Category: wildlife

29 September. Today we continue our drive south, guided by the records of invasive Solanum that we have been able to find online through the patchy internet reception we can get. The first stop is in Granite Creek in a rest stop that advertises free coffee for tired drivers. The parking area off the road is an invasive plant paradise. Surrounded by a national park, here you can find a wide range of invasive plants from around the world. The invasives include Solanum americanum, Tecoma stans, Argemone ochroleuca, Thunbergia alata, Verbascum virgatum, and others. But we are here for buzz pollinated Solanum and find plenty of S. mauritianum, S. seaforthianum, and even tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). The perennial honeybee is here trying clumsily to get pollen from S. mauritianum without ever vibrating. Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), another exotic organism, seem to also thrive in this part of Australia and I tell Daniel about their wintering grounds in western Mexico. There, the monarch butterflies can be found in enormous numbers, hanging from conifer trees, resting after their long migration from the USA and Canada. Or at least they used to be there in large numbers when I visited; who knows how they are coping with the brutal deforestation going on in the forests of Michoacan. Here in a roadside of Eastern Australia, lonely monarchs flutter a bit lost. The grass is tall and as we walk around, I think of snakes hiding in the grass. No wild bees here in the cloudy, cool morning, so we drive again.

Eventually we make it to our next destination in Hervey Bay. This is a touristic town on the coast, but with plenty of records of the plants we look. It is getting late (drives in Australia are long), and we go to the Botanic Gardens where we find some stingless bees.

As we drive back to the campground I hear a strange noise coming from the trees. We stop in a park in the coastal road and we saw giant black fruits hanging from some trees. Something doesn’t add up. Then one of the fruits rattles, crawls on a branch and extends its enormous membranous wings. They are flying foxes! I couldn’t be more excited of seeing these giant bats (Pteroptus alecto) for the first time. There are several dozens in this tree and several more in the next one. A tree further down is also full with flying foxes and we realise that there are several hundred bats around us. As we approach the trees and look through the binoculars, I see a pair of eyes looking right back. The bats are becoming active and are well aware of our presence. Their terse fur, sometimes forming a lighter collar in some individuals gives these wonderful animals an elegantly sinister look. The bats stretch their wings, and you can almost feel the texture of the skin that stretches in their hands-turned-wings. They communicate and interact with one another. They keep their sights on us, and when a drunken woman hits their tree with a branch, they take off with the sound of leather cutting the wind. Their silhouettes swish across the blue sky of the dying daylight, and the trees rattle with their movement. I wish you could hear them.

27 September. It’s before 6:00am and we are waiting by the Broken River. We stand on the edge of a murky, slow flowing river guarded by tree ferns and lianas that touch the water surface. The muddy water hides a platypus somewhere. Bubbles raising to the surface and a cloud of mud in the water reveal the location of the almost mythical platypus. A small creature breaks the water surface, the colour of its fur barely distinct from the colour of the mud at the bottom of the river. Its duck-like bill chews rapidly, probably on invertebrates dug out of the bottom.

Before we can fix the binoculars or the camera it dives again. A little while later it re-emerges, its clawed paws stretched on the surface along with its flat tail giving us a glimpse just long enough to get a good view before the platypus dives again. We spend sometime admiring this extraordinary animal in silence. I think of the book I am reading (appropriately called Platypus Matters by Jack Ashby), and the story of how Europeans sought to settle the questions of whether the platypus lays eggs and feeds its young with milk, and, if so, what kind of strange mammal this is. Together with a handful of species of Echidnas (the hedgehog-like creatures that also lay eggs), the platypus forms an unusual branch in the family tree of mammals called the Monotremes. Platypus go by many names in different countries but is an animal well known despite its localised distribution and the fact that only one zoo outside Australia has a living platypus (San Diego Zoo). In Spanish the name is ornitorrinco.

We pack and move to look for bees. We search first the montane forest, looking carefully in the few flowers that manage to grow in the understory of this dense forest. Palms grow at every gap in the canopy, and we see stag-horn ferns (another ‘platy’, Platycerium in the fern family Polypodiaceae) hanging onto every tree. These stag-horn ferns make their own hanging basket using modified leaves that catch debris and vegetation, and make long bifurcated leaves that extend like vegetal stag horns. Some of the ferns look so big that they seem capable to bring the smaller trees down with their sheer weight. A smallish goana (a large reptile also called monitor lizards) stays still by the water hoping we haven’t noticed it. We find some flowers and catch a glimpse of a bee. We stay still to see it foraging fast as lightning and zooming away in the vegetation in search for another rare flower. We wait for a while but the bee decides not to return.

We try our luck in the nearby pastures where a few farmers maintain cattle herds. The grassy mess of cattle farms has replaced here the ancient forest. Besides the grasses, several other non-native weeds make their home along the road. A spear thistle (Cirsium vulgare, Asteraceae) spreads its spiny leaves and shows off a purple inflorescence head. Mexican poppy (Argemone ochroleuca, Papaveraceae) grows here and there. In the 1930s, the Australian government leased land to young men on the condition of clearing out 35 acres of forest and transform it into cattle pastures. The exotic grasses and the cattle to go with it were considered more valuable.

Along the dirt road, we spot our good-old Solanum mauritianum (Solanaceae). As other Solanum, this one loves the disturbance of the roadsides and pastures. We stop, and soon find the first bees. The sun is shinning and bees are busy buzzing the Solanum flowers for pollen. On the roadside we measure and photograph.

We are lucky enough to come across a territory guarded by male carpenter bees (Xylocopa sp.). The male bees fight with one and other to defend a patch of Solanum, where the female bees come to collect pollen. They zoom around us and chase each other away. These are some of the most beautiful bees I have ever seen, and are restricted to Eastern Australia. The males of Xylocopa bombylans, have a metallic green-blue body that shifts to yellow-orange in the thorax. The iridescence of its exoskeleton is wonderful, and yellow hairs adorn their legs. The face carries an elegant ivory mask, and they are not shy or fearful of anybody entering their land. We spend a few hours observing these bees and studying their buzzes. This is a good day for the Buzz Bus!

In the evening we find a local campground, which used to be the school of the ranchers’ kids, and has now turned into a nice place to spend the night. We make a fire and enjoy a quiet evening under the stars. In the night, a rainstorm comes in and batters the roof of the Buzz Bus. I dream that the campsite is flooded and wake up to check whether we are at risk of being washed away. It looks fine, but the people in tents that were near us have had to move under the roof of the old school. The rain carries on all night.

25 September. Today we wake up early and head north of Yeppoon to the edges of Byfield. This is an area with large plantations of non-native pine forest, and scattered native vegetation in some hard to reach spots. The pines pepper the landscape even in the areas that are now part of a state forest. In the outskirts we get a bit lost looking for a watering hole and end up in a small side road. On the edges of the dirt road we spot Grevillea banksii (Proteaceae), a shrub that produces the type of handsome red inflorescences that Australian birds love. But instead of pollinating birds we notice some small native bees stealing nectar. Our first native bees for a long while!

Quickly, we get to work and manage to capture a few specimens, which I later determine to be the stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria (Apidae, Meliponini). These small bees resemble the stingless Trigona bees from the neotropics but have a rugged back (scutellum) that projects over the abdomen as if they were carrying a shield in their back. These bees refuse to produce defence buzzes and we record five individuals as non-buzzing. Although not unexpected, we are very happy to score this new species of a highly social, tropical bees as non-buzzing. 

We keep searching nearby, and discover some bright magenta flowers in a small bush. This is plant clearly belongs to the family Melastomataceae, a curious tropical family in which the majority of species are buzz pollinated, which appears to be a highly unusual trait for an entire family. We are very excited about the findings of what then we established to be Melastoma malabatrichum, a species that others have studied before in the old tropics but for which I am unaware of pollination studies in Australia. In any case, it is the first time I see this species in the wild. The flowers are large with spread out petals and five bright yellow anthers carrying pollen at the centre of the flower. The anthers are poricidal, opening through small pores at the tips, which makes buzzing the most effective way to remove pollen from them. As they are nectar less, pollen is the only reward that this plant offers to visiting bees. But M. malabatrichum has a trick under its sleeve, because in addition of the five yellow anthers, each flowers carries a second set of purple anthers that mimic the colour of the petals. These inconspicuous anthers sneak behind the back of unsuspecting pollinators, which mostly ignore them while visiting the yellow anthers, and manage to put extra pollen in their back. The purple pollinating anthers are known as pollinating anthers, and the yellow as feeding ones. This is a classic example of heteranthery as studied by Charles Darwin and Fritz Muller in the middle of the XIX century.

Watching these mighty Melastomes, we see a large green bee zooming by, and in the excitement of seeing a buzz pollinator for the very first time in eastern Australia, I miss and let it escape! Bummer! We find more plants and wait patiently for it to come back. The mythical green bee never returns but instead we witness to black stripy buzz pollinators arrive to the melastome and we manage to catch them both. Hooray!

We go back to the Buzz Bus and record their buzzes. As the data is acquired by the computer we breath a sigh of relief of having the first buzzes of this trip.

We go back to the field and wait for a while but no new buzz pollinators arrive. We spend the rest of the day exploring this and other parts of the region, but no more pollinators arrive. As the afternoon sets in, we pull over in a sign that says Capricorn Caves. The place is closing, but after some pledging they let us stay in their campsite that is under renovation. The nearby caves can be visited next day, and with the last rays of light of the day we walk in the beautiful forest that surrounds us. 

Somehow we have found this little paradise of sharp karst in which caves occur above ground in small hills with ragged peaks. And below, we find a few well preserved fragments of dry tropical rainforest or vine scrub, where dense vegetation of broad leaves co-occur with woody vines that climb and twist among the trees. We see a few honeybees, wasps, beetles, spiders, but not native bees. As we walk a wallaby crosses my path and gets lost in the vegetation. I hear noises on my left and wait quietly to see a second wallaby come very close to me just to notice me and jump away in the forest. 

Ahead in the path, Daniel is admiring some green ants, a type of ants that use silk to tie tree leaves together and build aerial nests. The hanging nests are sensitive to vibrations and touching the branches cause a horde of green ants come looking for the trouble maker. It is best to keep your distance from their armies. Daniel tells me that aborigines used to eat the ants which have a citrusy flavour, and to prove his point he tries one. Apparently they’re indeed lemon like.

In the camp, a brush turkey (Alectura lathami) has adopted us and she waits for our arrival to see if she can find any scrap of food near the Buzz Bus. She is disappointed. 

That night I photograph bees for measurement and make some notes of what we have seen over the last days. We go to bed late and tired but hoping that the next day brings more bees. Above in the sky, we see Scorpio, the Southern Cross and a bright Jupiter. The flashes of the camera go on for a while.