Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

sorry, "A Cook's Tour" refers to the way Captain James Cook stopped all over the place for a quick look, hence a book with a glimpse of many animals but not a huge amount of detail on each type

Love the way an Aussie saying pops up occasionally and then the quick explanation coz not all forumers understand - suppose it is the same in all countries, here is a funny aimed at Captain Cook and the 1st settlers

Similar thing apparantly happened to the Spanish in Mexico ...

no where near the quality of aquamad's photos, but these guys are daily visitors to our top up drums. There are usually up to about 30 on each drum sucking up our water

They probably don't want to do that with your fishtank, J!

Cabbage white butterfly...sorry, I didn't get a shot of the caterpiller, but I chucked it in a container to pupate, and remembered to check a couple of weeks later...result, one empty cocoon, one dead butterfly, one billion less little caterpillers and very slightly hungrier fish.

Next in the box goes a spider egg sac...I need to keep an eye on this one because I think it might be full of redbacks. Notice that it's pink in the middle, and obviously smaller than a dog-chewed nicad (eep).

Cadmium's not very harmful is it?
The dogs have systematically destroyed monya's nice little solar lights, each of which held 2 aa nicads. They are now scattered around the yard.

Riding home from work last night, I was surprised to see what looked like a colourful crab scuttling across the road. At 20odd km of urban sprawl from the coast, I thought this was unlikely. On closer inspection it was a massive wasp (hornet I think) dragging a full grown (well over 100mm legspan) huntsman spider, still twitching.
It was dusk, and the spiders are nocturnal, so the wasp must have either found it hiding during the day and paralysed it, or it had caught it the night before and had spent all day trying to figure out how to get it home.

By the time I pulled out the cam it had dragged the spider to the gutter, and then had to go about 2m down the road to find a bit of kerb low enough to pull the spider up. Everytime a car went past, the wasp flew off and panicked for a while (almost as much as I did, standing a couple of metres away) before going back to the task.

Once it got it up the kerb, it was across the footpath and into someone's backyard bushes and out of sight very quickly.

I feel a bit privileged to have seen it. Very impressive, and that spider will make great baby wasp food!

That is precious. I stopped on the side of the freeway today to photograph an eagle above. But he had flown too far by the time I got organised. It would have been a great shot.

Nice shots Steem, thanks for sharing

Found myself another unknown bug yesterday - sitting on the leaf of the eggplant... cant find any info on it Seemed to just be resting - no signs of eggs laid or leaves eaten nearby...

Another visitor to the system... zooted all over the place....

That is f'ing excellent. You should have got a video. Would have been a you tube hit.

another thread on insects has been started... look at viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6469&p=209003#p209003

I managed to find a couple of these ones this morn.... not happy