A Question of Balance Tuesday 18 July 2017
Ground Breaking News: The big news in the frog world is that five more species of frog have been found and described in Australia, one on the east coast of NSW in areas that are highly populated. The species has been named Mahony’s toadlet in honour of Professor Michael Mahony from the University of Newcastle. It is a species of red-groined toadlets. They are only 20mm long and have bright orange or red coloured slashes in the concealed parts of their groins and legs. Mahony’s toadlet has a wonderful pattern of black and white spots on its belly.
The first one of the new species was found was in 2007 by Simon Clulow in deep, vast sand beds north of Newcastle. The east coast of Australia was subject to massive changes in sea levels over the last half a million years. In some places massive amounts of sand had been deposited by the ocean and when the water levels went down what was left behind were towering dunes such as those at Stockton near Newcastle.
Deep within these is where Mahony’s Toadlet lives. They lay their eggs where the water seeps out of the bottom of the sand mass. The eggs are encapsulated and the tadpoles exist in these tiny little puddles. The toadlets dig out of the sand when they need to find food.
Unfortunately urbanisation causes changes in groundwater and surface water flow and paving creates dry areas and sends water in different directions. Mahony’s toadlet was instantly enlisted as an endangered species as its habitat is under threat.
The scourge of the sea: plastics: Plastics are a part of our everyday lives. From the milk in our coffee in the morning to the cap on the tube of toothpaste used to clean our teeth we use vast quantities of materials made of hard plastic. Most of the plastics we use end up in our oceans, where they become a deadly menace to sea birds. There is not a square kilometre of ocean that does not have plastic and, as they break up, they bleach white, resembling the kinds of food that sea birds eat.
This is not a new finding. A decade ago Nicholas Carlile described cases even on remote locations far from civilisation. Midway Island, 3,000 kilometres from any other land mass was knee-deep in plastic and even Heard Island in the sub Atlantic had plastic. These examples reported in the media were seen as a warning wake up call but it seems from current reports of island plastic pollution in 2017, that the alarm bells snooze button was activated rather than behavioural change. From the archives, Nicholas reports what could indeed be mistaken for the present day situation.
