#julimar

Look at those peets, Lookit them.

As it happens, less than an hour before I took these photos, somebody at the Bioblitz asked me where they could find Velvet Worms, and I had to tell 'somewhere less dry than Julimar', which I felt was good advice - even with the rain that weekend, nearly every inch of ground was bare gravel, with the exception of the small piles of bark litter around the bases of the Wandoo eucalypts. Hardly good habitat for a Phylum that can dry out easily.

And then @purrdence was poking around one of those bark piles and found this.

Occiperipatoides gilesii also comes in blue-black, is found on the Swan Coastal Plain and adjacents areas on the Darling Escarpment, and is one of four species of velvet worm found in this corner of the country. Three of those used be considered one species -  Occiperipatoides occidentalis - but are now considered their own genus, Kumbadjena. Kumbadjena is derived from Noongar (or Nyungar) words referring to the southwest region of Western Australia where these are found. Occiperipatoides means 'Western-Peripatus-like'. Peripatus itself is the quitessential velvet worm, and means 'walking about'. Which they do. On adorable peets.

Like other Velvet Worms, Occiperipatoides is a predator, hunting down other invertebrates with its sensory tentacles, and immobilising them with glue sprayed from nozzles in their face. The glue glands are large, running half the length of the body, but it can still take several weeks to refill them. The prey is then devoured with curved jaws deep in oral cavity. Some velvet worm species are social, and hunt as a pack, with dominant females getting to feed first.

Reproductive anatomy and behaviour is complex. Some have bladed structures - on the face, again - that they appear to use to place sperm packets in the female's genital slit she she holds him in place, and others deposit semen on her skin. Immune cells in her blood then gather underneath the sperm packet, and dissolve the skin and spermatophore integument between them and the sperm cells, whereupon the sperm swims into her body and starts looking for the eggs. Some velvet worms give birth to live young (a few even have a placenta!), and some are known to stand gaurd over their offspring.

Predators of velvet worms include other invertebrate predators, birds, and Hemprich's coral snake Micrurus hemprichii of South America, which apparently has velvet worms as a major part of its diet.

Being soft-bodied, velvet worms rarely fossilised well, but it seems they are descendents of the marine Lobopods, such as Aysheaia and the famous Hallucigenia of the Cambrian-age Burgess Shale. It's unclear when they moved onto the land, but it was most likely during the Ordovician or Silurian.

Western Grey Kangaroos - Macropus Fuliginosus

Julimar, Western Australia

'Yellow-horn'.

Hornworts are a Division of non-vascular land plants with an elongated horn-like diploid sporophyte at some points of the year, and a flattened green gametophyte stage that only contains one copy of the genome. Liverworts and mosses are similarly dominated by the gametophyte stage. Spores in this genus are yellow - hence the name.

Hornworts may be found worldwide, usually in damp or humid areas. Some are weedy in gardens and fields, and large tropical and sub-tropical species of Dendroceros may grow as epiphytes. Uniquely among land plants, some hornworts have an organelle and biochemistry that can concentrate CO2 to over 50 times atmospheric levels. Many have slime-filled cavities that are colonised by nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria like Nostoc.

The total number of species is uncertain - more than 300 names have been published, but the number of actually valid taxa may be a third of that.

One of Australia's stick-insect-like pollen-and-nectar-feeding katydids. Very hairy for a katydid. They have long narrow heads for sticking deep into flowers.

This one is still a baby - adults have wings that they keep furled up tight, at an angle away from the body.

photo by Donald Hobern.

One last species from Julimar that I somehow missed discussing earlier - one of the Buckyball Stinkhorns.

Both species in the genus are native to Australia, and unfold from an egg-like, slime-filled fruiting body, and spread their spores with the aid of flies. Second photo shows an egg that has just split open.

I. gracile is native to Australia, may have been introduced to Asia, China, India, Japan, and Korea, and has definitely been introduced to England, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula.

Small wood-rotting fungi common in the SE of Australia, but less so in the SW.

The family is waiting for a major revision, however - DNA evidence has shown that morphology is not a good indicator of taxonomic relationships. As of 2022, only the recently described genus Dendrodacrys is monophyletic.

AKA Coastal burrowing scorpion or black sand scorpion.

Originally described in 1861 by German naturalist and explorer Wilhelm Karl Hartwich ( or Hartwig ) Peters. It's along the coast of South Australia from Adelaide westwards to Perth, in coastal dunes as well as in sandy soils further inland at this end of its range. Their spiral burrows are about 1m deep, and they can live for at least 12 years.

A large scorpion, but not considered dangerous - stings may cause localised swelling, pain, and numbness, but they're nothing compared to the Deathstalker and Southern Mankiller scorpions from other parts of the world.