Eureka Productions from Sydney, got in touch about a wildlife series they are making for Animal Planet, with a request to use some of my possum video which they saw on youtube. I agreed, as long as I received payment for providing high resolution footage. Today, an email arrived stating that payment had been approved. The footage is needed to compare an Australian with an American possum. Both are marsupials, but they look quite different. I duly signed the licensing agreement this evening at Steve’s, and will email it and the footage to Eureka tomorrow or the day after.

PS The fee was paid into my account on 19 September.

Uploading the 500^th video on vimeo couldn’t be a more fitting subject for this, the 500^th  blog post. The video is of a melanic (black) golden orb spider, which I filmed in my garden. It is a variant of the dominant lighter-coloured form.

Last year, I filmed and photographed a cotton shrub growing in a front garden, starting with the flowers in January, then the pods and the first cotton boll in March and finally a cotton harlequin bug in early April, followed by a female tending her newly laid eggs two weeks later. I photographed the nymphs on the 3^rd of June, within a day of their hatching. The female never left her eggs for an incredible six weeks. At most, I counted ten bugs scattered throughout the shrubs at any one time, plus eventually, the hatchlings.

Noticing bolls on the shrub in early May this year, I crossed the road to take a look and was greeted by swarms of nymphs in various stages of development and plenty of adults, on leaf after leaf and crawling on stems, which I avidly photographed and filmed, returning for more photographs on succeeding days. Today I took another look and photographed a late instar female. There were more bugs than ever. I knocked on the door and spoke to one of the owners who admitted that he had never seen so many in the five years since he planted the shrubs.

Today I received two emails requesting a species identification from mountain residents.More often than not, I refer the enquirer to the Queensland Museum. Today I identified both the creatures, a moth and a spider. Also, this evening, I was asked permission for an early piece of mine about an orange-eyed treefrog in the Tamborine Mountain News to be used in a summary about an excellent recent series of seminars on Resilience.

Jack Hasenpusch emailed me a pdf of a chapter on camouflage and natural history, he and Paul Brock wrote for the book Camouflage Cultures, Beyond the Art of Disappearance. This was in response to a number of questions I asked him about spiny leaf insects, also known as giant prickly stick insects, Extatosoma tiaratum. The females can take a leaf-mimicking or lichen-mimicking shape. I had heard that the lichen-mimicking insects were instars which lost their lichen pattern and reverted to an overall light colour as adults. The pdf confirmed that the lichen pattern can be retained by adult females on rare occasions. The shape of the leaf-mimicking form is so different from the lichen-mimicking form that it is hard to believe they are the same species. I have filmed brown and green leaf-mimicking adult females on the mountain as well as an adult male and late and early lichen-mimicking instars.

Today I renewed the domain name for this website for another two years until May 17 2020. The cost increased by over 200% which led me not to renew a matching domain name which I thought might have some commercial value. A Chinese company once contacted me wanting to use it, but without making an offer, so I didn’t reply.

I have completed writing up the 949 video frames and photographs for 2017 which will be added to my image library in the collection of the Queensland Museum. The next thing is to put the images and the descriptive lists onto a USB for delivery to the Museum.

Steve and I uploaded a further five videos to vimeo, to add to the five we uploaded on the 13^th when we had to upgrade our presence to vimeo plus, because we had exceeded the permitted storage capacity for vimeo basic. These were the first new videos we have uploaded since May last year, having been otherwise engaged. There are a further twenty in the pipeline.