The 6-mile show continues

I visited and blogged about the 6-mile TSR in September this year.  Since the TSR seemed to be a good spot for "donkey" orchids (ie Diuris sp) I wondered if it, like our home area, might now be graced with a lot of sun orchids.  So with the weather being favourable (hot, sunny and a touch humid) I took myself off to Hoskinstown Rd.

I did find one sun orchid plant (Thelymitra peniculata, as at home) but the flower was pretty much closed.  However there were several other goodies to exercise my SD card!

The main attraction was the swathes of flowers of various kinds.  I think this was despite, rather than because of, the very dry conditions.

The first image is of Xerochrysum viscosum: a very attractuive 'everlasting as one plant but quite stunning when there are a a lot of them.
 Next we have some Leucochrysum albicans mixed in with Craspedia sp.
 Some more L. albicans - in this example accompanied by Wahlenbergia sp.
Quite a number of the plants had interesting shaped insects visiting them.  As usual I do a lot better on identifying the plants than the invertebrates.  There will hopefully be updates with names of the animals - until them enjoy the pictures.

Podolepis with a Beetle!
 The flower is a Leucochrysum.  WRT the insect, following a comment (see below) from my bogging friend Denis I pursued this with Roger Farrow, an expert entomologist.  He advised that  "Its an assassin bug Reduviidae,  Its a large group with no available key to identification.  Could be in the sub family Harpactorinae."
 Two insects (bees?) making whoopie in a Wahlenbergia.

Comments

Denis Wilson said…
Hi Martin
Your insect on the white and yellow centered daisy (Leucochrysum) might be an Assassin Bug. It is not a beetle - as it has soft wings visible, and different antennae to the Beetle preceding it.
Assassin Bugs are insect predators, not pollen eaters, but it might have been waiting for a Beetle to come along.
I had several at my front porch last weekend.
To be sure, you would have needed to get several angles, and we seldom realise that, at the time.
My encounter was aided by a spider web, which made it easy tog et the insect to rotate and show me it mouth parts, eventually.
The "rostrum" (beak) shot was "diagnostic".
Have a look at my Blog from Monday 7 Nov. Not identical with your creature, but similarities are pretty evident.
Like you, insects are not my strong suit.
11 November 2011 at 00:26:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
Denis

Thanks. I think you are right. The coverage of this group on the web is not great but I did find some images of Piestolestes (?)inermis which looked very similar.

Martin
11 November 2011 at 05:31:00 GMT+11
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more