Today I took the train to Whoop-whoop to help my fellow honours sacrificial lamb – erm, student – find field sites for his honours project.
Here he is, trying to look for spiders up a tree – Science, you’re doing it wrong...
After a couple of hours of bush-bashing, we did manage to find some decent field sites that had signs of spiders living in them:
...although it would have been much more convenient if the spiders hadn’t been hiding from predators and honours students during the daytime, but hey – we did find some! Luke’s project is going to find out about the webs of orb-weaving spiders (like those giant 2-dimensional webs you see around campus with the large colourful spiders sitting in them) – where they put them and why. Hopefully, he will be able to expand upon the current hypothesis: because they can.
Despite our partially spiderless search for field sites, we did however see some interesting things:
[Right] A Short-winged Heath Grasshopper (Rhitzala modesta, Orthoptera:Urnisina), the only known species within its genus: It lives in heath habitats with eucalypt canopies and tends to hide in amongst the woody parts of shrubby plants.
Several wildflowers:
[Left] Twining Guinea Flower (Hibbertia dentata). [Right] Lesser Flannel Flower (Actinotus minor)
[Right] An amazing chain of blue orchid-like (probably not orchids) flowers. [Right] A damselfly.
...and that was the sum of it really.