Weta, rat, dog tucker

New Zealanders use the expression ‘dog tucker’ — literally, dog food — to describe something or someone about to meet disaster. For example, a professional rugby coach whose team loses eight straight games will inevitably be described as dog tucker — his sacking will be as certain as sunrise. Sadly, the term doesn’t just apply to rugby coaches, as I found out last night while prowling around the lower section of the No. 1 Line track, looking for interesting animals to photograph. Only a few minutes after entering the forest, I came across a beautiful, large, female weta — a flightless, nocturnal, grasshopper-like insect — sitting on the trunk of a tree at about head height. I photographed her and carried on up the track. Not long afterwards, I had an encounter that left me depressed, thinking this beautiful, ancient insect would inevitably end up as dog tucker.

Or, in this case, another type of tucker.

I’d heard something that sounded like the rasping of another weta but not quite right for that. I picked my way past the giant rimu and through a tangle of shrubbery, turning my head so the lamp played over the ground, along the fallen, rotting branches, and over the foliage. Nothing. Then I heard the sound again and turned towards it. A shadow moved, then two small orange-yellow eyes glowed back at me. I kept the headlamp trained on the eyes and switched it to full power. There, sitting on the fallen stipe of a tree fern frond, was Rattus rattus — the black, ship, or roof rat.

New Zealand has three species of rats, all introduced by humans. Kiore (Rattus exulans) are now rare on mainland New Zealand, and brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) tend to stay close to the ground, so they pose little risk to arboreal animals — my weta would probably be safe if she stayed up her tree. But black rats climb nimbly, as this one demonstrated when it finally ran off along a thin, flexible stem of supplejack and vanished into the night.

In New Zealand, the two pests with the highest public profiles are possums and stoats. While rats do get mentioned, in the public’s consciousness of conservation pests they rate less highly compared to possums and stoats, yet an infestation of Rattus rattus means disaster not only for the larger native insects like weta, ground beetles, and some of our spectacular weevils, but for birds too — the agile black rat easily raids nests, devouring eggs, chicks, and sometimes the adult birds who, particularly at night, can be sitting ducks (or in this case, fantails, riflemen, tomtits, and so on).

Rats also damage ecosystems by eating seeds. While some seeds need to be eaten so the plant can disperse, rats are not effective dispersers of larger seeds like those of tawa (a bit like an olive). Kereru, New Zealand’s native pigeon, swallow tawa fruits and crap the seeds out, often well away from the fruiting tree (Wotton & Kelly, 2012), but a tawa fruit is too big for a rat to swallow whole. Instead, the rat will do its usual ratty thing, nibbling away the flesh and either dropping the seed without dispersing it or gnawing the seed and therefore destroying it.

I could go on about the evils of rats, particularly black rats, but a more pressing point is what we should do about them. The good news is that possum and stoat control operations both kill rats. Rats eat and are killed by the poison baits used for possum control, and the traps used for stoat control also trap and kill rats. The bad news is that these control programmes don’t cover the whole country. They certainly don’t include the No. 1 Line track.

When I returned over an hour later, past the tree where I’d photographed the weta, she’d gone. I hoped she’d climbed higher into the canopy where she might be harder for a rat to find. The very fact she’d survived and grown to adulthood comforted me. Rats might have a relatively low status in the public consciousness compared to possums and stoats, but weta are ingrained in the national psyche — so much so that the company responsible for the remarkable special effects in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films named itself after these charismatic insects — and the thought that weta might become rare around here appalled me. More than that, though, I’d formed an attachment to this particular weta, who had been so cooperative, calmly sitting there while I photographed her. I hadn’t seen a big beautiful weta like this for a long time. She was the only one I saw last night (although I heard a couple more), and I couldn’t bear to think she was dog tucker.

Or, more accurately, rat tucker.

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Notes: 
1. Strictly, 'weta' should have a macron over both vowels, thus: 'wētā'. The word without macrons has an entirely different meaning, but in practice you're unlikely to be misunderstood.

Photos:
1. Last night's weta: Hemideina crassidens, the Wellington tree weta. The long thing that looks like a sting is her ovipositor—the apparatus she uses to deposit her eggs.
2. ... And this is last night's Rattus rattus. Note the very long tail and large ears, characteristics distinguishing it from the Brown rat, R. norvegicus. You can see a larger version of the photograph on The Ruins of the Moment.

Reference:
Wotton, D. M., & Kelly, D. (2012). Do larger frugivores move seeds further? Body size, seed dispersal distance, and a case study of a large, sedentary pigeon. Journal of Biogeography, 39(11), 1973–1983. doi: 10.1111/jbi.12000

Photos and original text © 2015 Pete McGregor

The urge to collect

'...he was also in the grip of an urge that gained a stronger hold on him with every day: it was the collector's disease, that unsleeping impulse to acquire, to classify, to create a microcosm where order and pattern can be shored up against the world.'

 — Nicolas Rothwell

In Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll, one of the hemulens first appears in a melancholy, almost distraught state. When Moomintroll questions him, the hemulen reveals the cause of his despair: an obsessive stamp collector, he has finally completed his collection. He now has every stamp, every error; nothing remains for him to collect. Moomintroll begins to understand.

‘You aren’t a collector any more,’ he says, ‘you’re only an owner, and that isn’t nearly so much fun.’

As a very small boy, I too collected stamps. Briefly and badly, I admit, but I shared the hemulen’s urge to collect. I soon lost interest in stamps but not in collecting; that impulse took decades to dissipate. For much of my life I was possessed—and I use the word deliberately—by that urge, which manifested most obviously in the accumulation of a collection of pinned, pickled and labelled insects that to the best of my knowledge remained for some years the most extensive and interesting insect collection submitted for the fourth year entomology paper at Canterbury University. Still, compared to professional research collections like those of the university's zoology department or the New Zealand Arthropod Collection, my dead, preserved insects barely registered [2].

Somehow I eventually lost the need to own boxes of dead insects. Perhaps getting a job that came already supplied with a large—by my standard—insect collection meant most of the insects I encountered alive were already represented by dead cousins in the collection, so adding another to the killing jar and eventually to a wooden box seemed pointless (mostly, it is, although the study of variation within a species remains important for distinguishing species). Eventually the loss of the urge to collect developed into a mild aversion. My taste for collecting not just insects but most other things has become exhausted, or, perhaps more accurately, I have become exhausted by the accumulation of things and stuff. I now have more than enough things and stuff and get more satisfaction from getting rid of things and stuff than from accumulating more.

I wonder about photographs, though. I wonder in particular about photographs of insects. Having recently discovered the NatureWatch web site and at roughly the same time settled on an excellent system for macro photography, I’m getting a great deal of satisfaction from posting observations of insects and plants, thereby slowly building a record of interesting things around the house, up No. 1 Line, and in the Ruahine. Could this be a way of satisfying that urge to collect? I thought that was long gone, but maybe it was just dormant.

...

Collecting photographs, though, seems harmless. Who could object? What harm is being done? Certainly none to the subjects—the spiders and flies and beetles and little flowers and other things so easily harmed by other, even temporary, forms of capture [3].

There, though—that word: ‘capture’. At the risk of disclosing my crankiness, I’ll admit that the word ’capture’, along with an increasing number of other too-often thoughtlessly used words, bugs me. Look at the photoforums and you’ll see the comments infested with statements like ‘Great capture!’ or its twin, ‘Great catch!’ The subject hasn’t been photographed; it’s been captured, ensnared, possessed. My aversion to this has become so unreasonable I don't even like to say I 'took a photograph', preferring instead to say 'I photographed'.

'Nit-picking,' you say. 'Semantics—"capture", "catch": they're just words.'

No, they aren’t. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a collector’s attitude. I’ll stress that I accept no harm is being done to the subject, unless of course the photographer is one of those morally suspect or possibly well-meaning but ethically unaware individuals who breaks branches off instead of tying them out of the way, or who persists in trying to get closer to a bird that’s clearly anxious. In general, though, most subjects will have no awareness that they're being photographed. Many won’t even have what we could reasonably consider ‘awareness’ of any sort; for example, a little gentian flowering on the side of the No. 1 Line track responds to its environment in only the most basic of ways. When did you last hear a plant exclaim ‘Eek! A photographer!’ and close its petals over its pistils?

If any harm is being done, therefore, the most obvious recipient of that harm is the photographer, the collector of photographs.  Mostly, no harm will be done even to him (or her). Another possibility is that those who view the photographs might in some way be harmed. The obvious way this might come about is through inurement: after repeated viewing of photographs that at first kindled wonder and awe, the viewer might lose not just that ability to be moved, but the empathy that accompanies it. This, however, seems to draw a long bow; if it's true at all, I doubt it's common enough and important enough to agonise over. Feel free to disagree.

...

Moomintroll was right when he said owning isn’t nearly as much fun as collecting. What he didn’t say was why it’s not as much fun. That’s a much bigger question, though; it has many answers and Moomintroll might never have carried on with his adventures if he’d stopped to philosophise about the consequences of owning compared to collecting [4]. However, as far as I can work out, the main reasons owning isn’t as much fun as collecting are twofold. First, the owner has the responsibility of looking after the collection, and that can lead to the gnawing fear that something dreadful might happen to the collection — theft, fire, pestilence, the depredations of small children, and so on. Second, an owner is no longer creating anything, at least in any significant sense. That second reason rings most true for me because the act of creating something is the primary way a life attains meaning [5].

Perhaps this, then, explains why I continue to add to these collections of words and photographs: because I'm driven not by the desire to amass, but by the desire to create.

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Notes:
1. The introductory quotation is from page 11 of The Red Highway, Collingwood, Australia: Blank Inc., (2010). ISBN 9781863954938.

2. If the hemulen had chosen insects rather than stamps, he could have spent his entire life collecting with no risk whatsoever of completing his collection. Even specialising in beetles, the most numerous organisms on earth in terms of species, would have left his collection incomplete and him permanently happy.

3. Unless you believe, like Dr Brett Mills, that animals are aware enough to understand the concept of privacy.

4. That’s a job for the Muskrat who, if his whiskers have anything to do with it, might be a cousin of Nietzsche (although this has been disputed and a reasonable claim advanced that the Muskrat was modelled on arch-pessimist Schopenhauer). The Muskrat, however, would undoubtedly have considered collecting to be useless—possibly even as useless as owning anything.

5. Richard Taylor makes a persuasive case in support of this claim.

Photos: 

1. Copper butterfly on the No. 1 Line track, southern Ruahine Range, January 2014

2. Crane fly at the top of the No. 1 Line track, southern Ruahine Range, January 2014

3. Fungus gnat on Agrocybe parastica fungus, Pohangina Valley, late February 2014

4. Native gentian near the summit of Tunupo, southern Ruahine Range, mid February 2014

Photos and original text © 2014 Pete McGregor

The functionally invisible world

This is a female booklouse. Booklice aren't lice (although the parasitic lice probably evolved from one of the groups of booklice) and they don't eat books (although some species are associated with them and may nibble the paste in book bindings). They belong to an order of insects called Psocodea [1], which includes 'booklice' (in the narrow sense), 'barklice', and the parasitic lice. The female in the photograph is one of New Zealand's native barklice but that term is far from entirely accurate too, because they're found in far more habitats than on bark. I found her on a lichen-festooned fence batten, where she seemed to be doing her best to avoid the attentions of a male who was displaying vigorously at her.

Many years ago, this unmistakable species was included in the genus Myopsocus. Later, it was transferred to the horribly-named genus Phlotodes (which sounds to me like something you might find honked into a handkerchief); it stayed in that genus for a few years before being shifted back to Myopsocus. Now, apparently, someone has moved it to the genus Nimbopsocus, a name roughly ten times longer than its owner even without the part that identifies the species: australis.

What often strikes me about these kinds of tiny creatures is the way they're unknown to most people. I'd be amazed if the number of New Zealanders who'd ever noticed Nimbopsocus australis [2] got beyond double figures. This species is fairly easy to find: just look closely at anything with a good growth of lichen and eventually you're likely to see either the adults or the herds of nymphs (which cluster in mobs like tiny wildebeest, grazing on algae, fungi and lichen). But who bothers to look? A few oddballs like me; weirdos who get more delight out of peering at lichen-encrusted fence battens and stockyard railings than polishing their Holdens; eccentrics who'd rather know about barklice than Bathhurst. They (these barklice, not me) are beautiful to look at, and the antics of the males when displaying to the females are hilarious (but the same is often true of us, although I've yet to see some bloke doubled over with his head on the ground, waving his arms in the air behind his back, and rocking from side to side).

They're not just beautiful, though: they're fascinating too. Think about everything needed to allow an insect's tiny body to be called 'alive' — the complexity of that astonishing number of structures and processes packed into something so small we overlook it unless it stings us or drowns in our soup. Despite our remarkable advances in engineering, an insect remains utterly beyond our ability to construct; compared to the little barklouse in this photograph, a V8 Supercar is about as complex as a brick.

In short, they're worth watching and thinking about (although I'm unlikely to have convinced the petrolheads [3] I've just antagonised). Yet hardly anyone does watch them — not just barklice, but most of the thousands of species of tiny animals that surround us every day. We don't even see them. They're out there in plain view, but functionally they're invisible.

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Notes: 
1. Psocodea is sometimes considered a superorder comprising the order Psocoptera ('booklice' and 'barklice') and the order Phthiraptera ( parasitic lice).
2. More photographs in this NZ NatureWatch entry.
3. I'm using 'petrolhead' in the sense of definition no. 2 in the wiktionary entry.

Photos and original text © 2014 Pete McGregor