had exclusive habitats: the king in the Egyptian deserts and the crab in deep waters on the outer continental slope off Florida. And they both reside in hard outer skeletons: King Tut in his sarcophagus, Crab Tut in its carapace.

I couldn’t find what colour Crab Tut is, but I’d like to dream it’s as colourful as the gold and blue sarcophagus of King Tut. This is definitely one cool character of the crustacean world.

Links:

kingtutmelbourne.com.au

Mary J. Rathbun on Wikipedia

There are records of seven species of frogs here in the Lake Condah region; all seven are relatively common across south-eastern Australia. Last week, MV frog experts Josh Hale and Katie Smith tracked down six of the seven species within a day or two. The last one, the Southern Toadlet (Pseudophryne semimarmorata) is proving elusive but Josh is back this week to keep looking.

On rainy nights, we’ve seen frogs hopping around the base camp. Bush Blitzers have found them by turning over rocks where they shelter during the day. They've also been identified by the distinctive calls of the males.

Pobblebonk or Banjo Frog (Limnodynastes dumerilli) at Lake Condah Mission. This frog was found moving over mown grass.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

The Southern Smooth Froglet, Geocrinia laevis.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Many of the frogs we’ve seen are young juveniles, which means they were tadpoles over the past season. Josh remarked on the unusually large numbers of young frogs and attributes this to the very wet summer; the same conditions that have kept the vegetation unseasonably green. It’s an indication that frogs can build up populations quickly here and recover after years of drought.

Green morph of Brown Tree Frog, Litoria ewingii. This species is more often brown.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Brown Tree Frog, Litoria ewingii, in its more common brown morph.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

“Many frogs all round the world are declining so to see healthy breeding populations like this is really encouraging,” says Josh. Frogs make up an important part of the food chain and become prey for birds, mammals and reptiles.

Striped Marsh Frog, Limnodynastes peronii. These frogs are remarkably well camouflaged.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Spotted Marsh Frog, Limnodynastes tasmaniensis.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

Links:

Frogs of Victoria

This morning Patrick Honan from Live Exhibits instructed the Bush Blitz team to keep an eye out for Mountain Katydids (Acripeza reticulata). These are large, robust long-horned grasshoppers that are usually found in cold high-altitude areas so Patrick was surprised to see them recorded in a previous ecological survey of Lake Condah. Ranger Brad Williams and botanist Val Stajsic brought in two specimens from Muldoons that they’d found on Tuesday, suggesting that they’re reasonably common here.

Muldoons is property adjacent to the Lake Condah Mission site but getting there is not straightforward. There was a bridge decades ago dating back to when it was the hunting ground for people living on the mission. Matt Butt, the Coordinator of Land Management, explained that the bridge was washed away in a heavy flood in the 1940s. The road into the property was built only five years ago and the terrain is incredibly rocky. It’s also incredibly beautiful; the bush is largely intact since the ground was too rocky to be any good for agriculture. The ground is dotted with rock-lined sinkholes in the lava flow from Mount Eccles (known to Gunditjmara people as Budj Bim, meaning ‘high head’). Some of the sinkholes are full of water where Remko Leijs, from the South Australian Museum, has sampled the small crustaceans that live in the groundwater. Later in Bush Blitz some of the MV marine scientists will put on their SCUBA gear to film the wildlife of these water bodies.

Most of the MV biologists were at Muldoons for a couple of hours this morning and found some amazing animals. And yes, one of them was a Mountain Katydid plodding through low grass just a metre away from the road. She’s a female and particularly fat, possibly because she’s full of eggs. She’s gone back to Melbourne Museum with the Live Exhibits staff where they hope she will be the start of a captive colony for display.

Female Mountain Katydid found at Muldoons.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Budj Bim rangers Simone Sailor-Smith and Deb Rose caught a beautiful Jewel Spider (Austracantha minax). Another amazing find was a Peripatus or velvet worm. These are ancient animals that share some characteristics with worms and some with arthropods, and haven’t changed much in millions of years.

The tiny and beautiful velvet worm found at Muldoons.
Image: julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

We also found scorpions, centipedes, beetles, lacewings, ants and lizards. Where possible, the team is only collecting the first specimen that is caught and releasing subsequent finds. For birds and mammals, the surveys are by sight, by ear or through capture and release. The birders spent a few hours this afternoon at Lake Condah and reported breeding Musk Ducks plus three Reed Warblers which is interesting because they have usually flown north by this time of year.

One of the hungry tiger leeches that are common in swamps, on low shrubs, and clinging to Bush Blitzers!
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Of course, all this time we're spending in swamps is great for one local animal - the leech. We've all become quite good at spotting and flicking leeches before they latch on to feed, but some of us have still become hosts for these blood-sucking parasites...

Peter Lillywhite with a leech feeding on his neck.
Image: Berlinda Bowler
Source: Berlinda Bowler

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

The only way to learn about the biodiversity of an area is to get out there and look. That’s exactly what a team of scientists, including 24 MV staff and volunteers, is doing at the Lake Condah area in south-western Victoria for the next nine days.

The expedition is part of Bush Blitz – a three-year project to document the flora and fauna of Australia’s National Reserve system. As a partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots, Bush Blitz teams have identified about 350 new species on eight trips so far. The current trip is especially significant because it’s the first one to be held in an Indigenous Protected Area – the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape, comprising about 3,000 hectares over several properties.

Open woodland at Kurtonitj, one of the properties that comprise the Winda Mara owned and managed areas.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

This country is the traditional homeland of the Gunditjmara Nation. Within its rocky, volcanic landscape are ancient structures including eel traps and stone houses. For thousands of years this was a site of major aquaculture efforts where Gunditjmara created pools and channels to cultivate and harvest eels. However Europeans arrived in the 1830s and within 30 years, the Aboriginal population had been decimated and displaced. The Government established Lake Condah Mission to house the people who refused to leave, but in 1919 the mission was closed and in the 1950s the land was reassigned to returning WWII soldiers. But this is a tough mob; in 1996, the Gunditjmara community persisted and they lodged a claim for native title to their lands. It was finally granted in 2007 and Lake Condah was returned to Aboriginal people.

A kangaroo eyeing off the Bush Blitz crew at Kurtonitj.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

Until 1 April, Bush Blitz will be taking a snapshot of the life of this region. There are botanists from the National Herbarium of Victoria and entomologists from the South Australian Museum and the University of New South Wales among the Bush Blitz crew. We’re counting and photographing and collecting to learn more about what lives here – which will, in turn, aid its protection. Working with the Elders of the community and the Indigenous rangers means that the scientists will learn about the ecological knowledge of the Traditional Owners, too.

Three MV biologists spotlighting for frogs on the first night at Lake Condah.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

Uncle Kenny Saunders came to talk to us the night that we arrived and gave us a warm welcome. He spoke about the spiritual and cultural importance of the area to the 300 or so Gunditjmara living locally and the much larger population of Gunditjmara now living across Australia. After telling us his stories he left us with an inspirational challenge – that he hoped these scientific surveys would give him more stories to tell about his country.

Links:

Bush Blitz

Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project

ABC Mission Voices: Lake Condah

There are no angry birds in Field Guide to Victorian Fauna, the museum’s new free app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Instead, crazy-coloured snakes, critically endangered species, state faunal emblems, stinging jellies and a Baggy Pants Frog are among the animals included in the first release.

A screenshot from MV's Field Guide to Victorian Fauna.
Source: Museum Victoria

The app lets you explore useful and interesting information about each species including: identification, biology, distribution, diet, habitat, scientific classification and endangered status. Wherever you are – a forest, a desert, a rocky shore, at Ararat or Apollo Bay – you’ll be able to find information on more than 700 animals at the swipe of your finger.

And, in a first for the museum, the code for the app is being released as open source. This means that museums and organisations worldwide can take their own data and build their own local field guide, too.

Developer Simon Sherrin and designer Simon O’Shea have built the app based on the Biodiversity Snapshots field guide, which was created for schools by museum sciences staff. In doing so, they’ve made this excellent resource available to anyone with an iDevice, not just school students. And this is just the beginning. We’re preparing more animals every day so that the app will span more of Victoria’s rich biodiversity.

Simon and Simon. These guys are developers, so we can't show their faces on the web.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

Field Guide to Victorian Fauna can be downloaded free from the iTunes App Store. Simon Sherrin will also present the app at several conferences and meetings in the USA in coming weeks. It’s the second in the museum’s developing portfolio of apps which began in 2010 with Please touch the exhibit.

Is your favorite Victorian animal included in the app? If not, let us know what it is in the comments, and why it should be included in a future update of the field guide.

Links:

Field Guide to Victorian Fauna support page

Please touch the exhibit

Last weekend's balmy evenings brought out a squadron of deadly aerial hunters in my backyard. I saw about ten dragonflies zooming around, plucking flying insects from the sky. It was an amazing sight – I’ve never seen so many in action in such a small area. From the half-eaten bodies I saw on the ground, it seems they were feasting on a swarm of young ant queens and males on their nuptial flights.

Dragonflies and damselflies belong to the 300-million-year-old insect order Odonata. You can tell the difference between the adults easily; damselflies are generally smaller, more delicate, and hold their wings together above their body when resting. Dragonflies are their beefy relatives and most rest with their wings held out to each side. As juveniles, odonates – known as nymphs – mostly lurk in freshwater ponds and streams eating smaller creatures such as mosquito larvae and small crustaceans.

Compound eyes of a dragonfly.
Source: Museum Victoria

Adult dragonflies have incredible eyesight thanks to large compound eyes that wrap almost all the way around their heads. Combined with extraordinary agility, they are skilled hunters and snatch gnats, moths and flies from the air, eating them on the wing with their powerful jaws. They even mate on the wing; the male guards the female while she lays eggs in the water, grasping just behind her head with the claspers at the end of his abdomen.

A pair of dragonflies laying eggs in a pond. The male is holding on to the female just behind her head as she dips her tail into the water to lay eggs.
Image: Susan McBratney
Source: Susan McBratney

I love watching these animals and their amazing behaviour, which is reflected in the common names for some dragonfly families – hawkers, cruisers, skimmers and perchers. Another common name, darner, harks back to a medieval folk tale that they were the devil’s darning needles that would sew shut the mouths of unruly children!

Male scarlet darter (Crocothemis erythraea) male on the island of Crete. The thorax of the dragonfly is packed with powerful muscles that drive their wings. Unlike most other insects, dragonflies and damselflies can move each pair of wings independently of the other.
Image: Stavros Markopoulos
Source: Used under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0 from macropoulos

A lot of people have mentioned seeing more dragonflies than usual this season so I had a chat to MV’s aquatic insect expert, Richard Marchant, to find out more. He says that knowledge of Australian dragonfly biology is patchy, but they’re quite long-lived – nymphs might take one or two years to reach adulthood, and adults probably live a month or more and travel many kilometres. He believes that all the rain Victoria has received this summer means the increased areas of standing water has attracted dragonflies in huge numbers to many parts of the state, including the greater Melbourne area. So look up, and enjoy the stuntwork of these acrobats in the summer sky!

Links:

Infosheet: Dragonflies and damselfies

Australian Museum: Order Odonata

Devil's Darning Needle

600 Million Years: Giant invertebrates in the Carboniferous

Herald Sun: 'Bugs galore as Vic gets steamy'

This post is another in our special series during the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.

Sometimes I wonder how we eat the seafood we do.

Take scallops, for example. With their plump and juicy meat, they are coveted for our dinner plates and in top restaurants around the world. But what are we really eating?

Well, there’s the shell, more for presentation than eating, characteristically circular with ridges radiating from a rectangular hinge that holds the animal protected inside.

Shells of edible scallops, Pecten fumatus from 1970s Fisheries material.
Source: Museum Victoria

And there’s the body. Unlike oysters, they don’t sit tight and daintily nurture pearls. Instead, they focus on moving small distances by squirting jets of water from between their shell halves, building muscle mass inside equivalent to a bodybuilder’s bicep, all for our eating pleasure (and also to flap away from predators like octopuses and sea stars I guess).

Scallops for sale at the Queen Victoria Market. The white part is mostly muscle, while the orange part is known as 'roe'.
Source: Museum Victoria

And what is that orange-brown blobby bit that tastes so gelatinously good? Gonads. A factory that pumps out hundreds of eggs and sperm into the water with the hope that some don’t get eaten or swept away into unsuitable habitat.

But sitting on the bottom in sand or silty mud can attract parasitic friends like trematodes and nematodes. (I won’t go into how many fish parasites a scientist sees under a microscope or you may never eat sushi again.)

Is it revolting to eat the disgusting? I suspect not, so long as some chef goes about his or her masterful ways to clean and transform the disgusting into the delicious.

Oh and if you’re interested...

Scallops probably have the most eyes in the animal kingdom – they can have hundreds of eyes along the edge of their mantle. Exactly what sort of pictures they see we cannot be sure. Their shells reach about 14 cm in length and they live on shallow sandflats to waters over 100 metres deep. Their diet of floating food, such as plankton, is filtered from the water. Some species move short distances, others make more permanent homes on the reef, often becoming so encrusted with coral and sponge growth that they are barely recognisable. They were commercially harvested in Port Phillip Bay until 1996, nowadays they are taken from Bass Strait. Several species were thought to occur within the range of the common variety we eat, Pecten fumatus, but recent genetic work suggests they are all the same species.

Just like Melbourne loves to steal big sporting events, musicals and exhibitions from other Australian capital cities, now it seems we'd also steal a big fish!

For years I have been sitting in my office in the marine biology area of the museum discretely listening in to my office buddy’s phone calls. There is always something going on but this past week things have gotten more interesting than usual.

“...Another one? ... Where this time? ... Did they give you a photo?... Wow-ee!”

Apparently there have been a number of sightings of Blue Gropers in waters in and around Port Phillip Bay. Once a popular target for spearfishers in the mid 1900s, they are now considered one of the more elusive fish in our waters.

Eastern Blue Groper, Achoerodus viridis.
Image: Saspotato
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from Saspotato

We are thought to have only the Eastern Blue Groper in Victoria (Achoerodus viridis), but that is where the mystery widens.

If the western sightings turn out to be the Western Blue Groper (Achoerodus gouldii), then that would be exciting, because even though some guide books list the species in western Victoria, the museum has no verified records that I could find. Effectively, it would be the first offical indication that we have of the Western Blue Groper extending its range from Western Australia and South Australia into Victorian waters.

Being passionate about all things mariney, I have listened to these recent phone calls more keenly than most because regardless of the exact species, Eastern or Western, they suggest that this iconic giant is back in significant numbers. Perhaps this means marine parks and sanctuaries are helping blue groper populations to increase.

Anyway, I’m heading out next weekend to get wet and see if I can further fuel the enthusiasm in here. Join me and get diving or snorkelling, if you see a groper emerge out of the bay haze, snap a photo and help us solve this mystery.

A male Eastern Blue Groper (Achoerodus viridis) escorted by juvenile Silver Trevally (Pseudocaranx dentex). Shelly Beach, Manly, NSW.
Image: Richard Ling
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from rling

Oh and if you’re interested...

Blue Gropers are large, slow-growing fishes, that reach a metre or thereabouts – gentle giants if you like. They hang around rocky reefs. Funnily enough, their name is misleading because they are not always blue. Sometimes they are green, sometimes grey, sometimes inbetween. They start life as females and turn into males when about half a metre long, about a ten-year wait to manhood. They are more closely related to wrasses and parrotfishes than to the tropical groper commonly seen by divers on reefs in northern Australia. They are now more sought after for viewing on a spectacular dive rather than for dinner. Reef Watch Victoria monitors blue gropers and other marine life along our coasts.

Links:

Australian Museum Eastern Blue Groper video

Fishes of Australia's Southern Coast

Coastlinks Victoria - marine reserves, parks and sanctuaries

Priscilla is a Program Coordinator for Life Sciences and works on education programs at Melbourne Museum. She has been a regular dinosaur digger for over 10 years!

I'm often asked what it's like at a dinosaur dig. The romantic view most people have, fuelled by films like Jurassic Park, is that we simply sweep away the sand with a brush, use high-tech gadgets to locate the exact location of the bones, and get flown to tropical islands with Jeff Goldblum.

Over 100 years ago the first dinosaur fossil, the Cape Paterson Claw, was found on the coast of Victoria at a site known as Eagles Nest. Nothing much else was found until two young palaeontologists in the making, Tim Flannery and John Long, spent their youth searching the rocks along the coast of Victoria, eventually finding more fossil booty. Their finds have led to decades of dinosaur digs along the coast of Victoria.

From Cape Otway to Inverloch, the Cretaceous-aged sandstone rocks have been blasted, bashed and bored to reveal what life was like 120 million years ago in Victoria. Each year the work at the Dinosaur Dreaming Dig, which is a joint project between Museum Victoria and Monash University, recruits numerous volunteers who spend hours breaking rock. Over the years, the same volunteers return, making the whole experience more like a giant family gathering at Christmas. Uncle Norman, Mother Lesley, Sister Alanna, and Grandma Mary are all there. Gerry and his rock, Doris and her eggnog, Mike and his poems, Nick and his telescope, Nicole and her berry crumble are all part of the experience.

And yes, there are the dinosaur bones. Each year some 800 new bones are found and catalogued. Just like a Christmas stocking, you never know what you are going to find inside each rock  – will it be the discovery that changes theories of evolution or another disappointment? Yet despite so many fruitless ‘stocking openings’, I and many others are lured back. After so many years of digging, amazing fossils have been found. Many of these incredible specimens are now on display in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves. Hopefully, this clip gives you some insight into just how we find them...

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming: the Inverloch Fossil Site infosheet

Fossil collecting sites in Victoria infosheet

Dinosaur Walk

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Over the past ten years, MV curator Tim O’Hara has been snooping through museum collections all over the world, collecting data about brittle stars for a major mapping exercise. He compiled nearly 7000 samples from 250 common species of brittle stars from 24 different museums and discovered something quite unexpected about their distribution.

Brittle stars, or ophiuroids, are echinoderms closely related to sea stars. They have five long, flexible arms attached to a central body. Unlike sea stars, brittle stars are quite active and fast-moving. They are ideal for this kind of large-scale mapping study because they are found all over the globe in a variety of habitats.

A brittle star (Conocladus australis) from southern Australia wrapped around a whip-coral.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Biogeographers – scientists that study the patterns of distribution of life – have long observed that certain species are associated with particular environments. This makes sense; an animal has particular requirements of temperature, salinity, depth, food availability, and won’t survive where these conditions don’t exist. However in the deep-sea, environmental factors are not very variable - deep water is cold and dark everywhere. Correspondingly, it has been assumed that the fauna in the deep-sea won’t vary much, or at most, certain species would be confined to particular oceans.

It turns out this assumption is not necessarily true. Tim's brittle star study found that there are distinct bands of species distribution not only in shallow water environments, where conditions can be very variable and distinct, but in the deep-sea. Deep-sea brittle stars are found in the same latitudinal bands as their shallow-water relatives, and it’s not yet clear why.

Map showing the overlapping distribution of tropical, temperate and polar brittle stars.
Image: Tim O'Hara
Source: Museum Victoria

Tim thinks the pattern he's discovered might be related to the life history of brittle stars. As he explains, the distinct bands might be due to the way currents disperse larvae. “A lot of these animals have very yolky eggs and there’s a theory that in cold water, eggs go into suspended animation and float on the currents for perhaps a year. Some don’t need to feed – they have all the energy they need to go through metamorphosis to juvenile stage.”

A brittle star (Acanthophiothrix purpurea) on a coral, from Lizard Island Queenlsand.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

“It’s a funny strategy that an animal would just throw eggs into the current and hope for the best, but obviously it’s successful because they get around. We’re doing a lot of genetic work at the moment over this study area and we’re getting things that are almost identical 7000km apart.”

Tim’s study, co-authored by Ashley Rowden and Nicholas Bax, was published in Current Biology. This project was generated as part of the Marine Biodiversity Hub, a multi-institutional research program funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.

Links:

O'Hara,Timothy D., Ashley A. Rowden, Nicholas J. Bax. A Southern Hemisphere Bathyal Fauna Is Distributed in Latitudinal Bands, Current Biology, 8 February 2011 (Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 226-230)

Marine Biodiversity Hub

Discussion of this study elsewhere:

Deep-sea News

The Age: 'Scientists discover deep-sea creatures play in the same band'

Echinoblog

Ben designs exhibitions at Scienceworks, Melbourne Museum and the Immigration Museum. He has previously worked designing sets for theatre, and running workshops for kids. Ben loves surprises and performing silly dances.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be working on the new animatronic dinosaur exhibition at Scienceworks called Explore-a-saurus. The dinos we’ve been given by Questacon are in need of a bit of a repair, repaint, and re-interpretation. We decided we needed to supplement the existing dinosaurs with new exhibits to present more scientifically-based themes and a more contemporary approach to palaeontology. No more daggy cargo pants and pith helmets for our paleos!

Our first step was to look at interesting overarching themes to base our interpretation on. They needed to respond to current research since paleontologists regularly make new discoveries that overturn previous understanding. They must be engaging for kids, put kids in the shoes of palaeontologists and demonstrate scientific practice. One element I am particularly interested in is the idea of absolute knowledge. The evidence is open to interpretation, and thus, our knowledge about dinosaurs changes due to new research on old material and discovery of new fossils.

An example of how our understanding of dinosaurs evolution has changed: this old chart in the MV collection suggests the dinosaur branch of the evolutionary tree was a dead end, but current research suggests some dinosaurs evolved into birds.
Source: Museum Victoria

We decided the most interesting angle would be forensic palaeontology – a kind of CSI Cretaceous. We’re using the phrase ‘how we know what we know’ as the exhibition focus. Our interactives will use evidence-based research to demonstrate particular theories, and, if possible, show the palaeontologist’s methods,

With this in mind we turned to popular dinosaur culture – what do people want to know? What are the interesting facts which we can debunk or expand upon? We started with the way dinosaurs are portrayed in films and TV because this is the most prevalent form of education for kids! We looked at the way dinosaurs moved, how we know the sounds they made, the colour of their skin, whether they evolved to become birds or reptiles; and how well they could see. We came up with a 'how we know what we know' list and then another list of types of exhibit that we know Scienceworks visitors have liked in the past.

The interactive elements of the exhibition are now in the final stages of design before we move on to the manufacturing side, then comes the exhibition installation! Before you know it, it will be June 1, when Explore-a-saurus will open and visitors can come and try the interactive components for themselves.

Links:

Explore-a-saurus

MV Blog: Open wide! 

Have you seen the Science and Life television commercial? 

We hung around on set and learned all sorts of useful things - what fake blood is made from, how much blood is too much, and exactly what attacks Bernard the security guard at night in the gallery...

Dave Pickering checking out the teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

The crew at Scienceworks have just unpacked a shipment of animatronic dinosaurs from Questacon. They will be refurbished in our workshops before going on display in the exhibition Explore-a-saurus, which opens at Scienceworks on 1 June 2011. Palaeontology collection manager, David Pickering, was caught hamming it up in a photo shoot with the mighty models, but I don't think he'll get that close once they're switched on and come to life!

Among the dinosaurs are some of the superstars of the dino world - T. rex, Stegasaurus, Triceratops and others. They will be overhauled with some new animatronic technology and their appearance updated to reflect recent discoveries in palaeontology.

Eye to eye with Triceratops in the Scienceworks collection store.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Explore-a-saurus will have moving, roaring models on a grand scale. The exhibition will also show how paleontologists reconstruct dinosaurs - what they looked like, how they behaved and where they lived - from fossil evidence.

Links:

What's On listing for Explore-a-saurus 

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: How old was that dinosaur?

Every now and then, those of us who work at Melbourne Museum receive a polite but slightly troubling email:

"The Preparation Department needs to undertake work today that may generate some odours."

I can’t think of another workplace where stench warnings are a regular occurrence. They’re intriguing, too, because I always wonder what they’re doing down there in the basement.

Our skilled preparators do much as their name would suggest: they prepare things, from animal specimens for research collections to intricate models for display. Their job combines elements of biology, taxidermy, sculpture and painting and their work area is a den of creativity and practicality that is stocked with tools and equipment and art supplies.

In mid-December, a Gray’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon grayi) unfortunately was stranded at Portland and died. Given the rarity of this species, and MV’s strength in the study of whales, its skeleton is a valuable addition to our research collection. The preparators perform the somewhat gruesome but necessary task of cleaning the skeleton, and that’s where the odour comes in.

The Preparation Department's collection of rubber gloves - essential tools in this line of work.
Source: Museum Victoria

Preparator Steven Sparrey explained the facilities in which large specimens are prepared. The specimens are placed in a sequence of water baths in the ominously named ‘maceration tank’ which allows the animal’s soft tissues to loosen away naturally from the bones without damaging them. It’s not pretty and it doesn’t smell good. After this, the bones are given a soapy wash and dried thoroughly.

The sealed room that holds the maceration tank (at the back) and cleaning benches.
Source: Museum Victoria

Some astonishingly large vertebrae from the backbone of a whale were on the drying racks. These were prepared for the Melbourne Aquarium from another stranded animal. The bones were quite yellow and Steven explained that the stains are from the whale’s oils, and they would be bleached by the sun once they were properly dry.

Whale vertebrae in the drying racks.
Source: Museum Victoria

Shortly after that, he firmly suggested that we leave the area because the smell tends to cling to clothing. Needless to say, he doesn’t wear his work clothes home on the train. So there you have it – perhaps not one of the most glamourous jobs at the museum, but an essential task to maintain Victoria’s collection of our state's fauna.

Links:

Model-making for Dynamic Earth

Climate change and whale evolution

Fossil unlocks secrets to the origin of whales

In May, Dr Joanna Sumner, Manager of Genetic Resources, joined a trip to Ilkurlka in remote Western Australia to work with Indigenous people and the WA Department of Conservation to survey the wildlife of this desert region.

You've probably heard reports that northern Victorian farmers are losing whole crops to armies of marching hoppers and that locusts are on their way into Melbourne. The species in question is the Australian Plague Locust, Chortoicetes terminifera, which belongs to the short-horned grasshoppers (family Acrididae). High rainfall over past months has created a bounty of lush green growth for the locusts to eat, allowing them to breed to plague conditions.

‘Locust’ is used to describe grasshoppers that can swarm in huge numbers. Most grasshoppers are solitary and the Australian Plague Locust generally shuns company too. But something interesting happens when their numbers build up: they enter what is known as a gregarious phase and their behaviour changes profoundly.

Juvenile locusts aggregate in ‘hopper bands’ that march across pasture, devouring everything in their wake. The adults travel vast distances in flying swarms that can be kilometres wide. A swarm that covers just one square kilometre can eat ten tonnes of vegetation in one day.

Band of nymphs moving through pasture, as seen from the air.
Source: Industry & Investment NSW

We spotted locusts on a recent trip to Benalla; they were all over the town, hopping and flying over roads and gardens in low numbers.

This locust was sunning itself on the footpath of the main street in Benalla.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

In some species – such as the Desert Locust found in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – the gregarious phase displays very different colours and body form to the solitary phase. Not so with the Australian Plague Locust; the two phases look pretty similar, especially when they’re dry specimens and their colours have faded, such as those in our entomology collection.

Specimens of the Australian Plague Locust in the Museum Victoria collection. The dark spots at the end of the hindwings in the top specimen are distinctive features of the species.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Australian Plague Locust Commission

DPI Victoria locust information

DPI NSW locust image gallery

Entomologist Ken Walker took 75 students in Year 7 at Eltham High School for a nature walk around their school grounds last week. Ken also gave a talk about biodiversity, but he believes that biodiversity is best understood through fieldwork.

The students discovered this batch of beautifully architectural eggs:

Eggs laid on young eucalyptus leaves.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

Detail of insect eggs.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

They were laid by a Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle (Paropsis atomaria) which belongs to the family Chrysomelidae, or leaf beetles. This is a very large and common family of beetles that feed on leaves. Some species of chrysomelids are introduced pests, such as the Elm Leaf Beetle that threatens many of Melbourne's historic elms, but the Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle is native to Australia. These eggs will hatch into voracious leaf-munching larvae.

Paropsis atomaria laying eggs.
Image: Peter Kelly
Source: PaDIL, Museum Victoria

Young larvae of the Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle feeding on eucalyptus leaf.
Image: Peter Kelly
Source: PaDIL, Museum Victoria

Next year Ken will help the students do a full survey of the ants found at Eltham High to teach them more about classification and the biodiversity of their own school.

Links:

Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle on PaDIL

Elm Leaf Beetle featured in Question of the Week

I needed a tetanus shot yesterday after a gardening accident involving my arm and a very spiky cactus. Like many people, I hate needles, but I'd rather suffer the jab than take a risk with this quite awful, and often lethal, disease.

We have several vials of tetanus vaccine in the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) Collection. CSL was established in 1918 when it became clear that Australia's isolation, combined with the global disruption of World War I, demanded that we become self-sufficient in medicines and vaccines for the sake of public health. Like most vaccines, the anti-tentanus vaccine includes deactivated pathogen that doesn't cause illness, but still triggers the immune system into battle mode. The resulting antigens can respond quickly to destroy any active tetanus bacteria that enter the body and prevent us from developing full-blown tetanus.

A group of Clostridium tetani bacteria, responsible for causing tetanus in humans
Image: Centre for Disease Control
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library

When I was a kid I thought you caught tetanus from rusty nails, since standing on a rusty nail was the most common reason people went for a tetanus shot. It's not, of course - it's caused by a rod-shaped bacterium called Clostridium tetani. C. tetani is a common, free-living bacterium that flourishes in anaerobic (or oxygen-free) enviroments... such as the deep wound caused when you stand on a rusty nail. Once in there, the bacteria release a toxin called tetanospasmin which causes devastating muscle contractions and spasm. The infection is also known as 'lockjaw' since the first muscles to be affected are often the large chewing muscles. Tetanus is lethal in up to 45% of cases.

So on that cheery note, as summer approaches and you ditch your winter shoes for summer flip-flops, and spend more time outside near rusty nails, perhaps it's time for a tetanus booster? 

An article in the Age today shared the good news that the rare leafy liverwort Pedinophyllum monoicum survived the Black Saturday bushfire disaster in tiny remnants of Yarra Ranges rainforest. It was discovered through the Rainforest Recovery Project which is revisiting sites that were sampled prior to the fires.

This sort of work is critical to our understanding about how ecosystems recover - or don't - from bushfire. MV Curator of Hepetology, Jane Melville, received an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant in June this year to continue her work on the ecology, demography and genetics of frogs in the Kinglake region. A surprising number and diversity of frogs survived the February 2009 fires.

This field site in Toolangi was badly affected by bushfire, yet yielded an adult frog previously caught in 2008. It is thought that frogs survived the fire by hiding in and around bodies of water like this dam.
Image: Bec Bray
Source: Museum Victoria

Frogs and liverworts share one characteristic that make them particularly important indicators: they are very sensitive to drying out. Neither would survive a direct fire front but  persist in unburnt pockets (or refugia) that offer protection. Long-term studies will monitor how the forests recover in coming years; since frogs are mobile, it is hoped that they will spread relatively quickly back into their former range. Rainforest plants generally aren't quite so responsive so we're very fortunate that this small, tender plant made it through the fires.

Links:

Media release from the Department of Sustainability and Environment

Type specimen of Pedinophyllum monoicum held at Te Papa Tongarewa

What is a liverwort? - Australian National Botanic Gardens