haiku challenge winners

I've been chasing IDs on some of my photos, Wasp species, host for a mistletoe,..), but this morning I wondered how the Hexapod Haiku Challenge was going, to discover that judging will not finish for about a month.

In the meantime I wanted to put up some previous winners. And it is worth clicking on the links, since the judges dissect each haiku, teasing out its meaning and saying why it won.
2010:

Silverfish, tell me,
Darwin and Dostoevsky,
do they taste the same?

Martha Love, Gatsonia, NC

2008:
Two million flowers
The Ten-thousand mile harvest
Sweetens my pancake

Joel Caren, Raleigh, NC

And I finally got an ID on the strelitzia below, Ravenala madacasgariensis, which grows in a single plane.

Planes

Clair's planes

Clair had a party to celebrate my final seminar, and I slept there overnight. She has taken up model aeroplane flying as something to do with her father, and now has these four planes, with ambitions for many more, is on the club committee, and writes their newsletter. Talking to her, you, too, want to start flying immediately.

There was so much to carry home. The computer weighs a tonne. So I came straight home to Ruth's, fell on the bed and slept. But first I saw this lovely mistletoe, whose photo does not do it justice.


Mistletoe, growing on a camphor laurel at Lutwyche cemetery, Kedron.

And this morning and yesterday, I have been working on my thesis, with an interruption this morning of putting out the washing, and of going to Stafford City to do the weekly shop..

Ruth just knocked on my door to show me this
(also shown here). And now I have finally found the original posting on reddit. (Ruth's nephew had a terrible accident a year ago. His prosthetic leg is a stunning piece of art.)

Tomorrow

Iris in the rain, Mt Coot-tha picnic area.


Galls on A. penninervia, Mt Coot-tha

Throughout the forest below the picnic area were acacias festooned in what I thought were insect galls. But they are apparently caused by a rust fungus, and insects then make enthusiastic use of them. See Rust fungus

Tomorrow I give my presentation of my thesis...
Ann has wished me luck. Ruth has given me a home. And Kerrie remains her unflappable, helpful self.

Not haiku at all.

Phytochemical stimuli
direct and modify
insect pollinator responses.

Quoted from
Williams, G & Adams, P. (2010) The Flowering of Australia's Rainforests A Plant and Pollination Miscellany, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Australia.

Phytochemicals
direct, modify
pollinator responses.
(5)(5)(7)


In the misty rain at Mt Coot-tha.

Insect haikus, again.

Four hundred thousand(1)
In Australasia alone.
And man is special?

(1) Cranston, P.S., Insect Biodiversity and Conservation in Australasia, 2010, Annual review of entomology, 55: 55-75.

And Jean Hort has so many stunning photos of them: e.g.,
a Robber fly, and an even more stunning robber fly, a mantis, a mantis fly, some ants, an ant's head, and many, many more.

Originally, I wrote four million, but on checking Cranston, I realised I had added another zero to the guestimate of species numbers. He says 400,000 insect species. So I had another go. But it definitely needs a context to be understood.


The photos below show evidence of the many insects here.. And sometimes show an insect.

Insect effects on a Eucalypt, Timber Creek, Northern Territory


On a hakea, Barrenjoey Head, New South Wales.


Male Pandanus flower, North Stradbroke Island, Queensland. I think it was crawling with ants, which led me to ask whether it was wind, bird or insect pollinated?


Ant nest, high on a Boab, Angalarri River, Northern Territory.


Termite nest on a casuarina, Barrenjoey Head, New South Wales.


Paper wasp nest on a Buckinghamia, Kedron, Queensland

Another haiku

Dysdercus sidae on Lagunaria patersonia, Norfolk Island Hibiscus.

I couldn't find out much about these little bugs. Yet I have to have encountered them many, many, times before, and they were dense along the branches of this hibiscus. Any research done on them seems to have been done so long ago that my University (QUT) doesn't allow me access to the pdfs...
1928 gets quoted. & GoogleScholar gave 1964, 1970, 1973 (in S.Africa), and 1983!!!!

Dysdercus sidae
copulating. They say they
fancy hibiscus.

Two more steps

Waves, Whale Beach.


Near Whale Beach Pool.

Two more steps to go: The final seminar, the rewrite and submission.
I return to Brisbane tomorrow and I haven't yet started the final seminar slides..
I am at home today, which is why the swim and the photos. Need to pack all I need for two weeks.

Walk

Barrenjoey Headland. On the path beyond the lighthouse.


Barrenjoey Headland. On the path beyond the lighthouse.

I had to go for a walk. Men came today to pick up the spare fridge. In the end they didn't take it. Theoretically, it was part of a 'fridge buy-back' scheme. But they wanted $200 to take it. I had waited all day and felt quite sick and miserable about it all. So I went for the walk.

I do love the silver of casuarinas and tea-trees. And for some reason the isopogons are so green. Very beautiful.

Preface

I thought my new self-published book should include these haiku efforts with photos, perhaps, and I thought I might try to write some atheistical arguments in a terse format. Nail my colours to the mast.

I have been thinking of late how altogether risible the (Christian) theist position is. And that it would be worth saying why, given that Australia has retreated from its post war secularism and seems to be wishing to imitate a theistic America ("one nation under god"). The laws which Christians wish to impose upon me so that I cannot exercise my conscience have oppressed me since I was a young woman,...

It bothers me somewhat to "come out" in this manner, because some of the nicest people I know are Christian and their niceness is a function of their belief and their desire to be good and to be good to others. Nonetheless, from a philosophical viewpoint, I do find Christianity ludicrous in the extreme. So I am just going to have to put those arguments.


Walked for almost the first time along Whale Beach Road to get to Palm Beach pool. The beautiful Melaleuca quinquinervias I photographed a few years back have been savagely lopped and look like they will have difficulty surviving. There is a lawn at their base and the person who mows the lawn is ringbarking the trees. I couldn't bear to photograph them..

But this lovely casuarina was flourishing. On the base of the cliff on the eastern side, getting the water soaks from the sandstone. A beautiful tree.

To go with a photo of the swimmers:

We are jellyfish
subject to wind and current
thinking we control our fate.
we think we control our fate.

God loves us
But only those born since the year dot.
Others go to hell.
All others hell bound.

Can't get these right but this is as good a place as any to work on them...

For a state which is both religious and democratic
the logic of genocide is inescapable.

Bliss of no longer becoming anxious
Post menopausal state or brain-cells dying?


View from the house towards the central coast at dusk.

this one remembers walking with Ath

Goanna on the Basin track.

Ancient goanna
So nimbly climbing the tree
And hiding from us.

Millions and millions

Millions and millions of species.
And the Christian god favours the one
whose eyesight is surpassed by the eagle
whose speed is bettered by the cheetah
and whose nose cannot compare with his dog's.

And those new viruses
evolving to survive our antibiotics?
Why does this god not love and favour
his latest creations?


It seems to me that it is time for atheists to get political. Clearly, the Tony Abbotts of this world find it impossible to believe that their god could render his favoured species, the only species with a soul, extinct. For them, the thesis of man-made climate change is not believable. Yet all these characters who refuse to accept the science of climate change are happy to accept the science which makes medical breakthroughs possible or allows them to turn on a light.


Angophora costata, Palm Beach, Sydney.

And what of trees? Why animals rather than plants? Surely 400 year-old living organisms are worth a thought.

Another haiku, another insect

An Ogmograptis
has scribbled for aeons on
E. haemastoma.


Scribbles on Eucalyptus haemastoma


Scribbly gums, E. haemastoma.


However, it seems now that Ogmograptis scribula has multiplied into many, many species.... In 2005, scientists discovered that various scribbly gum moths are very choosy in their diet, and that the local larvae (in Canberra) did not scribble on E. haemastoma. Different moths have different scribbles. I haven't yet been able to find the name of the moth which scribbles on this lovely tree. It seems it may not yet be named.
CSIRO: Scribbly gums interpreting their scribbles
Australian Museum: Scribbly gum moth

Still working on the haikus

This beautiful katydid is from
Jean's photos.

The haiku is:

Pretty Katydid
hiding in dead leaves & twigs.
Don't move, Katydid.

Another, again based on
Jean's photos verticordia is

Green soldier fly
and pink Verticordia.
Each helps the other?

haiku for the hexapod haiku challenge

Thrips & beetles
So needed in the sex life
Of the idiot tree.


Idiospermum australiense, the idiot tree.
Photograph courtesy of Tony Rodd.

Link to photo

For the pollination story, see Williams, G and Adam, P. (2010) "The Flowering of Australia's Rainforests A Plant and Pollination Miscellany", CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria.

I have taken the following from
BlackDiamondImages

Idiospermum australiense, is the most famous of the primitive North Queensland rainforest plants having been considered extinct until it was found again just south of Cairns near Noah Creek in 1971. It has been called the Green Dinosaur Tree or otherwise,Ribbonwood. It belongs to an ancient 120 million year old family of plants only previously known from fossils. The fruit is very large, as big as a tennis ball and toxic to birds and animals. It is brown in colour and descibed as a woody nut by Cooper. It is believed however that the seeds were dispersed by extinct animals and birds. The tree produces fruit with some interesting characteristics. All modern flowering plants produce seeds which have either one seed leaf (monocots) or two seed leaves (dicots) but the seeds of the Idiospermum can have between 2 to 6 seed leaves! Normally seeds will germinate and send up a single shoot but the Ribbonwood can sprout more than one shoot per seed. The fruit is large at 80mm (3 inches) and globular, splitting into four segments on the ground. The spirally arranged flowers can range in colour from white or cream aging to pink, red or orange and are fragrant. The fruit contains alkaloids which can disrupt nerve transmission to the brain. This rare species is only found from Noah Creek to the Daintree River and from the Mt Bellenden Kerr Range to the foothills of Mt Bartle Frere in lowland rainforest up to 260m altitude.
Source-Plants of Tropical North Queensland by John Beasley p.106 plus Cooper and Cooper 2004, P.232

4th Annual Hexapod Haiku Challenge