No, I did not get so fiercely pummeled by it that I got lumps on my head. Yes, I did run around like an idiot in this small patch that accumulated outside.
(And I collected some in a bag too)
The long story short is, it’s this little thunderstorm that hit the Sacramento area…sometime in the morning today, I think? I’m not sure exactly when because it didn’t reach me until I got home, but…yeah. Started sprinkling around 2:30, and then give it another ten, fifteen minutes or so and these little stones start pouring down. They’re like, maybe a couple millimeters across, BB size, something like that. So I get a solid ten minutes of absolute…hail. (I’m sorry.) But now it’s like….what, a quarter past three as of me writing this? (And now a quarter till four after not posting this?) It’s all done now (just rain) and it’ll melt away in the next hour or so, so the moral of the story is you really gotta be ready to carpe the diem when it comes, I guess.
Hail accumulations on a patio canopy. For once, the decorative lights don’t look like they’re lying about something.
…there’s really not much more than that, but it was pretty cool. What with the neat white piles of cold stuff, it’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to a real winter in any place I’ve lived.
Apparently, there’s this quote that’s something like “My favorite part of winter is watching it on TV from [Arizona/Texas/California/Florida]”
And would you believe it or not, the hummingbirds were STILL coming to the feeder even when there was literal ICY BIRDSHOT falling out of the sky. Daredevils. (Though if they were just hungry, I can respect that too.)
Hong Kong. The city – the words – mean a certain home to me. Mean 14-hour-long flights, delicious food and slightly smoggy streets, tangled banyan roots and family roots, red taxis and double-decker buses.
Invariably, to most people, Hong Kong is the city with Bruce Lee, the classic shot with the red-sailed sampan in the harbor, a most easily awe-inspiringly-destructible skyline for Autobots and Kaiju and whatever else have you to battle behind, and for some reason it seems like it’s always the Ground Zero of choice for some screenwriter’s fantasy about the next Death Plague. Oh, and it’s got people. Lots of people.
But today, hopefully I’ll paint a different picture of Hong Kong, one that isn’t quite what I’d known from my own experience until this point and one that’s certainly not what the average person would probably imagine it to be, but still Hong Kong nonetheless.
Crash course on Hong Kong geography (don’t fall asleep yet!)
As much as I might feel like I’m a true Hongkonger (or whatever the appropriate demonym is), I’m really not. (I can’t even speak Cantonese, the local Chinese dialect.) That being said, I know enough geography to give the very basics, which sets the stage for my glorious adventures:
Hong Kong is a sort of city-state of around 1,000 square miles in area, part of which is connected to mainland China just south of the city of Shenzhen, and the rest is distributed amongst a handful of islands. Most of the Hong Kong metropolis is found along the southern edge of the Kowloon peninsula (connected to mainland China) and the northern edge of Hong Kong Island, the second-largest island in Hong Kong’s jurisdiction (after Lantau Island, where the Big Buddha statue and the airport are located). These two towering masses of skyscrapers face each other across Victoria Harbour and comprise the famous Hong Kong skyline, although almost all of the iconic buildings are found on the island (coming up in a later post).
Beyond that, though, Hong Kong is rather undeveloped. The Southern half of Hong Kong Island, along with most of Lantau and the land to the north and east of the Kowloon Peninsula (the latter of which are referred to collectively as the New Territories), are either just too hilly and jungly, or are protected by the government from being replaced with concrete jungle. Thus, aside from a few suburbs that maintain the big-city feel, a significant portion of Hong Kong’s land area is devoted to large parks, cultural sites, and traditional settlements. And within its rainforests and waters hide over 230 species of butterflies – nearly 4 times the number found in the entire UK – and some of the northernmost and hardiest coral reefs in the world (although they may eventually be lost to pollution).
It’s in the eastern New Territories, north of Ma On Shan (the tallest point in Hong Kong), that the Plover Cove Reservoir is located. Once consisting of coastline connected to the ocean, Plover Cove was converted into essentially a large lake by building a large dam across its opening, draining it, and refilling it with freshwater for the use of the city of Hong Kong. Throughout this time, Plover Cove and the surrounding areas have remained popular sites for local recreation – people can bike and walk on the dam, as well as fish the reservoir itself, hike and camp in the surrounding forest, and boat in the ocean on the other side of the dam.
Lakes and mountains, sea and sky
Before my family and I went to the Plover Cove Reservoir and dam proper, we stopped by the surrounding town of Tai Mei Tuk to pick up bikes to rent. From there, it’s about a three-minute ride on flat terrain and another three-minute walk up a shallow gradient (on which you’re not supposed to ride the bike) to get to the dam, which is flanked on both sides by small hills and open circles of pavement, which serve the dual purpose of helicopter pads and turnaround areas for vehicles. Although the dam mostly only sees bicycle and pedestrian traffic, there were a few cars driving along it (likely government workers), and later in the day a fire truck came to put out a small, mysterious fire on the lake shore that was blowing large clouds of smoke over the most heavily-traversed sections of the dam.
From Tai Mei Tuk, you enter the dam from the northwest side (it stretches straight down to the southeast), meaning that the reservoir is to the left and the ocean to the right. For the first couple hundred meters or so, the dam is pretty crowded, but the people thin out the farther away you get from its entrance (maybe a 5-10 minute bike ride to its very end at a leisurely pace).
From the Plover Cove Dam, facing Plover Cove Lake.
Even from this point, about a third of the way down the length of the dam, there aren’t many people on the road, and you feel almost transported to the middle of the Southern China coastline – nothing about this place feels like the classic hustle-and-bustle of Hong Kong. To the left, the mountain in the distance with the serrated appearance is known as Pat Sin Leng, meaning “mountain range of the Eight Immortals”. All around 1500 feet in height, each of the eight peaks is named after one of the Eight Immortals of Taoism and Chinese mythology.
From the Plover Cove Dam, facing the ocean.
At the other end of the dam, which is a little more than a mile long, there are several walking trails that weave around the hills and jungle. Although bikes are not permitted there, fishing and hiking are possible from that end of the reservoir, as several paths lead up the hill and down to the lake shore.
Plover Cove Lake, as viewed from the southeast side of the dam; Pat Sin Leng is visible as the closest mountain ridge.On the shore of Plover Cove Lake, facing west.
A fisherman on the shore of the lake.Steep flights of maintenance stairs like this one are common throughout Hong Kong; they are often cut directly from the hillside or consist of metal ladders fixed into rock to allow workers access to the hilly terrain.At the top of the stairs leading to the Plover Cove Lake access point near the dam.
Kite-flying
After I rode my bike back to the other end of the reservoir, I met up again with my relatives and we attempted to fly a couple of different kites from the dam. Having a very cluttered skyline and dense forests throughout most of its undeveloped areas, Hong Kong is generally not an accommodating place to fly kites, so large open areas with reliable winds often see lots of people with kites on good days.
The Plover Cove Reservoir main dam facing southeast. The body of water to the left is the Plover Cove lake; to the right is the ocean. A few kites are visible in the distance.
The first kite that we brought with us was a large two-line delta stunt kite. And it performed disastrously. The wind was consistently there but it wasn’t constant, nor strong enough to support a kite of this size and type, and the lines were tangled and thus of uneven length. So trying to run the kite out would get it airborne for a max of oh, maybe a second or two before it would plunge like a missile back down to the pavement or over the railing and onto the rocks below. It hit and nearly de-seated a couple of cyclists (including me, when I was first riding back) until an elderly man with a much lighter kite scolded us and we eventually stopped trying.
My aunt eventually went to Tai Mei Tuk to buy a few smaller kites, and these got off the ground (and stayed off) much more successfully:
Snacks by the pier
After returning the bikes at Tai Mei Tuk, we stopped by the two small piers to get classic Hong Kong snacks.
Hong Kong fish ball siu mai in a honey soy sauce.
These are siu mai (also transliterated shao mai, shu mai, and a billion other ways), small steamed dumplings with a thin dough wrapping and a meat filling. There are a bunch of different variations of siu mai, of which this kind has a fish-ball filling and is the most common type served as street food. Pardon the blurriness of the photo; we wouldn’t stop eating these long enough for me to get a stable shot. And I don’t regret it.
Dofu fa, Chinese-style soft tofu pudding.
This is a tofu pudding, known as dofu fa (with my own transliteration). It’s a very soft and mildly-flavored type of tofu with a creamy texture; it is eaten sweet, with syrup and sugar sprinkled on top. Normally, I’m not a fan of tofu, but this is one exception I’ll make.
The two ocean piers at Tai Mei Tuk, facing westward.
In addition to exploring the Plover Cove Reservoir, it’s possible to rent canoes or paddleboats and explore the small harbor around Tai Mei Tuk. Many boats of different kinds can be found docked here at the two small public piers, and there are lots of little fish that school around them, so I did see people fishing here too. No success, though.
Conclusion
I love it and I want to go back.
Long-story short, that’s my adventures around the Plover Cove Reservoir, which in this trip was my only stint in the New Territories. However, I will be sure to head around there the next time I visit, and hopefully I’ll be able to get nice pictures then and write about it more.
So…writing is slow at the moment, but there’s definitely more on Hong Kong to come. Stay tuned.
Alas, what is Australia without some photos of its most iconic wildlife?
Every time I’ve been around the Adelaide area, I’ve made it a mission to go to one of the sanctuaries or parks to get up close with some of the classic Australian animals that I wouldn’t see otherwise. This year, I went with my family to the Cleland Wildlife Park, the centerpiece of an about 11 square-kilometer protected area in the Adelaide Hills surrounding the city. The Conservation Park, as the area is known as a whole, includes many hiking and biking trails as well as enclosures with famous Australian animals, but unfortunately I did not have enough time to go explore all of that. Perhaps another time…
What I did manage to get, however, were nice petting opportunities with a handful of very adorable marsupials.
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These little peeps are Southern brown bandicoots, Isoodon obesulus, and they’re everywhere in the park. For their small size and shy appearance (they look somewhat like rats, except obviously much cuter), they’re surprisingly friendly, and will rarely object to petting, especially when distracted with a bit of food. I remember the first time I saw a bandicoot on a wildlife sanctuary, it was sprinting around crazily, and I pursued it in large circles trying to even identify what it was – yeah, these were considerably calmer.
Although they do look like rodents, bandicoots are marsupials, thus being more closely related to kangaroos and koalas than mice or rats. However, bandicoots have indeed adapted to fill the ecological niches that small rodents like shrews hold in Eurasia and North America – they live in small nests, eat bugs and plant roots, and are food for native owls and snakes. This species used to be found throughout much of the rainier parts of Australia (mostly along the coasts), but its range has since shrunk considerably due to predation by newly-introduced predators – namely cats and foxes. As bandicoots aren’t used to seeing these predators, they don’t know to avoid their scent or evade their hunting style, and so their numbers have declined precipitously. However, as evidenced by their presence in this park, the plight of the Southern brown bandicoot is now recognized, and people have begun to protect their isolated populations or reintroduce them to areas where cats and foxes can’t get to them. Oh, and before you ask, these bandicoots have NO relation to Crash Bandicoot – the videogame character is in fact an Eastern barred bandicoot, a species I have never seen before.
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Of course, here are the obligatory kangaroo pictures. I’ve already mentioned them before in my post where I had pictures of wild ones, but now that I’m seeing them up close in the Wildlife Park, I can make a few more observations. First of all, the color difference between the red and Eastern gray kangaroos is quite obvious here. The size difference is unfortunately not – the red kangaroos can grow to be slightly larger, but I these individuals aren’t full grown. Another thing – kangaroos are unbelievably soft. Their fur feels like…uh, sort of like the really fuzzy inside of a jacket. Or like one of those pillows that you rub the wrong way and then it turns like a slightly darker shade of the same color. The ones that do that, kangaroos feel like that. Finally…it’s not exactly related to the topic at hand, but if you have a Google smart speaker or mini assistant (or whatever it’s called), ask it “how many legs does a kangaroo have?” You might be surprised to hear the answer.
A species of rock wallaby, Petrogale sp.
This is a wallaby, and if you think it looks like a mini kangaroo, you’d be right! It pretty much is. Taxonomically, wallabies are grouped together with the kangaroos, but they are more diverse – different species of wallabies live in rainforests, the Outback, and in rocky terrain, and not all of them are endemic to Australia (a few species can be found in the nearby tropical New Guinea). I’m not sure exactly which species this one is, but my guess would be a type of rock wallaby. General observations (including experience from visiting other wildlife parks in the past) – the wallabies I’ve seen in parks generally seem to be friendlier with people than the kangaroos, and have better appetite for the park-provided kangaroo food. Being smaller, they’re also less dangerous if one happens to get irritated with you and gives you a kick or shove – if a full-grown kangaroo does balance on its tail and really kicks you in the chest, that could be game over (fortunately, the kangaroos in the parks are more used to people, and won’t do that unless you really hurt or bother them, such as by stepping on their tails).
A juvenile koala.
Probably the only animal to rival the kangaroo in its renown as a symbol of Australia, Phascolarctos cinereus, better known as the koala. Lots of facts about these arboreal marsupials, but I’ll try not to bore you. Mostly native to the country’s eastern coast (Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria), koalas were hunted to extinction in South Australia in the early 1900s and were later reintroduced to this state . (The first time I went to Adelaide and around the Adelaide Hills, I saw a wild koala, part of this reintroduced population. Since then, I’ve only seen them in parks.) Thanks in no small part to their cute and cuddly appearance, making them perfect flagship species for conservation efforts, they are some of the best-protected marsupials and have made an amazing comeback in the 100 years since they were killed in the millions for their fur. They have since been thrown back into the delicate middle ground between healthy populations and endangered status, indicated by its classification as a “vulnerable” species on the IUCN Red List, due mainly to habitat loss and fragmentation and diseases resembling human STIs (namely Chlamydia and a virus called Koala Retrovirus that causes a similar disease to human AIDS). Fortunately, koalas continue to receive a lot of research and conservation help, including at parks such as this one which may take in abandoned, sick or injured individuals and nurse them back to health before releasing them again.
A pair of sleeping koalas.
A quick note relating to koala cuddling or displays: not all parks are the same. Please do your research and make sure that the location where you go to see these adorable animals really does care for them and doesn’t simply use them as props for tourists. Cleland does a good job of putting the health of their koalas first – currently, in fact, koala experiences are canceled until mid-February due to a skin condition caused by high heat – but please make sure you read a little bit about the park you plan to visit online to get a sense for what the park’s priorities are or maybe even find special information about their koala-holding policies. (In addition, if you imagine holding a koala to be like an angel’s embrace or something else heavenly like that, no, it’s not at all like that. Their fur is really not that soft and they are surprisingly claw-y, so although it’s not painful, holding a koala is significantly less fun than holding a baby of the same weight.)
A pair of dingoes in an enclosure. One is on top of the right nest, and the second one is in the left nest.
Although they look a bit like short-haired shiba inus, these are dingoes, one of the apex predators on the continent. Their taxonomic and conservation status are quite confusing because unlike the Australian marsupials that lived and evolved on the continent for millions of years, the dingo arrived only a few thousand years ago from New Guinea, and it is believed to have descended from once-domesticated breeds there. Therefore, dingoes aren’t truly their own species in the same sense that wolves and coyotes are, but at the same time they still live completely independently of humans. The most commonly accepted scientific name for them is thus Canis lupus dingo, making them a once- but currently non-domesticated subspecies of the gray wolf; at different points in history, however, they have been referred to as a feral breed of domesticated dog or even their own species. Of more controversial debate is what should be done about them; they are considered pests, as they may attack sheep and cattle, and they are believed to have caused the extinction of the Tasmanian devil and thylacine on mainland Australia. In fact, the world’s largest fence is built across southeastern Australia to keep these fertile lands free of dingoes and livestock in this area safe from their attacks. However, others argue that dingoes have since taken on or created a new niche in the Australian ecosystem, helping to control newly-introduced pest animals such as rabbits and deer.
This is the Cape Barren goose, known scientifically as Cereopsis novaehollandiae. It being…well, a goose, there isn’t a lot of special stuff I know about it. It’s native to the southern coast of Australia, and perhaps the most interesting thing about it (besides its patterning, especially on the beak) is the fact that this goose rarely swims – it mostly forages for grass on land, and in this park, it will aggressively chase people for offerings of kangaroo food pellets.
A far more unique and intimidating bird, this is the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae. It’s the largest bird in Australia and the second-largest in the world (after the ostrich), and like the ostrich, New Zealand kiwi, and the cassowaries of northern Australia and New Guinea, it belongs to the group of flightless birds called the ratites.
They’re probably one of the scariest birds out there (barring the cassowaries, which I have never seen in person), which isn’t helped by their glaring red stare and habit of slowly following anyone who it sees has a bag of kangaroo food. My 8-year-old cousin shook her bag in front of one of these, and it proceeded to walk slowly towards her. She then shakily said with a laugh, “nice bird…nice…bird…ni-” as she started walking in circles around me, with this giant emu (taller than her, mind you) following her, staring daggers. Even after she threw some pellets on the ground, the emu wasn’t interested. Only after I took the bag from her did the emu finally give up on chasing her…and it promptly began to follow me. It only finally stopped after I tossed some pellets coincidentally in the direction of a broken bag of kangaroo food that was lying in the grass. The emu then walked over to there, bent down, and ate the paper bag.
Also (and I’m kicking myself that I never got this on video), the emus would make like this….really scary thumping sound inside their stomachs or something every now and then. I don’t know if it’s a territorial call, or if they were signaling their contempt or irritation towards visitors, but it sounded like a very low, loud burp that emanated from their body. Here’s a video on YouTube that sort of captures this sound (fortunately, the emus I saw were a lot calmer than this, although the drumming sound from any given individual did go on for a couple seconds, much longer than the filmed emus):
Unlike many other native Australian animals and now-extinct ratites such as the moa of New Zealand, the emus of the Australian mainland do not face any conservation threats (emu subspecies on Tasmania and other Australian islands went extinct soon after the arrival of Europeans). In fact, with the introduction of agriculture and irrigation to greater areas of the center of the continent, emus have been able to expand their range slightly. This, however, has placed emus in greater conflict with Australian people…which leads me to probably one of my favorite historical stories ever. During the Great Depression years in the US, Australia also suffered severe economic hardship, and many farmers were frustrated both with their inability to sell wheat and the arrival of emus, which ate, trampled and ruined their crop. At the continued protest of farmers in Western Australia, the Australian government finally sent artillery – some World War I-era machine guns – and soldiers to exterminate the emus once and for all in what became known as the Emu War. Commencing in early November of 1932, the soldiers attempted to kill the emus over a span of about a month. However, they faced weather problems which dispersed the emus, guns that jammed, and tactically-skilled enemies – the emus often adopted “guerrilla tactics”, splitting up from the huge herds in which they were first sighted into small groups and running away from enemy fire at high speeds. Eventually, the soldiers were recalled, and while no official declaration of war or surrender remains to document the Emu War, it is almost universally regarded to have been an Emu victory. The birds continued to destroy crops for a few years until better fencing was installed around peoples’ fields.
So there’s a small sampling of some of Australia’s most famous animals, up close and personal. My next couple of posts will deal with my journeys in a very different city. Stay tuned.
Hello all! I’m now back from abroad, but while school is still mellow and I haven’t been absolutely swamped in assignments yet, I still endeavor to finish posting about my travels. Sorry if that’s boring, but if I do it I do it and then it’ll go to something else eventually. So bear with me.
Anyhow, one of my secret passions that I might not have mentioned on this blog before is butterflies. Butterflies were the first thing that got me interested in biology – I don’t know exactly what it is about them, but I’ve always loved their colorfulness, their flight, and their magical transformation from quasi-legless, ungainly caterpillar to graceful imago. And for me, growing up in a city with plenty of open areas and a nice diversity of native butterflies, it was accessible to me. It wasn’t like a zoo, where I’d have to travel and pay to see animals on permanent display. A single flower could suffice as my zoo, and the exhibits would come and go as they please. Spectacular.
I used to catch lots of butterflies when I was younger, finding it particularly interesting to raise the caterpillars from the eggs they laid or that I discovered while browsing plants they were known to feed on. Since then, however, I’ve also developed a great appreciation for photographing butterflies, with the significant benefit that I won’t get arrested if I try to take back pictures as opposed to caterpillars or preserved specimens. So since several years ago or so, I’ve always dedicated a little time to looking for butterflies while visiting my family around the world – in Okinawa, Vancouver, Hong Kong, and now Australia. Although this wasn’t a dedicated butterfly-seeking trip, I still managed to capture some great images of two species, which I will discuss in more detail to hopefully make up for the lack of species diversity. If you have insomnia, this will either be a great help to you or not. Could go both ways.
A common grass-blue, Zizina labradus, with wings closed.
This first butterfly appears drab, small, and unassuming – almost moth-like in its apparent boringness. It’s known as the common grass-blue or Zizina labradus, and it is a member of the family Lycaenidae, whose members include butterflies known commonly as blues, coppers, hairstreaks or gossamer-wings. In terms of average size, the lycaenids are the smallest butterflies, and are typically very delicate and weak fliers. Their roughly 5,000 species (estimates range from around 4,500 to over 6,000) can be found around the world, and while many species feed on plants in the clover and pea family, some are famous for parisitizing ant colonies as caterpillars.
This species above is, alas, not an ant parasite; in the wild, it feeds on Australian native legumes, but in urban and suburban areas it has adapted to feed on clover and vetch species that have been spread worldwide. Thus, like many California lycaenids such as the Eastern tailed-blue (Everes comyntas) which have made transitions to introduced host plants, the common grass-blue and its caterpillars can be found quite commonly in large fields or lawns even in the middle of cities or otherwise disturbed habitat. While it is quite small (for scale, just a little bit bigger than the average letter key on a computer keyboard), a few of them flitting above clover can be difficult to ignore, and their name quickly becomes apparent when they land and open their wings:
A male common grass-blue with wings open.
Striking, shiny-silvery blue or orange colors on the upper side of the wings are characteristic of many butterflies in the family Lycaenidae, although many members are more gray in color. Thus, despite their size, I still think that the blues make for very attractive species to photograph, although collecting specimens and preserving them is much more of a challenge as a result of their fragility.
The second species of butterfly is, unarguably, the most commonly-seen in the wine country around Adelaide where I stayed (indeed, the only one that I saw there), and I believe it’s found throughout the country as well. Even on Queen Street in Melbourne, I saw a single lone individual flying along the sidewalk, through traffic lights and besides cars and tourists. It’s the aptly-named common brown, known scientifically as Heteronympha merope:
A male common brown, Heteronympha merope.
Despite the fact that they’re so numerous at times they hit me in the face without my being able to do much about it, I still love them (small fluffs). Males of this species (most commonly observed in early summer) have this beautiful fiery-orange color and thick brown lines which helps them camouflage in the arid Australian bush, and four small eyespots, one on each wing, which can help startle predators if they’re discovered and give them a chance to escape (although they’re shy butterflies and they startle easily, making them hard to photograph, they don’t fly very fast). On average, I’d say they have a wingspan of 2-3 inches, which is fairly normal for butterflies of the family Nymphalidae, to which H. merope belongs. This family is commonly known as the brushfoot butterflies, containing some 6,000 or so species which all have the unique characteristic of having two very short front legs. All insects have 6 legs, but the nymphalids only walk on four, holding the shortened front legs up to their faces.
A female H. merope. Females of this species have very different upper wing patterns, are generally larger than the males, and tend to fly faster. They are, however, much shyer and rarely open their wings. Not the “snout” that protrudes from the center of the butterfly’s face; these are the front two legs of the butterfly.
The common brown belongs to a particular subfamily of the Nymphalidae which is called the Satyrinae, commonly known as the satyrs or browns. While the Nymphalidae as a whole has some very spectacularly-colored species (such as the famous blue morphos of the Central and South American rainforests and the monarch butterfly of North America), the browns, as their name implies, are generally duller in color. As I mentioned above, they aren’t very strong fliers, so many of them rely on this color to provide them with camouflage against bare ground or dried plant material. Many species in this family eat seasonal grasses as caterpillars, so the butterflies may effectively live their whole lives in the grass, staying camouflaged amongst them as adults (unlike many common garden butterflies, the Satyrinae do not visit flowers often). However, they are by no means hard to find – simply brushing a hand over dry grass or walking through it can stir up large clouds of butterflies as they are flushed from their hiding spots, flutter around for a few seconds, and then settle on the ground or in the plants again. I remember seeing this behavior often with the California ringlet (Coenonympha tullia california), a closely-related butterfly, when I hiked around Chico, California. But it was another level altogether in Australia:
Heteronympha merope is particularly interesting because it is more than just a curiosity discovered and described with the advent of European science to the Australian continent – the common brown, in fact, was known to Indigenous Australians for thousands of years, where it played an important role in their calendar system. The Jardwadjali- and Djapwurrong-speaking people from around the Gariwerd region of central Victoria (southeast Australia) divided the year into six parts; the season from November to January, correlating with what would be described as late spring to early summer, was called “Ballambar”, or the butterfly season. (In Californian climate, this would roughly translate to around May to July, maybe six weeks or more after the major rains of the springtime.) By this time, the caterpillars of H. merope would have hatched from their eggs or emerged from dormancy over the winter, eaten their way through fresh green grasses, turned into pupae, and started flying, signifying the beginning of summer and foreshadowing the “Kooyang” season with the hottest and driest days of the year.
Studies have since shown that these butterflies’ flight times are changing as a result of climate change. In 2010, Kearney et al. found that populations of H. merope around Melbourne, Victoria began flying around 1.5 days earlier each decade as mean temperatures rose by about 0.16 degrees Celsius each decade. Over the 65 years of data collected, the butterflies are now emerging almost two weeks earlier in the calendar year than they used to. This is not a phenomenon unique to butterflies – many seasonal insects hatch based on ambient temperatures, so if global temperatures tend to rise on average, they will hatch earlier, which in some cases may cause serious imbalances in predator-prey relationships. Bird chicks of migratory species expecting to be fed bugs, for example, may end up starving if the prey they anticipated to be in their breeding grounds had already hatched, fully developed and left. And who knows how this might have impacted Aboriginal Australians, who would have seen their calendar offset by a factor of nearly half a month?
Just interesting things to consider and think about, the next time you see a butterfly. Hopefully in the future, I’ll get more pictures of them and share some more I’ve found from different locations. Stay tuned.
Kearney, M., Briscoe, N., Karoly, D., Porter, W., Norgate, M., & Sunnucks, P. (2010). Early emergence in a butterfly causally linked to anthropogenic warming. Biology Letters,6(5), 674-7.
Greetings again! In one of my previous posts, I shared some pictures and videos that I took of marine life (predominately fish) at Noarlunga Reef, a popular diving site south of Adelaide, South Australia. At the time, I was like, dang, this is pretty cool, I’m really glad I got to explore some of the waters of South Australia. Hope I can do this again the next time I go back.
Well, I did go back again on the last day I was in Adelaide. Excellent.
This second time, I went around the northern part of Adelaide, with a greater focus on invertebrates, seeing as they were rather lacking in my previous post. The first place I ended up stopping at was the suburb of West Lakes, which shares its name with the large lake-like body of water in its center. About 40 years or so ago, the swamp which used to be located here was drained (no connection to modern political rhetoric), the land reclaimed, and the area transformed into a residential area, with the resulting formation of the eponymous lakes. These lakes are saltwater, being connected to the ocean via the Port Adelaide River, and are a part of a larger estuary which was once a major outflow of the River Torrens prior to the urbanization of Adelaide.
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Being quite shallow, well-insolated, and mild in terms of water movement, I suspect that the West Lakes are very rich in terms of invertebrate diversity, and unfortunately I was not able to explore it in much depth (both literally and figuratively). However, I was very pleased to find these feather duster worms quite close to the water’s edge. These polychaete worms comprise the family Sabellidae (although I cannot identify this individual to the species level), and they are filter feeders, using their crown of delicate feathery fronds to collect algae, bacteria and other nutritious particles from the water. Many species of feather dusters make their way into the aquarium trade, where they can nicely complement a display of corals and other sessile invertebrates, although few species are as brightly-colored as this one.
The other location I went to was the Semaphore Jetty. Like at Port Noarlunga, the jetty extends far out into the water perpendicular to the beach, although there was unfortunately no large reef at the end of this one. As a result, the water at this beach was significantly more turbulent, which reduced visibility, shooed away most of the fish and made it exceedingly difficult for me to get stable, clear pictures. However, I was still able to find interesting organisms by focusing my attention on what grew attached to the surface of the jetty itself.
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The largest and most interesting animals I found there were these moderately-sized sea anemones, which I believe belong to the genus Oulactis. The most often observed species is O. muscosa, which is usually around a couple of inches in diameter with variable tentacle color and a dark maroon-colored disk and mouth. Commonly known as sand anemones, Oulactis species are common in tidepools where they often camouflage themselves with bits of rock and shell or are buried in drifts of sand, sometimes with only a few tentacles exposed. Being rather ubiquitous in these intertidal habitats across the southeast coast of the continent (from South Australia to Queensland), they probably hold similar ecological niches as the Anthopleura anemones do in tidepools along the coast of the Western US, although the latter are generally larger and found in much denser populations.
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Much of the rest of the jetty looked like this – covered in calcareous deposits and small animals. These include many smaller sea anemones, the identity of which I do not know; a variety of small tube worms, also unidentified but which resemble in miniature the feather duster worm pictured above; and a few barnacles. Although I clearly wasn’t able to photograph a large diversity of animals here or get very many detailed images of them, it’s interesting to note how their growth parallels the formation of larger and more famous coral reefs around the world. A variety of small, fleshy-bodied animals like sea anemones grow and die off rapidly, but the calcium-containing skeletons and structures of barnacles and tube worms will remain for many generations after each individual organism does, and as more and more of them grow in their place, they build off of the original submerged structure – be it rock, metal or wood – and create a reef.
So that’s the end of my ocean adventures on this trip. In the next few posts, I’ll talk about some interesting animals on land, and then, for once, stuff not directly involving nature as I revisit my travels in Hong Kong. Stay tuned.
As I continue to write about my time in South Australia, I really want to make sure I cover perhaps its most famous and one of its most profitable exports – wine.
Wine in Australia is big business – between September 2016 and September 2017, almost 800 million liters of wine worth nearly $2.5 billion was exported from the country, roughly equal to about 0.2% of the country’s entire GDP in 2016. More of this wine was produced in the state of South Australia than in the other states combined – over 400 million liters, or enough to fill more than 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Most of this wine makes its way to huge export markets like the United States and China, but some also goes to international competitions, where it is ranked on equal footing with globally renowned wine-producing regions such as Bordeaux and Napa Valley. In fact, in the 2017 World Ranking of Wines and Spirits, a South Australian wine was named the top wine of the year; in the past 5 years of this competition, a South Australian wine has taken this honor 3 times.
*record scratch* You’re probably wondering how South Australia ended up in this position. Well, it hasn’t always been this way…
A brief and blunt overview of the Barossa geography
Although I really don’t know enough about wines, viticulture or the geography of South Australia to speak about this with any authority, I suppose some quick researching is in store to help me tell a more historically-accurate story.
For this post, I’ll be focusing on the Barossa zone, one of the most well-known wine regions in South Australia. There are of course other impressive wine-producing regions in the state and lots of minutiae that I’m leaving out (McLaren Vale, Adelaide Hills, but frankly I don’t know enough to talk about them in any detail), so I’ll keep it simple and hopefully correct. The Barossa Valley proper feels and looks a good bit like the Central Valley of California, where I’ve grown up and lived – walled in by mountain ranges, rather hot and dry weather (at least in the summer), and rich soils. The Barossa zone also encompasses the Eden Valley, which is more hilly and chilly and has generally rockier soils. Together, these abiotic factors constitute a wine’s terroir, a French term used to describe the environment in which a wine is produced and the resulting nuances in its flavor.
Once again, I’m really oversimplifying things, and I won’t be surprised if I’m misleading, missing details or even blatantly wrong in areas…but I’m doing my best to get the basic idea there. Maybe I’ll rewrite this when I’m 21.
Vineyards in Eden Valley, with Barossa Valley in the distance.
Germans and cheap wine: the origins of Barossa wine production
The story of the Barossa zone begins in the mid-19th century, not with British prisoners (as much of the rest of modern Australia did) but with Germans fleeing Silesia. Although the heyday of the classic mercantilist colony had since passed (and spawned the United States in it), the idea of wealthy people getting together to fund new settlement and turn a profit was very much alive when one George Fife Angas helped start the South Australian Company in 1835. Six years later, Angas promised safety and free land to Silesian refugees who were willing to help farm the land of the Barossa Valley, and they settled on wine as a suitable crop for the Mediterranean climate in the region.
The first grape grown widely in the Barossa Valley was Riesling, a German grape used to make white wine. However, this grape typically prefers cooler climates (like those found in the Eden Valley – more on that later), so it often went overripe in the hot Barossa summers. These grapes were used for the production of fortified wines – wines mixed with other spirits like brandy – so the Barossa was first known for this style. The region continued to create “Port-style wines”, similar to those famous for being produced in Portugal, with the introduction of a red grape from southeastern France, called Syrah or more commonly Shiraz.
In the middle of the 20th century, Australia turned its sights on Cabernet Sauvignon, a very famous and widely-cultivated hybrid grape used for the production of high-quality red wines. The region of Coonawarra, in the southeast of South Australia about halfway between Adelaide and Melbourne, eventually became the focal point for Australian cultivation of this grape. The Barossa Valley was largely passed up because by this time, it had gained a poor reputation for producing “cheap” Shiraz only used for fortified wine or as filler in low-quality blends of wine grapes.
Old vine Shiraz: The Barossa Renaissance
It was around this time, the middle of the 20th century, that independent winemakers in the Barossa and the wine regions surrounding Adelaide began to experiment with the grapes that they had in an attempt to create something that could compete with the European quality. Perhaps the most famous of these is Penfolds Grange, a cult wine consisting of predominately Shiraz grapes (nowadays a tiny amount of Cabernet Sauvignon is often mixed in as well), which was first created in 1951 by Max Schubert through a marriage of the unique Australian terroir and classic European winemaking techniques. Its first few vintages were viciously criticized due in part to its undeveloped taste and the existing prejudice against wines of the area – one review described it as “a concoction of wild fruits and sundry berries with crushed ants predominating” and another person called it “a very good, dry port, which no one in their right mind will buy – let alone drink”, a not-so-subtle insult to the region’s winemaking history. In fact, in 1957, the Penfolds company forbade the further making of the wine. But Schubert, believing in his ability to create a masterpiece, continued in secret by reducing the quantity made and reusing hogshead barrels, and by the 1960s, the last decade’s Granges had matured marvelously. When entered into competitions, these took home dozens of gold medals and other awards, with the famed 1955 vintage meeting great success, and the company ordered production to start again (although it had never really stopped). Nowadays, the Penfolds Grange, Bin 95, is arguably Australia’s most famous wine, and good vintages can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Penfolds Grange is perhaps the best-known example of revitalizing and indeed discovering the South Australian Shiraz style, but it is not the only one. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, many other wineries began to experiment with and create high-quality Shiraz wines from decades-old vines, completely changing the perception of the Barossa Valley. Far from producing cheap fillers for blended wines, the region was now proudly displayed on labels of bottles of Old Vine Shiraz. As the new millennium began, well-established wines like Penfolds Grange continued to excel as newer wineries added to the prestige of the Barossa; in 2013, for example, the World Ranking of Wines and Spirits named the 2010 vintage of Gatt Wines Old Vine Shiraz as the top wine in the world, and the other top 4 wines in that competition were all Shiraz from the same winery.
The entrance to Gatt Wines vineyards in Eden Valley.
The Barossa zone today
The Barossa zone is now well established as a top producer of high-quality Shiraz wines, using the grapes to produce traditional red wine as well as sparkling varieties and rosé wines as well. However, it has diversified greatly with the knowledge of the region’s potential. Cabernet Sauvignon has since been established in the region and used to produce exceptional wines – one, for example, won the prestigious Warren Winiarski trophy for best Cabernet Sauvignon at the International Wine and Spirit Competition in 2014, beating out wines from more traditional locales such as Coonawarra or Napa Valley. Riesling remains an important varietal but is now more commonly grown in the cooler Eden Valley where it can produce quality wines, alongside the white grapes Semillon and Chardonnay. And the experimentation with and production of wines from European grapes less familiar to the American ear – Grenache, Sangiovese, andMataró – continues, where Pinot Noir and Zinfandel are less common.
Conclusion
So that’s a little bit on the history and current state of the Barossa zone of South Australia and its famous wine. Sadly, I’m not old enough to sample and talk directly about the tastes and flavors of the wine, so all of what I know is pulled from talking with people in the area and some web research. But it’s definitely interesting to me, and I hope it has been interesting and informative for you as well. If you’re over 21, come visit South Australia and maybe taste a bit of the wine here as well! As Max Schubert said, we must “be prepared to experiment in order to gain something extra, different and unique in the world of wine” – and I think that that goes for both the consumer as well as the winemaker. Stay tuned.
Well, it appears that the blog will be backlogged for a little bit as I catch up on photo editing, writing and working on some school stuff…but it’ll happen eventually. In this post, I’ll detail some of the wild animals I’ve found while exploring the wine country to the northeast of Adelaide, South Australia – pretty much entirely birds but also a few other iconic species (COUGHkangaroos). I’ll briefly talk about the wine of the Barossa Valley and surrounding areas (or what little of it I know) in a soon-to-come post, so for now it’s straight to the animals:
Birds
As I prefaced in my previous post on the marine fish of South Australia, the province does not have nearly the biodiversity of the tropical provinces (most notably Queensland), so the total number of observable bird species here is not tremendous (around 450-500 by most estimates, versus the almost 700 in Queensland). Of these, I have good quality pictures of more than 3 pixels’ resolution for about 5 species. With that being said, three things:
I know next to nothing about birds and I didn’t go on a dedicated birding trip with any scopes or special cameras (my birding trip was a morning walk along a winery road, and my “special camera” was a point-and-shoot that’s probably worth like $10 and a side of fries now), so cut me some slack;
Plus, these birds are super shy – like I literally reached into my pocket to get my camera and they just flew away. And I had like 30 meters of distance in front of me, so go figure; and
At the very least, many of the pretty-colored birds one would normally associate solely with the tropics (species in the order of parrots, mostly) can still be found in South Australia, where the climate feels decidedly more Mediterranean. So thank goodness, the pictures aren’t just of sparrows or some other drab, objectively boring birds (hey, I’m not a birder, I want flashy colors and interesting stuff).
So here we go:
A male common bronzewing.
Probably the least shy and (go figure) the least interesting bird I saw on my walk was this bird – the common bronzewing, Phaps chalcoptera. I suppose I’m being a little unfair, though. As the common name implies, the males of these species have beautiful wings with a metallic, rainbow-colored sheen when seen in the right light. Alas, I did not see it in the right light – I was right below the bird where it perched on a branch, illuminated in perfectly the wrong way so that it looked just like a rather plain dove. These birds are quite common throughout Australia, being found in every state and most every habitat in the continent save the tropics of the north and the drier parts of the Outback.
True to my point number 3 above, South Australia is home to a wide variety of parrot species, most all of which are brightly-colored. At the winery were I stayed, there were lots of fruit trees and moderately disturbed habitat – perfect for attracting these birds, which they did in spades (I saw at least six or seven species, few of which I successfully photographed, of course). Problem is, these birds are as skittish as they are beautiful, and as I didn’t have a birding scope or even binoculars to attempt to macgyver some sort of manual magnification for my camera or phone, I was forced to approach closely to get any kind of resolution in my pictures…which very rarely went well. The fact that many parrots form hybrids and have very similar patterning which requires close examination to differentiate species also doesn’t help my identification process. But I did my best.
These two birds above, to my knowledge, are best placed in the genus Platycercus, the rosellas. This genus contains six species of moderately-sized parrots, all endemic to Australia and two of which (the crimson rosella and the Eastern rosella) are found in the state of South Australia. The tricky part of identifying them is their tendency to hybridize and the large number of color morphs and subspecies associated with each species. The two birds above appear to be most closely related to the crimson rosella, P. elegans. The left bird, the Adelaide rosella, is a hybrid of a red-morph and a yellow morph, and it has a mottled fiery color sort of a blend between its two parents. The right bird is more puzzling; it has a green-yellow color but red all around its head, as well as a blue chin. No adult bird of any species or subspecies has exactly this color pattern, so my best guess is that it is either a hybrid of its own that I have not seen before, or it is a juvenile bird; many juvenile rosella species and subspecies have a green color which in the case of the crimson rosella eventually gives way to the adult red color in the nominate subspecies.
Unidentified parrot species.
Yeah I’m really sorry, I just have no idea what this bird is. It’s very pretty, it’s got a lovely long black tail, blue around the head, a little bit red on the throat, blue wings, and an olive-colored body. I’ll have a chat with some more bird-inclined friends about what this might be, but until then, skip.
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Finally, nice clear pictures of easily identifiable birds. This is a pair of rainbow lorikeets, Trichoglossus haematodus. These birds are very colorful, moderately-sized, and found along the coast of eastern Australia from the northern tip of Queensland down through eastern and southeastern Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and then just to the southeastern tip of South Australia, with this locale (around the Mount Lofty Ranges) close to the boundary of their range. Quite common throughout this area, some populations of the rainbow lorikeet are quite tame and very used to humans, and they have been successfully reared as pets.
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I was very disappointed to have seen a pair of the iconic sulphur-crested cockatoos flying overhead in Melbourne but not gotten a picture of them. However, I did try to make it up in the end by finding a different species of cockatoo – the galah, Eolophus roseicapilla. It is a rather large parrot, and its bright pink coloration is really pretty stunning. This species is found throughout most of Australia excepting, again, the tropics of Queensland and the Northern Territory and exceptionally dry portions of the Outback.
Goodness me, birds are exhausting. Moving on:
Kangaroos
What else is there to say beyond the header?
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These are Western gray kangaroos, found along the southern coast of Australia and into the central eastern parts of the continent, where they coexist (but only very rarely interbreed) with the Eastern gray kangaroo. In this area, they are the only species of kangaroo; however, they are quite common, being found both individually in rows of grapevines or in social groups (the collective nouns for which are mobs or occasionally courts) in more open areas.
Finally, some bonus videos:
Videos (Kangaroos and birds)
Although I did not manage to get a photograph of one, I did see (and hear) many laughing kookaburras, Dacelo novaeguineae. Although its scientific name is misleading (named after New Guinea, from which French explorers assumed the first specimens of the bird originated), its common name is true to its cackling, territorial call, which is often joined by other individuals in a cacophony which can last for minutes. The laughing kookaburra is the largest bird in the kingfisher family, but its most famous food is not fish but snakes. In this video, I managed to capture faintly some of these birds’ territorial calls (as well as a poor kangaroo in the beginning of the video).
Finally, don’t break your neck here…this is a video of me approaching the mob of kangaroos photographed earlier, in which I suddenly notice a single kangaroo hopping in the rows of grape vines, so I swivel the camera.
What’s next??
So that’s a wrap for the (large) animals I found at a winery in South Australia…in my next posts, I want to talk a bit about butterflies that I found there, as well as the wine of the Barossa region itself, and one more post with new aquatic finds…and then from there, I’ll move on to Hong Kong. Stay tuned.
Greetings all! It’s been quite a busy few weeks since this blog last updated, in which time I’ve had to wrap up my fall semester of senior year at high school, college applications, and pack for traveling to visit family. All the good stuff. However, for the rest of December and into January, I hope to post a bit on my travels before I return to Sacramento and my blog returns to regular scheduled programming.
At the moment, I’m in Adelaide, South Australia. I was in Melbourne, Victoria for a few days prior, but as I mostly visited family I don’t have much to share on that portion of my vacation. (I’ll still probably talk about it in the coming days.) I’ll be here until early next week, and then I’ll visit more family in Hong Kong and have some fun there before heading back to the United States.
So…that being a very basic debrief of where I am, where I’ve been and where I’m going, I’ll jump to the fun stuff and the main topic of my current post: underwater photography.
The South Australian Ocean in brief, by someone who knows very little about the South Australian Ocean
South Australia isn’t the most popular or renowned state in the country for aquatic exploration (snorkeling, scuba diving or the like) – that honor would most certainly go to Queensland in northeastern Australia. With its tropical and subtropical rainforests and optimally-insolated coastline, Queensland is home to a tremendous diversity of warm-water animals and plants as well as the Great Barrier Reef, undeniably the most famous coral reef in the world.
However, that by no means should discount the wonders that South Australian waters possess themselves. While the ocean in this state is cooler in temperature (around 20 degrees Celsius yesterday when I was out) and cannot support coral reefs, it does have its own iconic species, the most famous of which is the elusive and enigmatic leafy sea dragon, closely related to seahorses and the marine emblem of South Australia. The small but deadly blue-ringed octopus can also be found in shallow waters along the coast, alongside a nice diversity of over 600 species of fish.
Port Noarlunga – short introduction
Port Noarlunga, generally held to be one of the best diving and snorkeling sites in the Adelaide area, is maybe a 30 to 45 minute drive south of the city. The best place to swim around and explore there is a rocky, algae-covered reef that’s maybe 300-500 meters off of the sandy shore. It’s possible to swim directly there, but there is also a long jetty that connects the beach and the reef, with a set of stairs at the end of the jetty allowing easier access.
The reef is ideal for a variety of reasons. First of all, it attracts fish – some of them eat algae and little animals growing on the rocks of the reef itself, others seek shelter there from predators, and still others are the predators. So there is a tremendous diversity of fish around the reef, as well as many sessile or benthic invertebrates that feed on or attach themselves to the rocks and can’t be found just swimming about in the open waters. Secondly, the water around the reef is quite shallow, in which one can stand comfortably (as well as stand on the reef itself when it is exposed during low tides), so it’s quite easy to remain stationary and take good pictures. It’s also fun to explore the small tidepools that form on the top of the reef (in which small fish like sculpins or occasionally octopuses may hide out), although I will say they’re not nearly as interesting as those in the US. And finally, the reef acts as a barrier against the open ocean, keeping the waters calm and preventing dangerous currents from dragging people around as they might on an exposed rock. I stayed mostly on the protected inner side of the reef facing the beach, as the tide was coming in and it wasn’t safe to explore the outer side (especially if I’m distracted by photographing things), but there was still a nice diversity of fish inside.
Back in the middle of the last century, the Noarlunga reef area was quite heavily fished for food species such as whiting and gar, and as a result the reef was empty. However, it was made into a marine sanctuary around the 1970s, I believe, with fishing regulated along the jetty and prohibited completely on the reef, so in the past thirty years or so many species have returned and it’s once again assumed its former diversity and beauty.
Cool animals
Finally, interesting stuff. (Honestly, the history bores me a little, but I figure it’s important to describe the location of all my finds, as a scientist would, such that if you’re ever in South Australia you can find the place and make some discoveries yourself.)
Fish
A large school of sea sweep underneath the Noarlunga Jetty, South Australia.
As I walked (and slipped) down the steps at the end of the jetty and into the water, I was immediately greeted by a large school of sea sweep, Scorpis aequipinnis, which congregates around the pillars of the jetty. This is a rather small and social fish commonly found along the entire southern coastline of the continent, from New South Wales to Western Australia. They can grow to up to two feet long and can be fished recreationally with a pole and line, although I didn’t see any individuals here of that size. Still juveniles, these ones gather around the shelter of the jetty for protection and because they can expect regular meals of bread from snorkelers and tourists.
A small magpie perch from Noarlunga Reef.
The magpie perch, Cheilodactylus nigripes, is a species of morwong, the common name for the family Cheilodactylidae. It’s another relatively common fish on the reef (I saw and photographed several individuals), and it’s also found across the southern Australian coasts, though more frequently recorded in the southeast than southwest. Its distinguishing features include its red tail as well as its thick black stripes, the darkness of the middle one of which the fish can change rapidly.
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I found several smooth toadfish, Tetractenos glaber, while on the reef. T. glaber is found in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, and the waters surrounding Adelaide are the western bounds of its typical range in the southeast of the country. Although this fish is in the pufferfish family, all of the individuals I saw were very shy and did not puff up, likely because it requires a lot of energy and is a last-resort defense. It’s a very easy fish to catch on a line and hook as they love to steal bait, as well as easy to handle (because it’s not spiny), but deadly to eat. Like most pufferfish, this species contains the deadly neurotoxin tetrodotoxin in its organs, especially the liver, so it will paralyze you if eaten. Fun fact: this is the same toxin that makes blue-ringed octopuses, which share these South Australian waters, so deadly.
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Moonlighters, also known as six-banded coralfish, are small sea chubs of the species Tilodon sexfasciatus. While they resemble butterflyfish in body shape and striped appearance, they are not closely related. The juveniles can be recognized by their large spot at the back of their body, which the adult fish do not have. These fish are quite commonly sighted along the coast of the Great Australian Bight, but can be found throughout southern and southwestern Australia, and were relatively common on the reef.
A juvenile common scalyfin.
The common scalyfin, Parma victoriae, is a moderately large species of damselfish commonly found in the waters of the southern Australian states. Like many other large damselfish such as the Garibaldi, another subtropical damselfish which is the state fish of California, the juvenile is brightly colored with electric blue patterns, which eventually disappear to yield a rather monochrome adult – bright orange in the case of the Garibaldi and either brown-gray or yellow for P. victoriae (depending on the sex of the animal).
A small zebrafish being cute.
Many fish species in tropical and subtropical habitats adopt striped patterning, and the zebrafish, Girella zebra, is perhaps the most aptly named of any which inhabit South Australian waters. It has a pleasant oval shape, yellowish fins and several thin stripes (usually between 8 and 10), and can grow quite large – over half a meter long. These fish are quite common, especially around submerged structures such as reefs or piers (I saw several of them on the reef), and can be found across the southern Australian coast.
A small blackthroat threefin imaged on Noarlunga Reef.
It’s very easy for one to get lost among the large, brightly-colored fish swimming around or above the reef, and to forget the smaller inhabitants that live on the reef. Coming from the tidepools of California, however, I’m used to searching very closely for small, slender, and well-camouflaged fish in the rocks, and I was very happy to be able to photograph this one, the blackthroat threefin or Helcogramma decurrens. It’s a small fish shaped rather like a tadpole – with a fat, round head that tapers off to a thin tail – and like most of the fish which share its niche of eating small crustaceans and plants that it finds on the reef, it blends in when viewed from the top down, with a green coloration and small protrusions sticking out of its body to help it appear just like a frond of algae and not a delicious morsel for any predator. When viewed from the side, it’s apparent how it gets its name – the entire bottom half of its body is a dark bluish-purple, in some cases completely jet black. This fish is most commonly sighted on the west coast of Australia, where it is endemic, but it also appears to have a distinct population in the state of South Australia, mostly in the waters surrounding Adelaide and to the city’s north.
A juvenile Western talma from Noarlunga Reef.
This is probably the most interesting fish that I saw on Noarlunga Reef – a Western talma, Chelmonops curiosus. To those who are knowledge in tropical reef fish, it’s probably fairly easy to recognize that this is a species of butterflyfish, which are typically characterized by a geometric body shape and small mouths usually used to pick at reef invertebrates, algae, or coral polyps. Most of the butterflyfish are quite brightly colored, almost always with some shade of yellow, so I was quite excited to learn of a species which is neither entirely tropical in its distribution nor as colorful as some of its relatives. C. curiosus occurs in the states of Western Australia and South Australia (with few records along the coast of the Great Australian Bight), and the waters around Adelaide represent the eastern boundary of its distribution. Typically it’s a deeper water species, from what I’ve read, being found up to 60 meters below the surface, but I saw a couple of individuals at Noarlunga in water shallow enough to stand in – this is probably because they’re still juveniles, as evidenced by spots or patterns towards the top back of the body which eventually disappear as the fish reaches adulthood.
Okay, so that’s a wrap for fish. I didn’t get good photographs of nearly as many invertebrates and algae, but I still have a few, which I’ll share below:
Seaweeds and Invertebrates
To be perfectly honest, I don’t know nearly as much about saltwater algae as I should and want to, especially the seaweeds (known interchangeably as macroalgae). While in freshwater, green macroalgae of the division Chlorophyta predominate in terms of quantity and diversity, the brown and red algae (Phaeophyta and Rhodophyta, respectively) form the bulk of commonly-observed marine seaweeds with only a relatively small proportion of Chlorophyta growing as successfully or widely. So despite the very obvious diversity of algae present on Noarlunga Reef, I only photographed (and am able to identify) very few species here.
A small frond of common kelp alongside a thinly-branching brown algae and a small school of sea sweep.
The common kelp, Ecklonia radiata, is a moderately large species of brown algae with flat, broad, serrated leaves and no gas vesicles. As its name suggests, it is very common, being found across tropical and subtropical waters from the Canary Islands and South Africa to Oman to Australia and New Zealand. Behind it, there’s another species of brown algae with much thinner branches, but I have no clue what that is.
A black encrusting sponge, sea lettuce, and empty limpet shells in a small tidepool on Noarlunga Reef.
The focus of this picture is green algae, so fortunately I can identify it fairly easily as a species of Ulva, I think, known commonly as sea lettuce. It forms these very thin, delicate sheets only one or two cells wide, which allow the alga the best transfer of nutrients and waste from the water as well as ample surface area for photosynthesis. Ulva species are found throughout the world and are quite common growing on any submerged material in the water – on exposed rock, large groves of Ulva can leave behind slippery and slimy mats in which interesting aquatic organisms can hide. Finally, as the common name suggests, Ulva is an edible species, and can be eaten raw in salads or added to soups (although do not confuse it with the Japanese wakame, used in miso soup – it’s a distinctly different species).
Also in this picture is an encrusting, black-colored sponge. Sponges are the most basal of animals, consisting of virtually identical cells that form a very simple tube-like or porous structure used to filter in and collect microalgae and zooplankton. Some sponges, like this one here, simply adapt to the contours of the surface on which they grow, and are kind of soft and squishy; others form a rigid skeleton and grow upwards into the water column, and they can form far more interesting and larger shapes. While sponges are very common in nature wherever there exist surfaces for them to attach to and their dietary requirements are fairly simple, they can be difficult to care for in the aquarium because many species will die if air bubbles get trapped in their internal cavities – they block off certain cells from getting food and releasing their waste into freshly-circulated water, and then these cells die and the whole organism will decompose.
A blue brain coral underneath a ledge.
Although the water temperature and light availability to the South Australian waters are not suitable for sustaining large, stony-coral-based reefs, that does not mean that there are no corals in South Australia. This one, I believe, is a stony coral of the species Plesiastrea versipora, which in the aquarium trade would be classified as an LPS or large polyp stony coral. I haven’t been able to find a definite common name for this species – it’s referred to as the green coral, pineapple coral and brain coral (the latter of which is a very poorly-defined term which can refer to hundreds of LPS species) – and as such it’s difficult to find much information on this taxon, but from what I understand it grows in both tropical and subtropical environments around the entire Australian coast as well as the Indian Ocean. If I had the appropriate permits, I suppose it would be very interesting to frag some of this coral and try to grow it in an aquarium – it does have a very attractive color.
A large red bait crab.
The most numerous large invertebrate I saw on the reef was this – the red bait crab, Plagusia chabrus, several individuals of which I saw mosey out of the crevices of the rocks. As their name implies, these crabs are of commercial interest for bait use, particularly for grouper, and crabbing is permitted at Noarlunga. This species has a wide distribution, being found in both South America and Africa as well as in southern Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand.
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I was very happy to see lots of sea stars on the rocks of Noarlunga Reef when I went exploring. The most abundant species was this one, with five long, tapering arms and a bright orange color with black spots; its scientific name is Fromia polypora, but I haven’t been able to find any common name for it. It’s an Australian endemic, as far as I know, and it’s found across the southern half of the Australian coast from a little north of Brisbane to Western Australia. It’s also fairly large, with many of the individuals I saw around several inches in diameter.
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The second species of sea star I found is this one, Petricia vernicina, known commonly in the area as the velvet sea star (this name refers to many different species, depending on geographic region). It’s generally smaller than Fromia polypora, with a wider body and stubbier arms, and it has a more interesting mottled orange-yellow-white color with small purple spots on the arms.
Conclusion
So yeah. South Australian marine life is pretty sweet.
In upcoming posts, I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll do, but I hope to write a little bit about the South Australian wine country (what little I know about it, that is), some interesting land animals (your kangaroos and the like), and Hong Kong too. I hope you enjoyed this post (it did take a little while to edit the pictures and all), and stay tuned.
So, seeing as I’m pre-writing this post at the moment, these finds are about a week and a half old, but no less awesome.
As of writing this, my puddle water sample from Renfree Field in Sacramento has been aging for about 4 or 5 days. Over the course of this time, the water’s temperature, lighting, pH, turbulence and bacterial population have changed enough in a well-lit corner of my bedroom-turned-microbiology lab (relative to a puddle in an outdoors parking lot) such that the normally-dominant species in nature no longer have the competitive advantage they did when I first collected my sample. What is very interesting is that this means some species which normally exist in only tiny populations in the wild then have a chance to seize the newly-vacated water column and grow to high enough densities that I actually find them. In the case of rotifers, the primary species Epiphanes sentaand perhaps Asplanchna silvestrii die out to yield Brachionus of some kind. And now, as I’ve continued my observations, I’ve found another late bloomer: Polyarthra vulgaris.
Polyarthra vulgaris from puddle water, imaged at 100x.
P. vulgaris is a planktonic, roughly square-shaped, soft-bodied, and relatively small rotifer in comparison to the ones I’ve previously featured on my blog – probably no more than 100 microns on average in any dimension. However, it makes up for its lack of size with a very feisty character, if one could anthropomorphize a rotifer in such a manner. This is mostly due to Polyarthra‘s unique set of swimming fins or paddles – pictured as the “spines” running down the side of the animal’s body – which it can flick very rapidly to “jump” through the water column. P. vulgaris thus has a two-speed swimming mechanism: a slow, steady and controllable cruising speed, with motion generated by the regular rotation of the cilia which the rotifer uses to eat; and the quick, random and near-instantaneous jump through the water, a result of the lighting-fast twitch of the swimming fins. Many zooplankton species exhibit these two different types of swimming, especially the species on the lower end of the food chain. The lightning jump likely developed due to a need to escape from predators (say, a hungry Asplanchna), but as it is random and costs lots of energy, the organism still uses its regular feeding motion to move around slowly and more purposefully when it is not in immediate danger. (Just another aside on the lightning jump: in a normal drop of water, these rotifers legitimately appear to teleport. That’s how fast they are.)
And here’s a slideshow of three frames I captured of the rotifer demonstrating its flicking motion:
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And a video:
While the genus Polyarthra, to my knowledge, has been studied phylogenetically with DNA evidence and no doubt contains hidden species like the Epiphanes senta case, it’s still possible to identify general species “groups” based off of the visible structure of the swimming fins. Using a simple dichotomous key for zooplankton I found online, I am tentatively calling my individuals P. vulgaris due to their generally short, sleek fins. This species was first described in 1943, in a German book titled Die Plankton Rotatorien des Motalastrom: zur Taxonomic and Okologie der Plankton Rotatorien; it is a close relative of the related and longer-finned species P. dolichoptera, with which it often grows in the same body of water. The majority of research I’ve found on Polyarthra concerns its population dynamics, specifically with regards to predator-prey relationships and interspecific competition. In looking at the head-to-head comparison of the two aforementioned species of Polyarthra, P. vulgaris seems to have an advantage in warmer and more oxygen-rich waters (corresponding with the highest populations in summer and autumn), whereas P. dolichoptera prefers water up to 15 degrees Celsius cooler and can tolerate lower levels of dissolved oxygen (which explains why it often reaches highest population densities in the spring). However, both species can proliferate well in water below 10 degrees Celsius and will survive below 5.
So here’s where things get interesting.
Another individual of Polyarthra vulgaris, imaged at 100x.
As far as I know, P. vulgaris has been observed and collected from lakes and ponds in the northern parts of the continental United States and Europe, with one aberrant habitat being a canal in Washington. It can inhabit both oligotrophic (nutrient-poor) and eutrophic (nutrient-rich) waters, suggesting that it is relatively adaptable given its preferred temperature conditions. However, I have not come across in my reading any records of Polyarthra from ephemeral waters such as vernal pools or in this case a puddle. Knowing that temperature is often a major factor in their competitiveness and the rotifers’ recorded locales, I suspect that Polyarthra species must have a dormant phase during which they diapause or hibernate when the water warms up during the summer (especially in the case of P. dolichoptera, which prefers water temperatures of only 3-5 degrees Celsius!), and this has been reflected in the seasonal changes in these rotifers’ densities. Thus I wouldn’t be surprised if this population has that ability to diapause and regenerate, but it is pretty awesome to discover a potentially never before recorded habitat for them – in which they can not only survive unfavorable changes in temperature but also desiccation.
So that’s a wrap on Polyarthra vulgaris, with a brief overview of its unique morphology, research interest and what I found interesting about it. I’ll probably have a few more posts on puddle-water microbes (and of course lots of stuff on Chlamydomonas) before I switch topics for a little while. Stay tuned.
Works cited:
Allen, A. A. (1968). Morphology of the Planktonic Rotifer Polyarthra vulgaris. Transactions of the American Microscopical Society,87(1), 60-69. doi:10.2307/3224338
Haney, J.F. et al. “An-Image-based Key to the Zooplankton of North America” version 5.0 released 2013. University of New Hampshire Center for Freshwater Biology <cfb.unh.edu> 8 Dec 2017
Laxhuber, R. (1987). Abundance and distribution of pelagic rotifers in a cold, deep oligotrophic alpine lake (Königssee). Hydrobiologia,147(1), 189-196.
Saunders-Davies, A. (1989). Horizontal distribution of the plankton rotifers Keratella cochlearis (Bory de St Vincent) and Polyarthra vulgaris (Carlin) in a small eutrophic lake. Hydrobiologia,186(1), 153-156.
Stenson, J. (1983). Changes in the relative abundance of Polyarthra vulgaris and P. dolichoptera , following the elimination of fish. Hydrobiologia,104(1), 269-273.
In my previous post, I introduced the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as a small, single-celled species that lived in puddle water. Which probably narrows down the possibilities to maybe several hundred algae and several thousand protozoa, so in this post, I figured I’d flesh out that description a little more.
In the future, I’ll cover the phylogeny and taxonomy of C. reinhardtii in more depth, but for now it’s relevant to understand that this alga belongs to the order Volvocales. Why? Well, it is generally well understood that chlamy is an ancestor or a progenitor form of the colonial Volvocales species I’ve discussed in previous posts, and it so happens that a lot of the cellular characteristics of Pleodorina, Eudorina, Pandorina and Volvox are also shared with Chlamydomonas. Let’s dissect one image of these cells, with arrows pointing to different structures of the alga in each repeated frame:
An assortment of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, imaged at 400x.
The majority of normal vegetative cells of Chlamydomonas look like these: small, round, and solitary. They range in size from around 5 to 40 microns in diameter based off of my casual measurements with an eyepiece reticle of wild-type cells, although I would guess that most of them are closer to 20 than either of the other extremes.
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with arrows pointing to exopolysaccharide secretions. Imaged at 400x.
The border of each cell which defines it from the extracellular milieu is a cell wall – a generally-tough outer layer which helps protect the cell beyond the lipid membrane which is present in all living organisms. While most animal cells do not have such a cell wall, many fungi, plants and algae do. In most plants, the cell wall is comprised almost entirely of cellulose, an example of compounds called polysaccharides (literally “many sugars”) which are composed of sugar molecules closely linked together. We encounter cellulose as both dietary fiber and in most paper or plant fiber products we use every day. The cell wall of Chlamydomonas, on the other hand, has a high proportion of glycoproteins and glycopeptides, which are special types of proteins with sugars embedded in their structure. Another component of the Chlamydomonas cell wall is polysaccharide, but rather than forming stringy fibers like cellulose does, these compounds are very gel-like. In some strains of Chlamydomonas, a faint, clear ring of this gel is also produced outside of the cell wall and can be seen encircling the pigmented cell – here, a few cells with this form are notated with arrows, although it is fairly difficult to see. This material is known as extracellular polysaccharide, or exopolysaccharide for short.
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with arrows pointing to cup-shaped chloroplast. Imaged at 400x.
Within the cell now…all healthy Chlamydomonas individuals have this vibrant light green color. However, it is clearly not evenly distributed; the most saturated color can be found circling the bottom and sides of the cell wall in a thin layer. This “u”-shaped or cup-shaped structure is the cell’s chloroplast, and it is the major light-harvesting organelle in Chlamydomonas. Its green color comes from different forms of the compound chlorophyll, which harvest light energy and help the cell synthesize its own sugars to turn into energy for swimming, growth and reproduction. Although it does not take up the majority of the cell’s volume, the chloroplast covers much of the inner surface area to maximize the light that each cell can harvest.
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with arrows pointing to pyrenoid. Imaged at 400x.
You may have noticed that in many of these cells, there appears to be a bulge in the chloroplast, and in the indicated cells this bulge is shown to be its own distinct outlined structure. This is the pyrenoid, and as is evidenced by its proximity to the chloroplast, it plays a very important role in photosynthesis. As some of the research which I am very interested in concerns the pyrenoid, I will save the detailed description of its function for a future post. For now, it’s probably easiest to remember that it is an integral component of the photosynthesis process in Chlamydomonas, particularly the steps in which carbon dioxide is turned into cellular sugars.
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with arrows pointing to eyespot; note the faint red color. Imaged at 400x.
The lighter-colored section of the cells is the cytoplasm, containing the gelatinous fluid which gives the cell its volume (it should be clear, but the chloroplast is three-dimensional and covers part of the view into the cell). The eyespot of Chlamydomonas is usually located here, and it is the secondary light-harvesting organelle in this alga. Unlike the chloroplast, however, the eyespot is not used for generating cellular energy; it instead can sense changes in the concentration of light, communicating with the rest of the cell to direct movement and maximization of photosynthesis. Chlamydomonas thus demonstrates phototaxis, or movement in response to light, specifically positive phototaxis or movement toward light (for the benefit of increased photosynthesis and cellular energy). Although it’s hard to see, these eyespots have a reddish-orange color to them – why is this? Well, have you ever heard that Vitamin A is good for the eyes, and carrots have lots of Vitamin A? While this is an oversimplification, the short story is that Chlamydomonas eyes need Vitamin A to function properly too, and this reddish color comes from the Vitamin A in its active form, concentrated in a single organelle.
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with arrows pointing to contractile vacuoles. Imaged at 400x.
While the cells are spherical and it’s difficult to assign them a “head” or “tail”, the “head” of Chlamydomonas is generally the side on which this feature appears. These tiny, clear spherical regions in the cell are contractile vacuoles, and are very common among protozoa as well as algae. Their role is very simply to pump water out of the cell. But wouldn’t this end up drying out the cell very quickly? No, thanks to the process of osmosis. Osmosis is a special type of diffusion, where water crosses a permeable membrane to try and reach an equilibrium – where the concentration of solutions on either side of the membrane are equal. For example, if a cell has lots of dissolved sugars, proteins and salts in its cytoplasm, it will have a higher concentration of solutes in it than the surrounding water has. To try to reach an equilibrium, water will preferentially move across the cell membrane into the cell, diluting its contents until the concentration of solutes is the same inside and out. In their natural environment, most single-celled aquatic organisms (Chlamydomonas included) like to maintain this positive water balance, where water flows into the cell constantly, because it is easier to pump water out than to try to suck it back in. To prevent the cell from exploding with water pressure, contractile vacuoles are used to pump extra water out; as the water flows back in, the contractile vacuoles inflate and deflate at regular intervals. This costs the cell a constant expenditure of energy, but it is essential for their survival. Most cells of Chlamydomonas have two contractile vacuoles, and they are almost always located together at this “head” of the cell.
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with arrows pointing to exopolysaccharide secretions. Imaged at 400x.
Another organelle which helps define the head of the cell are these faint protrusions which have their base near the contractile vacuoles and extend outwards like little hairs. These are flagella, and they are the primary mode of locomotion for Chlamydomonas. Like the whips for which they are named (in Latin), flagella sweep back and forth rapidly in the water, creating a current which the cell uses to swim. Mature and healthy cells of Chlamydomonas have two of these each, but they often drift in and out of focus as the cell moves them around and are thus hard to see in every individual; additionally, they may fall off of older cells or cells that have been subjected to lots of physical handling (like being squeezed by a coverslip on a microscope slide, for instance).
So that’s a basic overview of the visible structures of Chlamydomonas using light microscopy. Although there are of course more – a nucleus, mitochondrion, Golgi body – the six that I covered here (seven if you count the cytoplasm) are very heavily studied and I will discuss these in depth in the future, so I thought it would be a good review for me to go over their functions and cellular locations – and hopefully interesting for you as well. My next few posts will not be Chlamydomonas-related – I have some other puddle water organisms to share – but I will be sure to continue this series, especially as I explore possible areas of research for this little alga. Stay tuned.
Algal Ramblings 