Climate Change

It’s hot and getting hotter

And there’s little we can do

As our ecosystems totter

And we sit at home and stew

Do we rage against the greed

That has delivered us this mess 

Or should we consider what we need

And tone down our own excess

As one of 7 billion

Is there really any point

To curb our wicked ways

While the others trash the joint

The problem with this thinking

Is that no one takes a stand

But we can slow the global sinking

If we work hard hand in hand

Behave not as others do

But as you wish they would

It is not what you can do

But about what we all could 

What does it really mean to be stewards of the world? Spare a thought for the animals living with consequences of our actions and you may get an inkling. I recently had a discussion about this with a religious friend with a human-centric point of view.  He truly believed that the planet and its resources were created and gifted to us by God.  He felt that we must be grateful for our gifts and be responsible stewards but humans should and must come first. He was not overly worried about climate change. 

The problem with this thinking is how much can we take?  Obviously there comes a point where the natural systems that sustain us will collapse if we take too much. This is the point which we go beyond at our peril. It unfortunately looks like we have reached this point even if we are not quite at the point of no return. What does it take to shake people out of their complacency? Even the news that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef is bleached is of not real concern to most people, or the collapse of world fisheries, or the global loss of biodiversity. They simply don't get it. They don't understand that the collapse of the natural world heralds our own demise. We can still retreat from the precipice but there are few signs of it happening. It's time we took this seriously. 

Cuttlebones

A hungry dolphin knows

That cuttlefish are sweet

But the chalky cuttlebone

Is not the thing to eat

Gripped in narrow jaws

It is thrashed from side to side

Until the chalky bone

Breaks through the slimy hide

To float upon the sea

And wash up on the shore

Where pock-marked cuttlebones

Gather by the score

The beach north of Tickera is strewn with cuttlebones.  And almost all of them bear the imprint of the toothy predators of the Upper Spencer Gulf. The slow-moving and sweet fleshed cuttlefish makes a wonderful meal but no-one wants a bellyful of chalky cuttlebone, Most of the bones have been pocked by dolphins with their distinctive narrow jaws and sharp peg teeth. Cuttlebones are not very robust and are not going to persist for long on the beach so large numbers of pocked cuttlebones indicate a high level of predation by dolphins.

Rhodoliths

The stone plant spent 1000 years

Turning CO2 to stone

And welcomed many homeless friends

Into its roomy home

And rolling sliding side by side

They cross the ocean floor

A million limy popcorns

Soon joined by millions more

Some will find a resting place

Upon a limy beach

While others sink into the ooze

Forever out of reach

If you have ever walked along a beach on Spencers Gulf the chances are that you would have found a rhodolith. The whole gravelly beach may in fact have been composed exclusively of rhodoliths. These are the limy popcorn shaped “corals” that we are all familiar with but they are not corals. You won’t see any sign of a polyp no matter how hard you look. The nodules are beautifully smooth and each one is an exquisite work of art. And each one is a limy skeleton of a red calcareous algae laid down over centuries in its popcorn bed on the floor of Spencer Gulf. The living ones look like the dead ones except for their pink colour. The rhodoliths are incredibly important for the world carbon balance as they turn carbon dioxide into limestone which in turn becomes a home for the plants and animals of the gulf. It’s a marvellous system but the rhodoliths have one big disadvantage. They roll around the sea floor but they can’t actively move. So when a trawler comes along to harvest the animals living on the limy bottom they often as not end up burying the rhodoliths in the ooze. So the stony plant that has for centuries used sunlight to convert CO2 to stone finally finds a grave deep in the mud where it is cut off from the life bringing sun-light. Vast areas of rhodoliths have already been destroyed by trawling in Spencer Gulf and it’s important that the remaining beds are protected. It’s important for the carbon balance, the food chain and ultimately the whole structure of the gulf. Where would we be without these engineers of the ocean? They may be small but there are lots of them and they do their work over millennia.

Dabde

 

Dabde the Destroyer
Has slept both deep and long
Under Djidbijidbdi
In her cave of frozen song

The guardians sense her stirring
In this eerie place of awe
Behind the orange cliffs
Blood-stained in ancient war
 
Cousin to the Woggle
The creator of the world
The stirring Brown Snake Goddess
Will soon become uncurled

The frozen songs are thawing
And ringing into space
Like the Ride of the Valkyries
As she prepares to leave this place

 Djidbidjibdi known to the white man as Mount Brockman is a place of terrible and ancient power. There beneath the blood stained orange cliffs lies Dabde the powerful Brown Snake spirit sleeping since the dream-time. Sleeping since the songs of the void froze into matter with the creation of the world. Dabde the destroyer, cousin to the greater Woggle, the Rainbow Serpent who created the world. Guarded by the ancients who alone know that when she wakes she will destroy the world with lightning and flooding rain.  We the white-man also sense her power.  It radiates out from the massive Uranium deposit lying under the mountain. Wealth and power there for the taking but for the guardians. You must not disturb the mountain! But Dabde is stirring. As the climate warms and the ancient songs begin to thaw increasingly massive cyclones lash the ancient landscape with lightning and flooding rain. A small taste of things to come should we fail to heed the warnings.

The Possum

There's a rustle in the Mulberry Tree
And the dogs go bark bark bark
Whatever could it be
On this night so still and dark

There’s something in the Pepper Tree
In a hollow deep and dark
Hiding where we cannot see
As the dogs go bark bark bark

We need to solve this mystery
Of what's hiding in the dark
Lying still as still can be
As the dogs go bark bark bark

One of the reasons we bought our house was the Brush-tailed Possum in a hollow in the Pepper Tree outside the house yard. The hollow is about 1.5 metres above ground level and looking out was a whiskery face with huge eyes and a pink nose. He was very cute. And we know he is a he because we got a nice shot of his rear end with the sensor camera we set up near the hollow. Our dogs are confined to the house yard so the possum can safely roam the grove of trees in the two acre property outside the house yard. He is very fond of the wild quandongs and we sometimes hear him in the mulberry tree next to the house yard, where he initially used to drive the dogs crazy but they got used to him soon enough. Sometimes though he likes to live dangerously. Like the time we found him on the kitchen bench one night and this time the dogs on sentinel duty on the front veranda were oblivious.

Not everyone likes possums and particularly people in New Zealand where Brush-Tailed Possums are an introduced pest and where interestingly they are rapidly growing into a much larger animal than their Australian cousins. That's the irony of pest species that are actively hunted. The fit survive and in a very short time the species becomes formidable. The same thing is happening with the North American Coyote and of course Australia's feral fox. Brush-tailed possums, like kangaroos, are a species that have done quite well out of the European Settlement of Australia. Dozens of mammals have become extinct but the hordes of possums in the trees and roof cavities of Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth are doing very well and drive people mad with their midnight carousing. So far we have been lucky and have not had a possum invasion in our roof space or our chimneys but it will likely happen one day. In the meantime I am very happy to coexist with our cute neighbour in his Pepper Tree hollow.      


 

The Cuttlefish Aggregation

The bride is truly stunning
As she hovers into view
With her wedding dress all pulsing
Bright electric blue

Rippling and shimmering
In ever changing hue
Sometimes brown and cryptic
Sometimes brilliant blue

The cuttlefish keep coming
To join the congregation
And the mating dance has started
In the swarming aggregation

For year after endless year countless thousands of cuttlefish would arrive on the rocky sub-tidal terraces off Point Lowly near Whyalla to breed and lay their eggs. It was one of the world's great swarming aggregations and a marvel of nature. It was also a marvel for the fishermen who plundered them by the tonne until the population collapsed, or almost so, before they were protected in the Point Lowly Zone in 1998. The population at first recovered but unaccountably again began to decline over past few years. This prompted an extension of the protected zone to the whole of the Northern Spencer Gulf in 2013. The reasons for the decline are not understood but a recovery of sorts does look like it is happening.  I was delighted to see them in their hundreds, if not the thousands of legend, when I visited Point Lowly in late May 2014. The rocky terraces between Point Lowly and Black Point are marvellous for a seaside picnic and continue to cascade into the clear sheltered water. I saw my first cuttlefish nestling in the sea-weed in about 2 metres of water about 20 m off-shore and then saw more and more as I ventured further off-shore. They can reach 0.5m in length and weigh up to 10 kg so they are a very impressive animal but most of the ones I saw were much smaller than that. And so pretty! I had the tune of Ice-house's Electric Blue running through my head as I watched one of these pulsating marvels of nature flashing brilliant blue. You can swim right up to them and they barely move. I came face to face with one who was a dead ringer for Ood from Dr. Who.  Let us all hope that the recovery continues and that these priceless marvels of nature one day return in the hundreds of thousands of yester-year.  And in the meantime let's enjoy the ones we still have.  If you are ever in South Australia in  May and June you should make the effort to swim with the cuttlefish.  

Razor Fish

The Razor Fish are far and few
Where once so thick and close
How can they all have gone so fast
Along the Spencer coast

Once they were just used for bait
But now the high demand
To have them on a gourmet's plate
Is causing quite some harm

They are tasty sure enough
But it hardly seems worthwhile
To kill them for the tiny snack
Within their giant shell

The Razor Fish, or Razor Clam as they are known outside of South Australia, is  a large fan shaped shellfish found with the pointy end buried in the mud and the top few centimetres exposed. Just enough to inflict significant damage on the bare foot of the unwary! They once carpeted the seagrass beds that cloaked the calm shallow inlets near Adelaide but they are now quite rare near any population centre. You need to travel further afield to places like the Upper Spencer Gulf  to see them in any numbers and even there the populations are plummeting. The bag limit is 25 per day but the day will soon come when this will have to be lowered. They are obviously being over-fished.

The loss of the Razor Fish is a tragedy in its own right even if it does mean less cut feet but they are also very important in the ecosystem. As well as being efficient filter feeders that clean up the water they are also a hard surface for epiphytic algae and for a range of animals. If you look hard in the photo you will see an abalone attached to one of the shells. So the loss of Razor Fish is also the loss of a suite of other organisms that all have their place in the ecosystem.

The other tragedy is that they are really not worth the effort as a sea-food. They are trendy for sure and the rarer they get the more status they hold. A bit like a bears gall bladder in China! But the small white adductor muscle, which is the only edible part, is such a small part of the large animal and you still need to get rid of the waste. The reality is that the 25 Razor Clams you have spent the day collecting on the mudflats will barely provide a decent meal for one person and will fill the rubbish bin with smelly waste. The flavour is also very strong. I think scallops are a much better bet and consuming those is much better for the environment.











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