Catalogue of Organisms: November 2016

ID for Heather?

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I was recently contacted by Heather Adamson who wanted to know if I could identify the animal in the above picture. She photographed it on an old post in the region of West Coolup, south of Mandurah here in Western Australia. I can tell her that it is some form of Lepidoptera larva (in other words, a caterpillar) and it looks like it may be beginning to weave itself a cocoon. Beyond that, I couldn't say. Do any of my readers have a better idea of what it is than I do?

Update: I shared this post to the Western Australian Insects group on Facebook, and Daniel Heald has suggested that Heather's photo may show the pupa of a lymantriid moth Teia athlophora. This species constructs itself a loose, cage-like cocoon from its own irritant hairs. The male, when he emerges, is a fairly standard looking brown moth, but the female is fat and flightless with only tiny stubs of wings. She will continue to live in and around her pupal cocoon, awaiting visits from courting males.

The Brown Honeyeaters

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Brown honeyeater Lichmera indistincta, copyright JJ Harrison.

Honeyeaters are one of the first groups of birds likely to be noticed by newcomers to Australia (after the crows and magpies, of course). Though generally not large birds, they are active, noisy and often colourful. Individuals or small groups of them will almost invariably be seen around trees in flower, seeking out nectar and squabbling over access to the best blooms.

Here in Perth, one of the more common honeyeater species is the brown honeyeater Lichmera indistincta. This is one of the smaller honeyeaters and as such might be less commonly noted by the casual observer, but it is abundant nonetheless. The brown honeyeater is one of a genus of about ten species of small, slight honeyeaters with slender decurved bills found from the Lesser Sundas of Indonesia to New Caledonia and Vanuatu (Higgins et al. 2008). Lichmera indistincta is the only species found in continental Australia. Most of the species are locally more or less abundant though some have quite restricted ranges, being found only on specific islands. A few are considered near-threatened. Lichmera species are predominantly grey-brown or greenish in colour; perhaps the most strikingly coloured is the black-necklaced honeyeater L. notabilis of the island of Wetar in the Lesser Sundas, which is yellowish-olive above and yellow below, with a striking white throat patch outlined in black.

Indonesian honeyeater Lichmera limbata, copyright Lip Kee.

Lichmera honeyeaters occupy a wide range of habitats but often prefer to be in the vicinity of water, occupying river-side woodlands and stretches of mangroves. One subspecies of the silver-eared honeyeater L. alboauricularis olivacea has a distribution that closely follows river systems in northern New Guinea. Favoured food plants of the brown honeyeater in Australia include Myrtaceae such as Eucalyptus and Melaleuca, and Proteaceae such as Banksia and Grevillea. They will also take small insects and spiders; I suspect that the proportion of nectar to insects in the diet depends on the availability of the former. Nests are open cups constructed of plant matter such as grass and pieces of bark bound together with spider web and other fibres. Small clutches of one to three eggs are brooded by the female alone, taking about two weeks to hatch, though the chicks are fed by both parents. The call of the brown honeyeater, which can be heard year-round, has been rendered as 'sweet-sweet-quarty-quarty'.

Nectar, of course, is not a hugely nutritious food source per volume (being mostly water), and a small bird like a brown honeyeater has to feed fairly constantly to keep itself going. Even though its metabolism slows down when sleeping, a brown honeyeater will still lose about half a gram of body weight overnight (Collins 1981) which is pretty impressive when you consider that the entire bire only weighs about eight grams (imagine if the average lost five kilos every night...) To make up for this loss, the bird feeds most heavily in the early morning, as well as retaining water for the last half-hour or so before going to sleep. And so it is that the honeyeater gets through the night.

REFERENCES

Collins, B. G. 1981. Nectar intake and water balance for two species of Australian honeyeater, Lichmera indistincta and Acanthorhynchus superciliosis. Physiological Zoology 54 (1): 1–13.

Higgins, P. J., L. Christidis & H. A. Ford. 2008. Family Meliphagidae (honeyeaters). In: Hoyo, J. del, A. Elliott & D. Christie (eds) Handbook of Birds of the World vol. 13. Penduline-tits to shrikes pp. 498–691. Lynx Edicions: Barcelona.

The Mancos Saltbush: Life in the Badlands

Mancos saltbush Proatriplex pleiantha, from here.

Proatriplex pleiantha, the Mancos saltbush, is arguably not much to look at. It never grows very large (only about half a foot in height) and though a single plant may produce a lot of flowers, they are not very showy. Nevertheless, this little fleshy-leaved annual is something of a survivor. It grows on badlands in only a few localities in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and may be the only vegetation to be found on the eroded clays that it calls home. It persists in this hostile environment by not persisting; instead, each individual plant will produce hundreds, if not thousands, of seeds during its short life that may lie dormant in the soil for several years, waiting for the flash of rain that will allow it to emerge.

The Mancos saltbush was first described in 1950; its vernacular name refers to the original collection locality near the Mancos River. It was originally described in the genus Atriplex, a diverse cosmopolitan assemblage of herbs and shrubs in the family Chenopodiaceae commonly known as saltbushes and oraches (the garden orache or mountain spinach A. hortensis has long been grown as a vegetable in Europe). However, right from the start it was considered distinctive enough to be placed in its own subgenus, later raised to the status of a distinct genus by Stutz et al. (1990). A molecular phylogenetic analysis by Kadereit et al. (2010) later confirmed that Proatriplex pleiantha is not a direct relative of Atriplex, instead being associated with other small North American Chenopodiaceae genera Grayia and Stutzia. Features distinguishing Proatriplex from true Atriplex include the succulent leaves, the flowers being borne in groups of three to seven in the axil of a single bract, and the presence of a five-segmented perianth around female flowers (Atriplex flowers are borne singly to a bract, and lack a perianth).

Because of its restricted range, the Mancos saltbush may be vulnerable to disturbances in its habitat; for instance, one of its main population centres in New Mexico is in close proximity to the Navajo coal mine. Nevertheless, this species is not currently listed by the US Fish & Wildlife service as being of concern, due to its being locally abundant in the areas where it does occur. Surveys of this species have been complicated by the dependence of its germination on suitable weather conditions: in years with little rainfall, it may appear to be almost absent, but the advent of a wetter year may prove otherwise. All it takes is a decent drop of rain, and you may see the badlands bloom.

REFERENCES

Kadereit, G., E. V. Mavrodiev, E. H. Zacharias & A. P. Sukhorukov. 2010. Molecular phylogeny of Atripliceae (Chenopodioideae, Chenopodiaceae): implications for systematics, biogeography, flower and fruit evolution, and the origin of C₄ photosynthesis. American Journal of Botany 97 (10): 1664–1687.

Stutz, H. C., G.-L. Chu & S. C. Sanderson. 1990. Evolutionary studies of Atriplex: phylogenetic relationships of Atriplex pleiantha. American Journal of Botany 77 (3): 364–369.

Who Knows Which Way the Water Flows?

Dorsal and lateral views of specimens of Trenella bifrons, from Parkhaev (2001).

There is no question that the molluscs are one of the most significant groups of animals in the marine environment. And thanks to the production by many species of mollusc of a hard shell, they are also one of the best-known groups in the fossil record. A rich and detailed picture of molluscan evolution is available to us as far back as the earliest Cambrian. But, of course, the further back in time we go the more questions we have about what the picture means. And it is in the earliest part of their history that the picture becomes the most opaque.

The Trenellidae are part of that early picture. This family of molluscs is known from the early Cambrian (Parkhaev 2002). They are part of the assemblage of early molluscs referred to as the helcionelloids, whose overall position in the molluscan family tree is very much open to question. Helcionelloids are simple, more or less cap-shaped or cone-shaped shells that are usually also tiny. The type species of the Trenellidae, Trenella bifrons, for instance, is only about 1 to 1.5 millimetres along the longest axis, and only one-half to one millimetre tall (Parkhaev 2001). This all adds up to a general shortage of morphological details that might help us pin down which, if any, modern molluscan groups helcionelloids are connected to. Possession of a undivided dorsal shell has lead many to compare them to gastropods. Others have pointed to the monoplacophorans like the modern Neopilina. In both cases, though, the resemblance is fairly superficial and confirming things one way or another would depend on identifying features of the soft anatomy, such as torsion, that are difficult if not impossible to infer from features of the shell alone.

Within the helcionelloids, trenellids are characterised by having the lower rim of one end of the shell's long axis drawn out into a siphonal groove. It seems likely that this groove was somehow involved in the passage of water around the gill(s), but whether its position indicates the front end or the back end of the shell, and whether it was used to draw water in or expel water out, depends again on what each author expects its original soft anatomy to have been. Unfortunately, evidence for the latter in trenellids is almost completely non-existent; while muscle scars have been identified in some helcionelloids, they remain unknown for this family.

The Trenellidae are closely related to, and probably include the ancestors of, the Yochelcionellidae in which the siphonal groove become raised and closed ventrally, turning it into a snorkel-like structure (one yochelcionellid, Yochelcionella daleki, has been featured on this site before). However, comparing trenellids to yochelcionellids raises something of a question in my mind. In general, mollusc shells grow through secretion from the mantle around the shell's rim only, meaning that once shell growth has passed a certain section the mollusc usually cannot go back and rearrange it. Assuming that helcionelloids grew in the usual molluscan manner, surely yochelcionellids would have gone through a stage in their development before the lower part of the 'snorkel' was closed off where they looked a heck of a lot like a trenellid? Is it even possible to distinguish a mature trenellid from a juvenile yochelcionellid?

REFERENCES

Parkhaev, P. Yu. 2001. Trenella bifrons: a new helcionelloid mollusk from the Lower Cambrian of South Australia. Paleontological Journal 35 (6): 585–588.

Parkhaev, P. Yu. 2002. Phylogenesis and the system of the Cambrian univalved mollusks. Paleontological Journal 36 (1): 25–36.

Lasiobelba: the Oppiid Way

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Lateral view (minus legs) of Lasiobelba pontica, from Vasiliu & Ivan (2011).

The animal illustrated above is a typical representative of Lasiobelba, a cosmopolitan genus of oribatid mites. Lasiobelba includes over thirty species of the family Oppiidae (Ermilov et al. 2014), commonly recognised as the most diverse family of oribatids. Oppiids are inhabitants of soils, where they primarily feed on fungi. Distinctive features of Lasiobelba within the Oppiidae include the absence of costulae (thickened ridges) on the prodorsum, and the presence of nine to ten pairs of setae on the notogaster that are inserted in two or four subparallel rows. The bothridial setae (the large sensory setae near the corners of the prodorsum) may be spindle-shaped at the ends or linearly hair-like; the two bothridial morphologies are used to distinguish two subgenera Lasiobelba and Antennoppia, respectively.

As is common for oribatids, there doesn't seem to be much information available for this genus beyond taxonomic studies. Lasiobelba species are most diverse in tropical and subtropical regions, with few reaching colder parts of the world. When they described the species L. pontica from the Movile Cave in Romania, Vasiliu & Ivan (2011) noted that this genus was otherwise unknown from the country. They suggested that this species might represent a relict of a warmer era that had managed to survive in the stable environment of the cave system after inclement conditions had driven it from the surface.

REFERENCES

Ermilov, S. G., U. Ya. Shtanchaeva, L. S. Subías & J. Martens. 2014. Two new species of oribatid mites of Lasiobelba (Acari, Oribatida, Oppiidae) from Nepal, including a key to all species of the genus. ZooKeys 424: 1–17.

Vasiliu, N. A., & O. Ivan. 2011. New oppiid species (Acari, Oribatida, Oppiidae) from Romanian caves. Trav. Inst. Spéol. "Émile Racovitza" 50: 3–14.