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A polished shell of Pāua Abalone (Haliotis iris)
The blackfoot paua (Haliotis iris) is a species of abalone found in the cool coastal waters around New Zealand (and nearby islands such as Stewart Island and the Chatham Islands). Coincidentally, the word “Haliotis” derives from Ancient Greek and means sea ear—because abalones superficially resemble human ears. Abalones are large marine gastropods (sea snails) which have long been prized by humans for having delicious meat and gorgeous shells. The blackfoot paua is no exception—not only is it fished for its flesh, but the Māori people, who are indigenous to New Zealand, esteem it as a treasure to be used in culturally significant works of art. To quote thefeaturedcreature.com, “Typically, the blackfoot abalone is used in Māori carvings to represent eyes; these eyes are associated with the stars or whetū, the symbolic eyes of ancestors that gaze down from the night sky.”
Iwi Le Comte Maori Carving with mount (2011, Totara wood and Paua shell)
The shells of blackfoot paua are not naturally iridescent: craft workers expend a great deal of energy grinding away the inconspicuous neutral colored exterior so that the brilliant whirls and swirling colors of the nacre are revealed. In addition to its lovely shell and tasty flesh the blackfoot paua can also produce scintillating blue-green pearls which are known as blue eyris pearls.
Blue Eyris Pearls next to a polished Pāua abalone shell
Like the giant triton, the blackfoot paua is suffering for its beauty. New Zealand has many sensible regulations to prohibit overfishing the paua: divers must free dive for the mollusks, and fisherfolk can only collect a limited number of specimens of a certain size. Unfortunately even a first-world nation only has so many resources to devote to conservation, and marine experts expect that the blackfoot paua is suffering from overharvest. Hopefully humankind can find a way to balance the demands of traditional carving with the needs of conservation: Māori carving is very beautiful, but so too are the living shellfish…
Maori wood carving of Tawhiri, god of storms (at the Arataki Visitor Centre, Auckland, New Zealand)
Dactylanthus taylorii
In grade school biology class we learned that plants use photosynthesis to manufacture their own food from light, water, and air. In almost every familiar ecosystem, the plants are somewhere down there at the bottom, dutifully turning out food for every herbivore (and thereby ultimately for everything). It makes the green kingdom seems so virtuous. The plants I wrote about this week as “underworld plants” are no exception–they provide us with nutrition, beauty, drugs, a way to get rid of lackluster emperors, even natural-looking color for unusually pallid shrimps! And it all comes from air, water, and sun.
However the grade school biology explanation does not provide a full picture. There are indeed plants out there that do not pull their full weight. Like a big dirty city, the plant kingdom has its own underworld filled with creepers and stranglers and suckers—and at the very bottom there are outright parasites. Some plants do not “make their own food” and indeed do not contain chlorophyll at all. They leach nourishment out of other vegetation. One of the strangest and darkest of these parasitic plants is Dactylanthus taylorii, the Hades flower, which comes from the forest undergrowth of New Zealand. Naming it after Hades might be unduly generous—the plant should probably be called the cancer flower.
Dactylanthus taylorii: close-up of male flowers (Photo by Helen Jonas)
Dactylanthus taylorii is the only species in the genus Dactylanthus and the taxonomical relationships of that family to other plants are anything but clear. The Hades plant grows on the roots of various indigenous trees. It has not roots and no leaves but is connected to its host via a stem. The tree tissue where this stem attaches to the host becomes horribly distorted into a weird burl-like structure. Plants can be male or female and they are most often pollinated by the lesser short-tailed bat, (Mystacina tuberculata) (a strange and evocative creature which the native Maori call by the name of “Pekapeka-tou-poto”). The flowers produce a nectar which smells like mammalian sweat–which apparently attracts the bats which then carry pollen between male and female plants.
The Lesser Short-tailed Bat pollinating Dactylanthus taylorii
Like many parasites, the Hades flower is cryptic—it makes itself difficult to find. Because of this characteristic, there are aspects of the flower’s life and lineage which remain unknown. However the modern world does not seem to suit Dactylanthus taylorii : botanists estimate there are only a few thousand left in the wild. The plant’s decline is exacerbated by the fact that collector’s value the freaky wooden excrescences which they create. In the future the hades flower may indeed exist only in the hereafter.
To borrow a page from the timeless style of Sesame Street, this week Ferrebeekeeper is brought to you by the Roman letter Q. Each post will concern a topic which begins with that rare letter. So quench your thirst with quinine water and wrap up in a quaint quilt. There is a reason that the letter Q is worth 10 points in scrabble but I think we can find 5 relevant topics that are not too quixotic (also I’m going to stop using extra q words for effect immediately—please don’t stop reading).
A Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus)
For the first q-themed post, we must travel to the ancient arid continent of Australia. For reasons of geology and tectonics, Australia has been a wallflower in the great continental ballet and has been isolated for the last 40 million years. Thanks to this geographic seclusion, the animals of Australia are much different than the creatures which flourish elsewhere, and Austalia’s mammals are dominated by marsupials like the kangaroos, the wombats, the koalas, and the bandicoots. All of those creatures are herbivores, but there are insectivorous marsupials (like the numbat) and there are marsupial carnivores which prey on the others. Some of the larger orders of marsupial predators have died off as Australia dried out, but a major order of predators remain–the catlike quolls.
Quolls (genus Dasyurus) are solitary, nocturnal mammals which seek shelter in their burrows and dens by day and hunt birds, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals at night. They are agile all-terrain creatures capable of swiftly moving across the forest floor or through the forest canopy. Quolls kill their prey with a bite to the neck where it joins the head. In addition to being predators, they also scavenge for carrion and they can sometimes be found by picnic areas and rubbish dumps. There are six species of quolls which range in size from 350 grams (12 ounces) to 3.5 kilograms (8 pounds). Four species are located across the Australian mainland while one species inhabits New Zealand. One outlier species, the Bronze Quoll (Dasyurus Spartacus) lives in the savannah of New Guinea. The animals all share a characteristic spotted fur coat and a similar lifestyle. The closest relatives of quolls are the formidable Tasmanian devils (the largest extant marsupial carnivores) and the superficially weasel-like mulgaras.
Unfortunately, quolls are not doing well. Feral cats, dogs, and foxes are much more deft predators and are outcompeting the quolls or eating them outright (although the quolls do get some free meals from the invasive wave of rabbits and rats which have swept Australia). Additionally the quolls are falling victim to an even stranger invasive species. The Cane Toad (Bufo marinus) is a toxic South American toad which was brought to Australia in order to control agricultural pests. The toads secrete a powerful toxin which is potent enough to kill a human (some people ingest cane toad secretions in order to experience the hallucinogenic effects). Cane toads resemble some of the natural amphibian prey species of quolls and the spotted predators eat them voraciously—only to fall sick and die. In order to save the unlucky quolls, a project is afoot to train the predators not to eat cane toads. Wildlife researchers have been dropping small sausages made of cane toad from airplane in quoll habitats. It is hoped that quolls will eat the sausages and become violently sick (but not fatally so). Having had a miserable bad trip, the quolls will then presumably forbear from eating further cane toad flesh.
The Cane Toad (Bufo marinus)
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