When small is beautiful | Alice Springs News

By MIKE GILLAM

More frequently than I’d care to admit, I go out bush looking for specific wildlife behaviour and in the process stumble onto quarry of greater significance.

On this occasion, in the company of Linguist and Musicologist Myfany Turpin, we travelled to Artarre (Tara) Community 243 km north of Alice Springs. Artarre, she advises, is the Kaytetye word for emu tail feathers.

Over thirty years, Myf has documented traditional knowledge culminating in the production of numerous research papers, a learners guide and a dictionary of the Kaytetye language.

While Professor Turpin of the University of Sydney specialises in ethnomusicology she has also produced various educational posters of plants and animals. This is one of the great cultural delights of living in Alice Springs, where I frequently find myself in the company of passionate desert specialists, from fire ecologists to researchers like Myf.

My colleague wanted photographs of desert crabs revealed to her by the inquisitive children of Artarre (Tara) for a forthcoming Kaytetye plant and animal book. Following heavy rains, watercourses were running and conditions seemed perfect.

I jumped at the chance to improve on my old photographs of Austrothelphusa transversa, the inland freshwater crabs that persist for years in burrows emerging during rainfall and flooding events to breed and lay eggs.

We set out early from Alice Springs and reaching Aileron, conversation naturally turned to the occasional leafy clumps of Psydrax latifolia, (native currant) or Ahakeye, a vibrant green shrub with bunches of pale star shaped flowers. Ahakeye, pronounced Argy, is a rainforest relict that shelters in the dun coloured mulga, mostly north of the frost line.

Crab at Taylor Creek.

More stunted individuals occur sporadically in the high range country around Alice Springs although there are also rich lowland colonies NNW of Watarrka, thriving in the protective embrace of mulga shrubland and somehow impervious to frost. Sharing the Kaytetye name, this bush food and caterpillar food plant is known by Arrernte people also, as Ahakeye.

I mentioned my frustrating search for the Argy hawkmoth caterpillar, Cephonodes kingii, one of only two species of this culturally important group that had eluded me over several decades.

In the ensuing conversation, one that could surely only take place in Centralia, Myf confirmed her own fruitless search for the same caterpillar, which has a perplexing Kaytetye name and remained to be taxonomically confirmed.

We laughed at the slightly absurd intersection of our interests and sometime later agreed to pause and check some magnificent Argy at the road side, something I have done many, many times before.

I know to look very closely for dung and the early instars and lo and behold, after perhaps 10 minutes I found several caterpillars measuring only a few millimetres in length. The conspicuous tail-spine confirmed that these were indeed hawkmoths, the elusive Argy caterpillar! Intending to grow up larva, pupa and moth, we placed caterpillars into a plastic drum with a supply of fresh Argy leaves and continued our journey in high spirits.

North east of Ti tree we passed through low stony plateaux dissected by picturesque Eucalypt lined creeks and featuring semi-permanent waterholes. Taylor Creek, was still flowing in places and wherever buffel grass was absent riparian plant life proliferated.

Immersed in the rolling chatter of budgerigars and strident cries of cockatiels we arrived at the small community of Artarre (Tara) situated in the watershed of the Davenport Ranges.

I was immediately distracted from the purpose of our visit by a young man wielding a whipper snipper against a dense tide of still green buffel grass growing amongst trees in a public area.

When I asked if he was working for the Community Council he shook his head and I gathered that the Shire was comprehensively "missing in action": “Just doing it. I’m worried for snakes and the kids running through the grass”. I mentioned fire risk and the waist high buffel grass surrounding departmental housing? He agreed, “when it gets dry.”

Several hours later we were waist deep in water with a bunch of local kids, keen to direct our quest for (Ikarle) desert crabs. While I wasted time searching intently beneath overhanging banks for burrows and other clues the locals simply plunged into the waterhole. Within a few minutes of feeling the bottom with their feet and duck-diving on contact to catch the active crabs, we were ready to take photographs. Humbled by children, not for the first time or the last. The second highlight of a perfect day.

Given the huge agricultural interest in lowering water tables in nearby Singleton, I decided we’d better lodge a crab specimen, the first to my knowledge from this catchment, with the NT Museums collection.

On the way back to town we stopped at several stands of Argy and found more caterpillars, retaining some larger larvae that had acquired their full livery of colours and pattern. Unlike the highly polymorphic Yeperenye caterpillars of Mparntwe, the larva of this hawkmoth appeared much less variable and more restrained in design.

Cephonodes kingii moth.

At home I sustained the Argy cuttings in containers of rainwater and the caterpillars thrived. A week later I drove up to Aileron and refreshed the supply of food plants. The caterpillars kept eating for almost two weeks whereupon all had disappeared into the thick layers of dried leaves on the bottom of the containers to pupate.

Several weeks later the first moth emerged and I was able to photograph this amazing diurnal flying insect with its distinctive transparent wing panels. Evidently these hawkmoths shed the pigmented scales covering their wings soon after taking to the air and it seems likely their transparency attribute makes the moth less visible to predators.

Photographs secured, I drove back up the road to place the remaining pupa beneath a layer of cool leaf litter across a number of sites. By now the Argy were flowering and I watched as my liberated moth evaded the dense matrix of treacherous spider webs stretched between mulgas. I imagine night flying moths would experience even greater difficulty avoiding these webs of the golden orb weaving spider.

The very last Centralian hawkmoth species I’d like to see has been recorded from the George Gill Range and Kata Tjuta, to the south west of Alice Springs. Here entomologists successfully collected the caterpillars, from within the foliage of Ptilotus obovatus, a small flowering mulla mulla and a popular garden plant in Alice Springs. This new species of hawkmoth was recently named Coenotes arida.