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Notices and reviews
Invertebrata 21, November 2001

Butterflies in the Pine Rivers Shire (two-sided colour poster, 60 x 42 cm). Produced by Pine Rivers Shire Council, August 2001. Available from Department of Development and Environment, Pine Rivers Shire Council, PO Box 5070, Strathpine QLD 4500.

'This publication packs a lot of information into a small space and still manages to look attractive. There is basic information for beginners such as on the butterfly lifecycle but everything is still scientifically accurate.

'The poster takes up one whole side and lists 61 butterflies and the host plants for their caterpillars. Twenty-three of these butterflies are illustrated with photos. This provides useful information for those contemplating a butterfly garden.

'It was good to see that some caterpillar photographs were included and that the mistletoe butterflies were not left out. While there are several books covering all of Australia's butterflies this poster concentrates on those to be found in the Pine Rivers Shire. The Shire Council is to be commended for producing this brochure/poster and no doubt many people will date the beginning of their interest in butterflies from when they first saw it.'

Frank Jordan
Butterflies and Other Invertebrates Club Inc Newsletter No. 22, September 2001; p. 14
(with thanks to BOIC)

Notices and reviews
Invertebrata 21, November 2001

Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club. 2001. Jewel Beetles of Tasmania: A Field Naturalist's Guide. Hobart: Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club; 40 (42) pp. Paperback ISBN 0-9578529-0-8

Text by David Cowie, colour photographs by Les Rubenach. Edited by Don Hird, produced by Andrew Walsh, printed by Printing Authority of Tasmania. Price AUD$12 (or $15 posted within Australia) from the Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club Inc, GPO Box 68, Hobart TAS 7001.

Covers biology, life cycles, behaviour, foodplants, distribution, conservation, and classification. The ca. 50 species that occur in Tasmania are discussed, many of which also occur on the Australian mainland.

Editorial
Invertebrata 21, November 2001

Last summer we extended our house in Penguin, and a few cubic metres of excavated soil wound up in a heap on our back lawn. Over the next six months, the heap became home to a range of exotic invertebrates. On casual visits to the heap I found Argentine ants, various slugs and the spider Dysdera crocata.

In August I surveyed the heap more carefully and collected some quick-running lithobiomorph centipedes. There was the native Henicops maculatus, the introduced Lithobius microps and something I didn't recognise.

The strange centipedes were small and golden, like our native Anopsobius. Unlike Anopsobius, they didn't roll up into a spiral when disturbed. There were hundreds of them in the heap. They seemed to be concentrated where the Argentine ants were thickest.

I sent specimens to Greg Edgecombe, who studies southern temperate lithobiomorphs (among other things) at the Australian Museum in Sydney (see Nature Australia, Autumn 2001). Greg suspects they're a new species of Lamyctinus, in the same family as our native lithobiomorphs.

Problem is, where did the Thing-in-the-Heap come from? I doubt that it's a native. In nearly 30 years of centipede-collecting in Tasmania, I haven't seen anything like it. The only Lamyctinus officially recorded from Australia, the introduced L. coeculus, is a quite different species which has been spread around the world by trade.

Of course, the Thing-in-the-Heap could be native. It's sometimes very hard to decide. In 1996 J.T. Carlton (Ecology 77: 1653-1655) proposed the useful term 'cryptogenic' for species which might be either native or introduced. Another cryptogenic Tasmanian centipede is the geophilomorph Ballophilus australiae. It's been found on Clarke Island in Bass Strait, on a walking track at West Head near Beaconsfield, and in 'improved pasture' on the coast just south of the Arthur River. B. australiae is widespread on the mainland, but is it really Tasmanian?

If Greg describes the Thing-in-the-Heap as a new species, our backyard in Penguin will become the type locality. Meanwhile, my wife has suggested that I look for the Thing in other Penguin gardens. She has plans for the heap, and she's reluctant to threaten the only known population of an interesting invertebrate, even if it is (probably) introduced.

Historical footnote
Invertebrata 21, November 2001

The Royal Society of Van Diemen's Land (forerunner of the Royal Society of Tasmania) held monthly meetings in Hobart in the late 1840s. Tabled at the meetings were examples of 'the natural productions of this island': plants, animals and geological specimens. Most of the items are recognisable from their descriptions, but this one is a bit mysterious:

The Secretary submitted a small (probably undescribed) hairy Crab, caught about the level of low-water mark on the rocks near "the Snug" point, in D'Entrecasteaux Channel. It is remarkable for the size and comparative strength of its claws, and for its lurking in a state of perfect concealment under a red membrane-like covering, from which it springs on its unwary prey. It much resembles the Dromia hirsutissima of the Cape of Good Hope.

Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van Diemen's Land 1(3), 1851; p. 272.

Dromiid crabs often carry a 'red membrane-like covering' of living sponge on their carapace, but their claws aren't especially large. Another common low-intertidal crab, Lomis hirta, has very large claws and is hairy, but doesn't carry a sponge 'mantle'. What got tabled at that meeting?

Invertebrates in the media
Invertebrata 21, November 2001

Government report says 600 species face demise
Tassie's near-extinction list

The extinction of an overwhelming 600 species of native Tasmanian plants and animals is imminent, says a new report.

A draft conservation report says the state's rich variety of fauna and flora is in urgent danger because of overexploitation and neglect.

It has 63 recommendations which, if adopted, could result in permanent protection for more native forests, conservation assessments before native forest and vegetation clearing, stricter quarantine measures and greater funding for conservation.

The report, prepared for the State Government and released yesterday for public comment, said 33 native plant and animal species were extinct and another 600 were perilously close.

The report said seven weeds of national concern and another 142 noxious weeds were in Tasmania.

A massive effort was needed to control just a few.

Also, most pristine areas such as the South-West World Heritage Area and Macquarie Island were threatened by weeds and feral animals.

The draft Tasmanian Nature Conservation Strategy was released for comment at The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery yesterday.

State Biodiversity Committee chairman Bruce Davis said the strategy's key objective was the long-term protection of Tasmania's biodiversity and geodiversity.

"You can't protect the animals or invertebrates if you don't protect their habitats," he said. "We are suggesting a range of ways of ensuring the protection of our living natural assets but we have also recognised we need to be making similar efforts to preserve non-living features and processes, such as rocks, fossils, landforms, soils and water, which are fundamental to our living systems.

"Particular forest communities are under threat.

"If we continue our current rate of clearance, we're not even going to meet the Regional Forest Agreement in 20 years."

The plan is available at www.dpiwe.tas.gov.au or phone 6233 6556, or email biodiv@dpiwe.tas.gov.au.

(With a photo of the State Biodiversity Committee chairman and a stuffed fox, captioned FOXING AROUND: Bruce Davis and a feral pest.

The Saturday Mercury newspaper, Hobart

7 July 2001, p. 10


'...animals or invertebrates...'? Perhaps just a slip of the tongue. Unfortunately, '...and another 600 species were perilously close' is nearly a direct quote from p. 3 of Tasmania's Nature Conservation Strategy (TNCS). TNCS refers its readers to Table 5 of the report, which notes that 454 plants and 154 animals are on the State threatened species list. Perhaps we should stop categorising species as 'endangered', 'vulnerable' and 'rare' under the Threatened Species Protection Act, and just call them all 'Perilously close to extinction'?

Despite this lapse and the weak reportage in The Mercury, TNCS is well worth reading, as it presents strategy-level recommendations on all aspects of nature conservation in Tasmania. 'Strategy-level', of course, means that many of the 64 TNCS recommendations are deliberately vague. How they're to be implemented will be discussed in a TNCS Action Plan, to be released after public comments on TNCS have been considered. We can expect that commercially important recommendations will have priority, because TNCS tells us that 'The development of Tasmania's Nature Conservation Strategy has provided a timely opportunity to strategically review many issues affecting Tasmania's natural resources. Some major issues have emerged which will influence how we do business locally, nationally and internationally' (p. 36).

'We' who are involved with invertebrates in a non-commercial way can find the usual messages in TNCS. Tasmania has a rich and richly endemic invertebrate fauna. We don't know a lot about it. Many invertebrates are threatened by a range of inappropriate uses of the land and its waters, and the sea. We need to do more invertebrate surveys and research, we need more comprehensive fauna inventories when monitoring the environment, and we need to know more about invertebrate species which may be threatened.

You can find each of these points in conservation strategies, plans, reviews, policy documents and position papers going back some 25 years. Some of them can be traced to an article published 80 years ago by Baldwin Spencer*. All of them will undoubtedly appear again in future documents in the TNCS lineage.

In September, a senior staff member of the Nature Conservation Branch within DPIWE addressed an invertebrate conservation workshop in Launceston. He pointed out that Tasmania has an admirably high proportion of its land area in reserves, and that we have many more invertebrates on our threatened species list than any other State. We are moving rapidly towards improved conservation on non-reserved land, and invertebrates already figure largely in our forest practices system and in environmental monitoring generally.

On the negative side, the DPIWE officer pointed out some of the impediments to conserving invertebrates by 'traditional methods', such as focusing on single species and finding an appropriate spatial scale at which to manage habitats. Another issue is that we don't know whether existing reserves are actually doing the job we hope they're doing, because we know so little about the invertebrates in those reserves. And, of course, it's hard to get money from politicians to conserve 'non-charismatic' animals. The result: we have to accept, said the DPIWE officer, that we will lose invertebrate species in coming years.

It was a good address, just as TNCS is a good overview. The State Biodiversity Committee and its helpers can't be accused of ignorance of invertebrates and their importance. Nevertheless, the prospects for invertebrates post-TNCS are likely to remain the same as they were pre-TNCS: not nearly enough attention will be paid to the 95% of our fauna that's neither mammal, bird, snake, lizard, frog or fish.

The problem today, as it has been for the last 80 years, is that invertebrates have a low priority in nature conservation. TNCS has not addressed this problem and offers no strategies for change. The 'neglect' referred to in The Mercury article will continue.


*Spencer, B. 1921. The necessity for an immediate and co-ordinated investigation into the land and fresh-water fauna of Australia and Tasmania. The Victorian Naturalist 37(10): 120-122.

Literary footnote
Invertebrata 21, November 2001

...from Such Is Life (1903) by 'Tom Collins' (Joseph Furphy).

The scene is 'Runnymede' station in outback NSW in the 1880s. Tom Collins, a very minor government official, is passing the time with young Moriarty, an ambitious but lazy storekeeper:

'...Then why not take up some interesting study, and work it out from post to finish? Political Economy, for instance?'

'Anybody could do that,' replied the young fellow contemptuously. 'I want to distinguish myself.'

'Then I'll tell you what you'll do, Moriarty. Take a narrow branch of scientific study, and restrict yourself to that. Say you devote your life to some special division of the Formicae'

'The what?'

'Formicae. The name is plural. It embraces all the different species of ants.'

'Why, there's only about three species of ants altogether; and there's nothing to learn about them except that they make different kinds of hills, and give different kinds of bites. That sort of study would about suit you. Fat lot of distinction a person could get out of ants.'

What is it?

Yes, it's Tasmanian! -Ed.

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