Better red than dead: on mistletoe and a spider!

I shall begin with the mistletoe, and draw people's attention to a paper by David Watson and Matthew Herring "Mistletoe as a keystone resource: an experimental test" published by the Royal Society and available as a free download.  (Well done that Society: a few other publishers should follow their example.)

For those who wonder what a keystone resource is, in another paper Watson proposes that "mistletoes function as keystone resources in forests and woodlands of many regions, providing important resources for a broad range of taxa and determining local diversities in these habitats."  In the Royal Society paper the authors prove this proposal. Thus in simple language mistletoe adds greatly to diversity in a habitat. So this tree on our block is doing a great job:
The dark blobs are the mistletoes.  This a view from directly underneath the one on the left.
The very dark lump is the remains of a old mistletoe where the stems attached to the host are just about all that is left.  This clump is about 8m off the ground and thus a bit difficult to get at and identify.  Fortunately another clump was closer to the ground and a flower could be photographed.
Apart from providing a pretty picture looking at the flower showed that all the florets were on small stalks: that makes this Amyema miqueli rather than the somewhat similar A. pendula.  I shall endeavour to keep an eye on the mistletoes around the place and report on what is feeding, nesting or otherwise interacting with the plants.

The other red item today was a small spider I found in the garden on an old weed seed-head.  It is very small: perhaps 6mm total length.  As spiders go I thought it rather cute.

I have looked at a number of spiderty sites but can't find a match for this chap.  Any suggestions welcome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

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 recall years ago driving al
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 birds: The view from the top of
Read more