A week ago I mentioned my surprise and disappointment at how few bugs I found in a Hobart garden in the week after Easter. One of the expert Tasmanian bug-hunters I mentioned in that post was amused by my reaction:
I had a good laugh at your disappointment … Unfortunately you did come down at the beginning of the ‘slow’ period (especially bad April to August). We do have winter insects but for the most part it’s more a specialist pursuit of the very small critters :-)
In retrospect, I think there were two reasons that the low numbers surprised me. One is that my memories of childhood in South Gippsland (the nearest thing to a Tasmanian climate I have experienced) have probably been skewed by the fact we didn’t spend much time outdoors in winter, as well as blurred by the decades in between. The other is that I hadn’t really thought about the difference between Tasmania’s seasonal variation and Townsville’s. We have comparatively little variation in day length or temperatures and our far greater variation in rainfall seems not to matter quite so much. (N.B. the temperature scales on these two charts are the same but the rainfall scales are not.)
A stop on the way home from Reef HQ Aquarium on Thursday drove home the difference quite emphatically, although quite by accident. I pulled up beside a mangrove creek which runs through a narrow strip of parkland between South Townsville and Hermit Park (something I have done several times before – see this post and links from it) and in the space of half an hour or so I was able to photograph, not just observe, more species of butterflies and more species of true bugs (Hemiptera) and more species of spiders than I had seen in my entire week in that South Hobart garden. I also saw, but didn’t photograph, another species of butterfly, some small grass moths, two species of native bee and various flies.
- Butterflies: Common Crow, Marsh Tiger, Varied Eggfly, Chocolate Soldier, Indigo Flash, Grass Yellow
- Other insects: a female Shield bug (Poecilometis sp.) sheltering her nymphs under her body, a tri-horned Hopper, Assassin Bugs, flies, grass moths, Blue-banded bee, another bee or wasp which may have been a Fire-tailed Resin bee, two species of paper wasp (Polistes stigma and Ropalidia romandi) and at least two species of ant
- Spiders: a very young St Andrew’s Cross spider in its web, and three species of jumping spiders – Cytaea plumbeiventris and two I haven’t identified yet.
The links on this list mostly lead you to older photos, here on Green Path or on my Flickr photostream, but a couple taken on the day deserve more attention. One, showing the kind of behaviour that makes the observer rethink butterflies’ sweetness-and-light reputation, is featured at the top of this page.
Assassin bugs (Reduviidae) are common enough but this was the first time I had seen new hatchlings (here is a bigger one in the same parkland). They were dispersing down the mangrove twig away from the cluster of eggs they had just emerged from.
3 thoughts on “Abundant invertebrates”