Peter’s Blog

I need to place on record my feeling that overwhelmingly throughout my life, my contact with my fellow men, women and children has been a total delight.
It is a recurring pleasure which I experience each day and is among the precious things which makes my life rewarding and worth living, not least because moments of the keenest enjoyment can as readily occur with a complete stranger as with family and friends.

 


 

The Film Diary includes photos as well as video frames because it contains the blog’s biodiversity content. It is also the blog’s second biggest category, after Other. The video content dates from 2008 to 2021, when I ceased videoing. The photographs date from 2014 to the present.

 

The Brisbane Line was the e-bulletin of the now defunct Brisbane Institute, to which I contributed the articles featured, between 2006 and 2012.

 

Not The Brisbane Line contains my other essays from 2005 to the present.

 


 

A cherished dream, my book   One small place on earth …  discovering biodiversity where you are,   self-published in August 2019, has been long in the making. Jan Watson created its design template nine years ago. The idea of doing a book seems to have occurred during my stay with Clive Tempest, the website’s first architect, when I was visiting the UK in 2006. By the time Steve Guttormsen and I began sustained work on the book in 2017, much of which I had already written, the imperative was to create a hard copy version of a project whose content is otherwise entirely digital.

 


 

People may wonder why there is little mention of climate change – global warming on my website. There are two related reasons. Firstly, if former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 remark that climate change is the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” is true, we have not acted accordingly before or since. Rudd’s statement is only true if we collectively live as if it is true, Rudd included. Instead, our politics has wasted decades favouring business as usual, and a global economy excessively dependent on fossil fuels – in the wilful absence of a politics intent on achieving a low carbon economy. Secondly, although it is open to individuals to strive to live the truth of Rudd’s remarks, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not. I salute those who do. The precautionary principle alone makes me regard climate change as a current planetary crisis, but because I have only marginally changed the way I live, and still wish to fly, I am not inclined to pontificate on the subject.

 


 

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Film Diary / 21.10.2014

Broadband service was restored this morning, meaning the outage lasted 6 days. I’m waiting for the settings for the 5 newest videos which I posted on vimeo today, to appear on my website so that I can send out a newsletter to subscribers. The site trawls through vimeo once a day. Consequently the completed videos should show up tomorrow.

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Website / 17.10.2014

An email arrived confirming that my resource has been re-harvested and with the updated link to my Gallery showing 340 taxa (species) instead of the previous 220. It was in reply to my email of 14 October drawing attention to the fact that the list we supplied on 30 September contained some 350 items. The discrepancy is the result of replacing two different names which EOL regards as synonyms, with a valid name occupying a single page.

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Film Diary / 15.10.2014

The second night shoot of the season in Palm Grove NP was petering out after a promising start, until Robyn spotted a cricket with a small body but inordinately long hind legs which I am pretty sure I have filmed before and Hugh spotted a large, very hairy caterpillar which was new to me. Not far away were two mating flies I also wanted to film with my PANCAM, which I was mysteriously unable to switch on, though there was sufficient battery life the last time I used it. This was the second equipment malfunction of the day. (I was working on the settings of the latest videos when my broadband suffered an outage. Telstra is sending a technician to my place tomorrow morning). We were not far from the entrance when I filmed a large trapdoor spider frozen on the path in mid prowl. Then, just inside the park I was lucky enough to film a pademelon perhaps 15 metres away amongst the vegetation. It was a female with joey, whose presence was revealed by its movement in the pouch. The pademelon sat quietly for several minutes before slowly moving deeper into the undergrowth. This was the first… Read Complete Text

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Other / 14.10.2014

For the first time since 29 July, due to my overseas trip and a combination of personal arrangements affecting Steve and me, we were only able to manage a working session this evening. We captured 90 frames, all but a few from the two most recent HD tapes, bringing the record up to date, except that I am well advanced on the next tape. We also put together 5 new videos.

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Film Diary / 12.10.2014

The following email from Greg Edgecombe, sent in July this year, wonderfully highlights the intricacies of species identification. It concerns a House Centipede . Today (Sunday) I sought and received Greg’s permission to post it on my blog – all the more impressive because he is a paleontologist specialising in centipedes and Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Previously he worked at the Australian Muesum in Sydney for 14 years. Greg was contacted by Bob Mesibov who is based in Tasmania and has helped me with centipede enquries.

Bob and Peter,

Scutigeromorph IDs based on photos are usually highly dubious and I would definitely put this one into that category.  Determining a species requires at least staring at tergite 6 down a microscope at high magnification and working out the relationships of spines, bristles, hairs and whatnot.  If there’s only one species known from a well-surveyed area you can stick your neck out a bit more confidently with a photo alone, but SE QLD harbours multiple species of pretty similar Thereuoneminae.

The name Allothereua maculata has been used for pretty much everything in Australia.  It’s a Western Australian… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 08.10.2014

We drew a blank last week on our first night foray of the new season, but tonight was a success on two counts. At Curtis Falls I at last obtained footage of the Catfish which I have unsuccessfully tried to film before. The vision was never clear, perhaps the water was too murky. There were up to 3 fish in the rock pool below what was no more than a trickle. Also at Curtis Falls, I filmed a Black-spotted Semi-slug on a rock with my PANCAM, obtaining much closer footage of the mollusc than with my Sony.