Blue Swimmer

If you're feeling restless
Or a trifle blue
Head off to the coast
Where the sea and crabs are blue

Be where the crabs
In seagrass fill
Your vision
Wall to wall

But beware a crab
Can nip you
If you dare
To make a grab

All of us can remember a time when the sea teemed with bounty. A Swan River in the 1980s full of crabs and prawns. Rock-pools at Lennox Head full of octopus. Crayfish wall to wall along the ledges north of Carnarvon. And then all at once without anyone noticing they are gone, or almost so. But it doesn't have to be like this and Spencer Gulf is a great example of the possible. It's truly uplifting to snorkel across the seagrass beds off Point Reilly and see Blue Swimmer Crabs by the dozen. Blue crabs and blue sea are a recipe to beat the blues.

Pygmy Blue Tongue Lizard

Australia’s Blue Tongue Lizards

Have tongues of brilliant blue

But the smallest of this Genus

Has a tongue of different hue

Rediscovered at Tiliqua

After decades thought extinct

In a trapdoor spider’s burrow

A pink tongued blue tongue skink

They live in spider burrows

In grassland never ploughed

And you can see them if you’re patient

And your voice is not too loud

A pink tongued Blue Tongue Lizard! I would like to see that. We had a great day out on the annual "lizard crawl" hosted by the Nature Foundation SA on Tiliqua Station near Burra. Here we got to see first hand these delightful but endangered small lizards that were thought to be extinct for decades before being rediscovered in 1992. Tiliqua adelaidensis is a fascinating small lizard that sets up home in an abandoned spiders hole in which it spends the rest of it's life. It only ventures out for small feeding forays on unwary insects before returning  home. They're definitely homebodies but home selection is tricky. You wouldn't want to head into a Trapdoor Spider or Wolf-spiders lair while the occupant was still there. Thank goodness for spider eating predators creating many abandoned houses.

Pygmy Blue Tongues were once common in the native grasslands in South Australia's mid-north but unfortunately for them this is prime cropping land. You can only imagine what the plough did to the millions of Pygmy Blue Tongues living out their sedentary lives in their spider borrows. Or to the spiders needed to dig fresh burrows. But not all areas were ploughed and rocky outcrops and other untouched grassy areas provided a refuge for the lucky few and the species has persisted. Just! The fragmented habitat is not ideal but a recovery programme is underway and a good understanding of where they are gives hope to a sustainable recovery. 

The Pygmy Blue Tongue is very cool. If you look hard into the burrow you will see the sharp yellow eyes in the shielded head looking back at you. And if you are really lucky you may see one venture out of the burrow to gobble up an insect. Or you can go fishing for them. A wriggling mealy worm on the end of a fishing line dangled from a rod is simply irresistible to a hungry lizard. Or to a greedy one for that matter! The ones we saw on the lizard crawl were sleek and fat and maybe getting just a few too many mealy worms. 

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.