Tasmanian tiger … snake

I saw only stuffed museum specimens of the extinct Tasmanian tiger on my trip around Tasmania last December, but was fortunate to see the very unextinct Tasmanian tiger snake (Notechis scutatus) – in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park on the west coast.

Tiger snake in the Franklin-Gordon rainforest

The Tassie species is the same as occurs on the mainland. The Parks and Wildlife Service Tasmania has information about it. This one was just off the Heritage Landing rainforest boardwalk, trying to soak up some rays that were feebly filtering through the canopy. The nature guide said he often saw the snake around that area.

The paper “Body size and trophic divergence of two large sympatric elapid snakes (Notechis scutatus and Austrelaps superbus) (Serpentes: Elapidae) in Tasmania” by Simon Fearn and others describes a study of the eating habits of the tiger snake and the copper head (Austrelaps superbus) in Tasmania. The information in this paper is published in a more digestible form in the magazine, Tasmania 40 South, issue 68. The tiger snake eats frogs, eels, trout, wrens, native and introduced mice, rats, antechinus and even juvenile eastern barred bandicoots. One really large tiger contained the remains of a juvenile brush-tailed possum.

Tigers often have the scars from rat bites on their bodies – presumably the rats are fighting for their lives when attacked by the snake. Older snakes can be literally covered from head to foot with such scars.

Copperheads, with their smaller mouths, eat mainly smaller items, including the spotted marsh frog and the banjo frog, lizards and other snakes. They share habitat with the tigers, but specialise in smaller prey. This means both species can inhabit the same areas and survive happily without too much competition with each other.

The rainforest (World Heritage listed) is so atmospheric. Hooray for the conservationists who fought so long, hard and successfully to preserve it! You get a good idea of the lushness and biodiversity of the plants, fungi and animals even from the short walk allowed on the tour. It’s possible to take kayaking tours, too, or do your own serious bushwalking expedition.

Misty, moisty Gordon river and surrounding World Heritage old-growth rainforest

Burrows of the Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish (Astacopsis gouldi), the world’s largest freshwater invertebrate, were evident. The barrier islands off the coast of Georgia in the USA also have freshwater crayfish, and Professor Tony Martin has written about them here.

The towers of the Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish

I’m no Peter Dombrovskis (check out some of his images here and here) or Olegas Truchanas (look here for some of his images), but the rainforest somehow calls out to be remembered so I took lots of shots. These men were two of Australia’s finest wilderness photographers. Having been there, I understand how they wanted to spend so much time in the Tasmanian wilderness, capturing the moment. Both died there on photography expeditions.

Talking about pop, pop, pop culture

And that’s enough referencing of ’80′s music, thank you.

The weekend saw another Gold Coast SupaNova pop culture event. I talked about last’s year’s event here.

It’s always fun to see the enthusiasms of so many people, singles, couples and families, whether they dress up as their favourite SF, movie, anime or game character. Literally wall-to-wall fans of every genre – there’s even (whisper) wrestling. I guess that’s pop culture, too.

Many authors were sitting at tables with their novels, looking lonely, so we chatted to a few and they were all keen to talk. One was award-winning fantasy, SF and comics writer Tad Williams – we didn’t actually know who he was, but he was a pleasure to talk with. We were gasbagging merrily away, then realised there was a queue behind us to see him. Oops – so we moved on.

There were too many fabulous costumes to take photos of, so I just stuck to my own fandoms. They shouldn’t be too hard to guess.

Here’s Souffle Girl …

Dalek Clara (Doctor Who)

The laughing frog

Fleeing the dismal continual rain in Lismore for a few days, we visited Warwick in south-east Queensland, a two-hour drive from home. As soon as we crossed the border, the rain stopped. What was that old advertising slogan? “Queensland – beautiful one day, perfect the next.” Like many other places in SE Qld and northern NSW, it’s had LOTS of rain.

We were surprised to come across a statue of Tiddalik by the river.

Tiddalik, the water-swallower and drought-breaker. Yes, that is a giant sandstone lizard behind it.

Saturn moth

Is there an astronomical theme appearing here? A little while ago I posted about a sunfish. This time a Saturn moth has come into my purview.

It seems to be Opodiphthera astrophela – compare the pic on the CSIRO website.

Opodiphthera astrophela

Ain’t we got fun?

It’s east coast low time again, folks – 3 weeks after the last one (reported here). Ballina, well-known for having the highest rainfalls in the immediate region,  had 151 mL in the last 24 hours – phooey, I say. We beat that, and the previous record here (3 weeks ago) of 125 mL (5 inches) in 24 hours – this morning there was 184 mL (over 7 inches) in the gauge for the last 24 hours!

Wind gusts in Ballina officially went up to 91 km/hour (57 miles/hour), but something stronger than that ripped off the roof of the Pelican restaurant by the river. It was quite windy in the valley, and Andrew did get some water in his studio – not from a dirt bank collapsing like last time, but just sheer overflow from the gutters not carried away fast enough and water rising from ground level. A tall sally wattle split in two and has fallen over the driveway.

Other places on the coast got it much worse than we did – being an hour inland helps. They are still waiting for their electricity and water to be restored, or to be rescued off their roofs. It took up to 5 days to restore electricity last time. If you live on property and have an electric pump to supply yourself with water from a tank (like us), you will be unable to have a shower or flush the loo. Luckily we kept our electricity supply and just had to sleep as best we could through the noise of the storm.

Today is sunny, so the clean-up begins. Just another east coast low in Lismore.

Update: The Daily Examiner has a range of photos and an article on the Ballina situation. The Marine Rescue folks recorded winds in Ballina of 80 knots (148 km/hour or 92 miles an hour for us landlubbers).

Sunfish

I was looking through some old photos and came across these two, from my days as a curatorial assistant at the South Australian Museum. There’d been a call from the public about a “funny fish” washed up.

A sunfish on a South Australian beach

It’s a sunfish, one of four species of Mola in Australian waters, ‘mola’ being Latin for ‘millstone’. They are ocean-going, eat mainly jellyfish (and probably, alas, plastic bags) and are sometimes seen ‘sun-bathing’ (hence the name) on the sea surface. Some of them are really big, the heaviest known bony fish in the world. Nobody really knows much about their behaviour, so the sun-bathing could be a sign of a sick fish rather than of topping up a tan or storing heat energy.

To my chagrin, I can’t find any details about where or when or even who the other museum staffer was. The beach would have been somewhere near Adelaide, as I vaguely recall the drive to find it didn’t take very long. Adelaide is on a shallow gulf, so this one was hardly ocean-going. I did write an article about it, though:

Window, J. Sunfish in South Australia. The South Australian Naturalist 1978, 53(2): 29–31

I don’t even have a copy of the article, so the photos will have to stand by themselves. Pretty neat, huh?

Two weeks in Tassie (part 2)

Part 1 is here.

Friday 14/12/12

Time to leave Lonny and go back to Hobart. Instead of just taking the usual three hours to zoom down the Midland Highway, we decided to spend the whole day investigating places that took our fancy.

We first stopped at Campbell Town. I really wasn’t expecting the paddocks on either side of the highway to be so dry – it’s very like South Australia and Victoria. Hobart has Australia’s second driest average annual rainfall (for a capital city) after Adelaide. Big westerly winds off the Southern Ocean bring rain, but it all falls on the mountains and the eastern side of the island is in a rain shadow.

Many (probably most) of the old bridges in Tassie are convict-built. Convicts were used as slave labour on such projects, and also as farm-hands and serving families.

Red Bridge, Campbell Town, built by convicts in 1833; photo by Angela Coco