WINTER 2025

 WINTER 2025

Brrrrrrr! It sure has been cold here on the estate. Still beautiful, warm, clear, blue-sky days, but freezing in the mornings! Actually, not always warm with blue skies in the day, we had quite a few cold fronts move through that brought cloud during the winter.

In fact, we had quite a significant winter rainfall on the weekend of the 22nd of July, smack in the middle of winter, where we had a good ten millimetres of rain. Cold, but not a bad thing, because, even if plants are in a dormant stage, they will still drink when water is available, so this topped up water storage for our green friends.

As mentioned in Don's newsletter, the annual rainfall this season has been lower than normal, with an average of 830mm precipitation falling over the estate, where our average since 2010 is 920mm.

This year saw a little more preparation before the dry season to minimise the chances of a runaway fire like the two we had to fight at the end of the last dry season: Besides more thorough fire breaks, I burned a bit more last season than previously, so the fuel load is not as high as it has been, which decreases the chances of runaway fires as the dry season progresses

In the picture above, you can see the bland, smoky atmosphere that dominates our dry winters spiced up by this absolutely beautiful Cliff Aloe plant, Aloe arborescens, with its multiple blooms high above the estate almost on the tippy top of Little Joker Koppie.

Below is a gallery of a few of the things I encountered over the winter this year:

Oooh, hot lips!!! 

This is the spore-bearing apothecia of Lipstick Powderhorn, Cladonia macilienta, a type of squamulose lichen that is completely cosmopolitan, which means that it occurs everywhere. In this case in every continent, although not yet found on Antarctica but expected to occur there. 

The structure of the lichen is that of tightly packed, centimetre tall, pointed structures that develop these bright red apothecia (the structure that produces the reproductive spores) on the tips when it is time to reproduce. The lichen lives on rotting wood, often together with mosses, in the dark undergrowth in our moist forests. Check my blog of August 2020 for a photo of the lichen as a whole.

It is one of those organisms that is sensitive to atmospheric pollution, so it can be used as a bioindicator for air quality, like Old Man's Beard lichen, which is also found on the estate, especially at higher altitudes.

 Also, it has been found to produce a metabolite called biruloquinone which is a substance that effectively prevents neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Because of this breakthrough, a mass liquid culture system for the production of biruloquinone has been established in South Korea. 

The fungus is also rich in carbohydrates and its close relative, Reindeer Cup Lichen, Cladonia rangifera, grows in such abundance in the arctic circle that it is the staple pasture for Reindeer, Moose, Caribou and Musk Oxen in the wintertime where these animals access it by digging holes into the snow!

Makes me think of Marilyn Monroe....

Peeter's Smooth Ringbum Ant, Streblognathus peetersii, carrying, not dragging, a large Hawkmoth caterpillar. If I had a very sensitive scale, I would love to have weighed the caterpillar and then the ant and calculated the difference.

How on earth do they manage to lift such heavy weights? Well, they have a few physical attributes that contribute to this amazing ability.

First, is the exoskeleton. It is found in (on?) all insects, but those that require this sort of lifting strength have had their exoskeleton modified by the addition of sclerotin, which makes it much more rigid, creating a perfect anchor for the muscles to use as leverage. 

And secondly, muscle strength is determined by the size of the muscle cross-section, and their muscles are a lot bigger in cross-section in ratio to the muscles found in vertebrates, making them an awful lot stronger.

Anyway, this, together with its close relative from the Karoo (S. aethiopicus) is Africa's largest ant species, reaching a length of twenty millimetres. I have previously featured these ants in my blogs, but under the latter's name. Streblognathus was always regarded as a monotypic genus (genus with only a single species), until recently, when that species was separated from the eastern grassland species, S. peetersi, which occurs here on the estate, by a few morphological differences. 

These ants belong to the most primitive of the ant sub-families, the Ponerinae. Most ponerines live in very small colonies from a dozen individuals to a thousand or so. The notorious Matabele ant from the lowveld is an example of the latter. They live in colonies numbering more than a thousand individuals. S. aethiopicus live in colonies with an average size of thirty-five individuals, while our Peeter's Smooth Ringbum ant lives in colonies with an average of one hundred workers. 

These ant colonies are different to most others in that they do not have a queen but instead a dominant worker that is fertile. Remember, in all ants the workers are female but, in this case, the one that is stress-free will have certain physiological processes triggered that enable her to conceive. So, to remain the only one that is stress-free, she bullies her fellow workers constantly, never allowing their stress levels to drop to the point that they would become fertile too. 

A cold and crazy system, but it works. In fact, African Wild Dogs are one of the mammal species that do a similar thing. 

This poor stunned juvenile African Goshawk, Aerospiza tachiro, had no choice in allowing me to photograph it while it was trying to recover from its head-on collision with my office window. Fortunately, after a few minutes it managed to fly away.

It was most likely hatched and raised in a nest in the pine forest beside "The Croft's" (unit 19), that being one of the main reasons why that forest has not been cut down yet.

Unlike most other raptors, though, the monogamous breeding pair do not usually use the same nest over and over again but build a new one nearby. This pair, I believe, must have used the same nest again a few times because they have been nesting there for more than a decade and they would have run out of forest if they didn't use it again.

This youngster (I think a male because he was quite small, and the females are much bigger than the males) has been fully fledged for more than a month, because they do not leave the area of the nest tree for at least that long before venturing further away. After a maximum of three months they are self-sufficient and will go their own way.

When a male and female bond and enter courtship, the male will catch a prey item and deposit it on a branch for the female as a gift. If she is willing, she will alight on the given branch and begin her meal. He then comes down from above her and mates with her while she is eating.

They then choose a tree to nest in and then establish a territory around it. Bothe sexes advertise this territory by flying above it, wing-snapping and calling a soft "CHIT-CHIT-CHIT" sound while in flight. Once the territory is well established, both sexes proceed to build a nest on a lateral branch, high up in a big tree by springtime.

The female then lays two to four (usually two) eggs in the nest and incubates them for about five weeks while the male actively supports her with food that he brings for her. The nesting period lasts up to six weeks with both parents sharing nesting and feeding duties before the chicks are fledged and ready to take their first ever flight.

Their main prey item is birds, ranging in size from the tiny Bronze Mannikin to the much larger francolins and spurfowls. The hunting strategy is to sit on a perch and wait for a bird to fly (or walk) past, when the Goshawk actively pursues it until it catches it.

These lovely birds are most commonly seen by us while walking on the river paths, because they like to fly along the river paths only a few meters above the ground, often almost colliding with an unwary human. 

What a stunning little ball of flowers, of all ages, belonging to a scrambling shrubby creeping plant called a Warty Grape, Rhoicissus tridentata, from the grape family.

The Warty Grape is very common on the estate, but only smaller ones are noticed because the larger ones are only noticeable by their stems because their main body is high up in the canopy of trees.

It is a useful plant for man and beast, with the flowers attracting many insects and even sunbirds; the red to black, edible albeit very sour grape-like fruits are eaten by man, other mammals and birds; the trifoliate leaves are browsed by many different antelope and the beautiful Silver-striped Hawkmoth caterpillar (see blog of September 2019 for a feature on the adult Hawkmoth, and blog of February 2021 for a feature on the caterpillar)

A more important use, though, is medicinal. Ethnobotanically, it has been used for a few ailments, but particularly to induce labour. The University of KZN did a study to validate this, and they found that treatment with methane crude extracts from the root evoked significant increases in the rate and force of uterine muscle contractions in mice. Go sangomas!

In my previous publication, I featured a group of Firefly larvae eating a Giant Land Snail. Well, this time I can show you what a wingless adult female looks like. Excuse the blurred picture, but I had to switch my flash off so that I could capture the beautiful green light that she was emitting.

It is very easy to establish that she is a wingless adult, because she has large compound eyes, whereas the larvae, as mentioned in the previous article, have small, simple eyes.

From that article, we know that all the species with wingless females belong to the single genus Lampyris, and that these are the species where a female uses her light to attract males, who will fly down to her and commence their courtship.

We also learned that in some of the species the female has the ability to change the frequency of her flashes to attract a male firefly from a different species and that, when alighting beside her, the female will quickly grab the male and eat him!

Now, the insect produces light by the process of bioluminescence, where the insect allows a chemical called luciferin to mix with an enzyme called luciferase within a cavity at the tip of the abdomen, in the presence of oxygen, so that it oxidises and a soft green light is created. The light is extinguished easily enough by stopping oxygen from entering the chamber, and lights again when the insect allows oxygen back into the chamber.

I have featured the Silver Vlei Spider in my blogs in the past. It is a very common spider found in our dark forests. This is a close relative, the African Masked Vlei spider, Eucage festiva. Unlike the Silver Vlei spider, the African Masked Vlei spider is not as common and occurs in our open grasslands.

But look at the patterning on the dorsal part of the abdomen: It looks just like an African mask that one buys from a curio shop! Exquisite!

The web is not constructed vertical to the ground like most orb weavers but at an angle of about sixty degrees, making them easy to identify. 

It is up to the male to find the female and approach her on her web to mate with her. The black widow syndrome is very apparent with this species as the female almost always eats the male after they have mated! 

The main prey of the spider are grasshoppers, and the spider constructs the web at the height that these insects normally jump, about a meter-and-a-bit off the floor. Once the grasshopper is caught up in the web, the spider approaches the prey and injects a venom into the struggling insect to subdue it. Once subdued, the spider immediately begins to chew the body of the prey, breaking it up. It then vomits an enzyme onto the chewed pieces which begin to liquidise. 

Once liquidised, the spider sucks the fluid into its mouth by pumping the stomach muscles and tiny hairs around the mouth filter out the indigestible pieces that it discards afterwards, together with the crumpled shell of the victim. This pumping stomach action is also what spreads the nutrients around the body of the spider. 

Once enough has been consumed, and the spider feels its body growing, it will return to the middle of the web and hang there upside down again. But this time its skin will split down the middle and the spider will climb out of its smaller, older skin and leave it hanging there like an old piece of clothing. Certainly, the biggest enemy to Masked Vlei spider are Spider-hunting wasps from the Pompilidae family (see blog of March 2020), who will easily locate the spider as it rests in the middle of its web. 

One of the three places where one is almost assured of spotting a Rock Hyrax is just beyond the crossing east of S7 on the Steenkamps' road. So, when I saw this Verreaux's Eagle, Aquila verreaux, while driving my Landrover near this spot, I assumed it was eating one of these little mammals. 

I stopped the big, noisy vehicle a mere four meters from the eagle, and couldn't believe that it didn't fly away. A truly magnificent raptor it is!

We have been sighting a pair of these massive raptors over the estate for the entire winter, whereas in the past, they were only sighted once or twice over a month or more. I did see them perched on rocks on a cliff face in Emoyeni property between Bulldozer Creek (unit 22) and Whiskey Creek (close to the brewery) about six weeks ago, and the larger female definitely seemed to be inspecting a nice shelf on this cliff face. Perhaps they were planning the shelf as a nest sight.

Needless to say, I have not returned to that area for fear of disturbing them if they decided to construct a nest but will go soon on a recce mission to find out. If they did decide to settle there, they would have constructed a large, untidy platform of sticks and small branches over a period of about two months on the ledge. The larger sticks are snapped off a tree with the eagles' feet while the bird is in flight (Gee, that must be quite a sight!), with the smaller picked up from the ground.

The monogamous couple usually have four or five nests in their territory which they use over and over, with the birds adding new sticks each time it is used, until the nest can be as wide as three meters and as high as four meters! If one of the sights is threatened, usually by human action, the couple will abandon it and build another elsewhere. This is what may have happened to this pair, or they are newlyweds and are establishing their first or second nests.

An average of two eggs is laid, four days apart, in the middle of winter and the hatchlings emerge eight or so weeks after laying, with the female incubating through the nights and, at least, half of the day. The male supplies food and incubates for the remainder of the days.

One chick hatches four or so days before the second and almost always kills the younger sibling, as do most eagle chicks, even if the mother tries to intervene. The survivor is raised by both parents until it is ready to leave the nest after just over three months after hatching. After another month or so, the parents chase the youngster out of their territory, forcing it to fend entirely for itself.

I was busy perambulating the Majubane waterfall path recently, when I encountered a sedge bush crowded with Stalk-eyed Flies, Diopsis stuckenbergii, hundreds of them, resting and interacting.

I mentioned these odd flies in my publication Winter 2023, but, because they are so bizarre, I have to feature them again. The nice thing this time was that I knew what they were and what they were doing and so managed to observe their behaviour a bit.

They roost on hanging roots above the water during the night. Then, in the early morning, they gather on the bushes near the stream and the males establish a lek, a gathering of males for the purpose of competition for females. The males face each other with front legs splayed wide. They then push their faces up against each other, and the one with the longest stalks (largest space between the eyes) dominates and moves on to the next male. The females watch this and are attracted to the male with the widest eyes. Very sexy!

Once mating is complete, the female lays her eggs in and amongst rotting vegetation on the forest floor. The larvae hatch and consume the rotting vegetables and then enter their pupal stage. Once emerging from the pupa, the newly adult fly's stalk eyes are squished up against their bodies, so they gulp air in through their mouths and pump it up into their faces and inflate their stalks, like balloons, until they are fully extended!

This, like the extraordinarily long tail of a male peacock, is a great example of "sexual selection", where the female's preference for, in this case, wide-apart eyes, results in the males evolving physical traits which may even actually hinder survival. As long as the male can still breed. 

The flies on the extreme bottom-right of the photo are literally peaking around a corner :) 

These tiny little things are the fruiting bodies of the Carnival Candy Slime Mould, Arcyria denudata, and are only about one millimeter tall. You've gotta love the common name!

When it comes to classifying living things, the highest level of classification is the Kingdom. For example, animals belong to the kingdom Animalia which includes earthworms, spiders, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds etcetera; plants to the kingdom Plantae; mushrooms to the kingdom Fungi and slime moulds belong to the kingdom Protozoa, together with Amoeba proteus, the amoeba you studied in biology class at school; Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan that gives us cerebral malaria and many others.

 

A single spore finds itself in a suitable environment, it germinates a few flagellated (have a tail for movement) protoplasts called Swarm Cells (not to be confused with a beehive). These cells move around their environment eating bacteria and when they meet up with a mate, they form a zygote and grow into a plasmodium as they split nuclei. 

A plasmodium is defined as a living structure of cytoplasm that contains many nuclei, instead of individual cells each with a nucleus. These plasmodia (white blob) feed on bacteria and other microorganisms and grow in size as other zygotes "swarm" to join and become an interconnected network of protoplasmic strands, with each strand's cytoplasmic contents streaming back and forth within itself. 

When this mass of single-celled organisms, that now behave like a multi-cellular organism, wants to move, the strand's contents stream in the required direction while protoplasm is withdrawn from the rear, allowing it to move at a top speed of about one millimetre per hour, leaving a snail trail behind. Search for my blog of February 2021 and there you will see I featured a different species of slime mould, but the photo of the plasmodia will give you an idea what the plasmodium of this species looks like. A white, foamy blob.

Once food becomes scarce, the plasmodium breaks up and migrates to a drier, lighter area and they convert into the spore-bearing structures like in the photo above. These structures produce spores very much like mushrooms do, and release these into the environment where they are spread by insects, wind or water. 

We emerged from our nice warm houses one cold morning only to noticed masses of winged Aphids everywhere. There were millions of them on all surfaces from the ground to the exposed cars, but they were unable to move from the cold. Some of those who settled on the lower areas were frozen in the morning frost. This individual and surrounding friends began stretching limbs once the ice had melted and they were able to move.

Aphids are sap sucking bugs from the Aphididae family of true bugs (Hemiptera). They are those tiny pests you see crowded around the twigs and branchlets of your garden plants.

They are fat and soft bodied, slow moving and gentle with no defences except two chimney-like tubes, called cornicles, at the end of their abdomens that extrude a quick-hardening waxy fluid that deters a few of its enemies. Sometimes.

The only thing that makes them so very, very successful, is their fecundity, their reproductive prowess. Let me explain:

As usual, it all starts with an egg. In the weather extremes of the northern climes the egg is laid by a female in autumn, after which she dies and the egg over-winters with the nymph hatching in springtime. In warmer climes, like ours, the egg may be laid in times of struggle, like insufficient food supply and the nymph hatches when conditions have improved.

The hatched first-instar nymph (aphids are true bugs which are hemi-metabolic, so there is no pupal stage and metamorphosis) is a female and she immediately pierces the host plant with her sucking mouthparts and begins to feed. Aphids pierce the phloem most of the time to access the plant's sugars, produced by photosynthesis, but when they're thirsty, they will pierce the xylem which carries the water up into the plant from the roots.

Interestingly, when the aphids are eating, they require no effort because the sugars are produced in the plant and therefore have a positive hydrostatic pressure while, when drinking from the xylem, they are required to suck with a little pump located in their heads because the water is being brought up from the roots via transpiration.

When food is abundant, she will moult a further four times and become an adult within a week. She then begins to birth two or even three daughters each day for the rest of her forty or so days of life. After a week, those daughters, too, are birthing their own young, live, in the same way. There is no parental care. The mother continues feeding after giving birth and the nymph immediately begins feeding on her own. If there were no enemies and food remained constant, this single female aphid, that hatched from that egg, will have produced two-hundred-and-ten to the power of fifteen clone daughters over a year! That number is beyond comprehension. To me, at least. I calculated it and the answer is a scientific notation 6.812e+34. I know someone out there knows what that means :) 

Fortunately for the rest of us living things (especially plants), aphids have an entire army of enemies, from exclusive aphid-eaters like ladybug, hoverfly and lacewing larvae that eat aphid after aphid until they are fully developed, to minute parasitic Ichneumid wasps whose gravid females pierce the aphid with their ovipositor and inject an egg within. The egg hatches and the larva slowly consumes the living aphid until it is ready to pupate. The aphid perishes at this stage and the hardened body becomes the pupa where the larva can metamorphosise into an adult

Interestingly, one of the greatest advantages of a holometabolic insect, meaning it has an egg, larva, pupa and adult stage, is that the larvae do not compete for the same resources as the adult, so the population can be much bigger. The exception to this is the ladybug, they are rabid aphid-eaters as larvae and as adults!

Anyway, back to the life cycle: Once the population of aphids on the plant gets too big, or the plant is too severely damaged by the aphids themselves, then hormonal changes triggered by these factors change the morphology of the new offspring. They are slimmer, more rigid and they have wings! This enables these females to fly in search of another host plant to colonise. Once on a suitable host plant, she will feed, and her offspring will be soft-bodied, wingless clones like her mother was on the previous plant.

At the end of the growing season when resources and weather become less attractive, the aphids give birth to male and female offspring who fly off in search of mates, mate and then the females' lay eggs in safe places to hatch when conditions improve again.

This must have been what we experienced that very cold winters morning: a mass of winged male and female aphids en route to their new host plants, or finding a mate, or both.

While I was observing the Stalk-eyed Flies (above) I saw this Ichneumid wasp land on the same bush and begin searching for a prey animal to inject her eggs into. She walked up and down the bush's leaves tapping both the upper and lower surfaces with her antennae. 

I thought I was going to see some action when she encountered a Stalk-eyed fly, but they simply ignored each other when the time came. I know that caterpillars purposely spend more time on the underside of leaves particularly to avoid being found by one of these wasps, but this wasp seems to have got the memo.

The word "ichneumon", from Greek "footprint" to Latin "tracker", has been applied to this family of wasps because they have to track down a larva of a holometabolic insect to parasitise with her offspring. 

Most female wasps have a stinger which they use in self-defence or, primarily, to paralyse mostly worms and spiders which the wasp feeds to her offspring. The female wasps from the Ichneumonidae, however, have an ovipositor instead. If you look carefully at the photo, you will notice the (blurred) ovipositor sticking out above the folded wings). This long ovipositor is used to reach insect larvae or pupae and inject an egg/s within. 

Some species will follow the egg with a dose of venom that will paralyse the victim like other wasps, but most will allow the victim to continue living and feeding while the wasp larvae feed off its insides, only killing it when important organs, which are left till last, are consumed. By the time the host dies, the wasp maggots have developed fully, and they will drill a hole through the skin of the now dead host and construct a silken cocoon in which to pupate themselves, making the dead host look a little like a porcupine with quills (cocoons).  

Amazingly, in those species, like this one, only a single egg is laid within the caterpillar, but this egg "reads" the victims species, size, age and how long until it goes into its own pupa and then divides the egg the requisite number of times so that there is enough food for the number of eggs that are formed! The most recorded splits are over three thousand splits! So, one egg decided that there was enough nourishment in the parasitised animal to feed over three thousand wasp larvae without dying before they were fully developed! That is simply incredible! 

These wasps are a very important controller of pest insects, and it is estimated that between 10% and 20% of host populations are parasitised by them. This makes them excellent candidates for bio control agents and have been used to control the populations of African Sugarcane Borers and the Arctic Woolly Bear moth in the north. 

The English common name of Darwin's Wasps arose from the fact that Charles Darwin was moved by the family. He famously wrote about how he didn't believe a "beneficent and omnipotent God" would have designed such a cruel animal which eats the insides of another animal while it was still alive.

And finally, there are some caterpillar species, who had fallen victim to these wasps in the distant past too regularly, that have evolved a pattern on their bodies that looks so very much like these cocoons sticking out, that the ichneumonid wasp avoids it, apparently convinced that the caterpillar has already been parasitised (an example being the caterpillar of the Dice moth, Rhanidophora ridens, common in the Kruger Park)!

A little while back, while my team was working in the area of Little Joker Koppie, one of the team told me they saw a large, white antelope up there. I was stumped. That weekend, Ryan Steele from Rainbow Rivers (unit 17) sent this picture of an Oryx, Oryx gazella, that he took, while hiking, from the plains above his place and below the top of Little Joker Koppie.

There's always a surprise in store for us here on the estate, and this was no exception. An oryx, here on the estate? Very odd. I was told that Mount Anderson Ranch had an oryx at a stage, so this must be it, then, since they are not naturally found in this sort of habitat and this is surely the only one here. Must be very lonely.

The exciting thing about this sighting, is that it increases our antelope species count on the estate from thirteen species to fourteen species. That's a good count anywhere!

Grass Orb-web spider, Neoscona moreli, sitting in a web designed similarly to the webs spun by Garden spiders, including a stabilimentum, a zig-zag line of silk running from the centre of the web to the bottom edge.

 

There are many theories to the function of this zig-zag of silk, from reflecting UV light to attract insects, to making the web visible to larger mammals so they don't walk through it. But as its name suggests, it may just be there to stabilise the particularly flimsy web.

Although the web and the habitat, open grasslands, compare with the Garden spiders, the Grass Orb-weaver's behaviour is more similar to the bark spider (blog of November 2019), where the spider hides away during daylight hours, and then spins a web from scratch as dusk approaches, uses the web to catch food during the night, and then dismantles the web again in the morning before hiding away again for the rest of the day.

The male, half the size of the female approaches the female in her web, at night, and if lucky, mates with her and escapes with his life before spinning his own web, similar but smaller than the females', the rest of the time.

The little spiderlings hatch in mid-summer and disperse soon afterwards when they are only a few millimetres in size and immediately build their own webs. If prey items are regular enough, the little ones reach adult size within two months.

To get a photo of one, in its web, in the daytime, is apparently not a common occurrence, so bully for me.





That's it for this winter, which, thankfully, is coming to an end because I felt colder this year than usual and it has been difficult some mornings. But, as usual, the estate delivers good fishing, cycling, birding, hiking and those other lekker outdoor activities. Remember, if you want a guided excursion, be it a drive, walk or hike, just let me know. See you soon.

 LATE SUMMER 2025

Well, the soft absorbing rain sure did arrive! The above photo was taken looking south towards Mount Anderson from the extreme north-eastern part of the estate, well beyond Pebble Creek (Unit 25). This lovely misty, cloudy and wet picture has been Finsbury since my last publication!

So, since the beginning of February till the end of March, a total of fifty-nine days, we have enjoyed twenty-six days of precipitation, dropping an average of 235mm of water on the estate. This is certainly not abnormal since the average monthly total for these two months since 2010 is 230mm. It just appeared rainier because it was overcast almost every day for those two months. Also, the rainfall arrived late this season so, although it appears it has rained a lot, which it has over much of the east of the country, the total average rainfall figure for the season is 752mm for the estate, well below the seasonal average of 920mm.

So, although it appears as if we have had a lot of rain, we are actually experiencing a drier than normal season, unless we get more rain before the dry season begins. I did read an article very recently saying that we should expect a wet winter here while the Western Cape should expect a dry winter (very bad for them) so, maybe there is still some rain to come.

As usual, regarding rainy days on the estate, there is always times during the day when the rain lifts and allows us to explore the grasslands, mountains, gorges and rivers. Below is a gallery of some of the interesting things I discovered during the late summer:

I spotted this little, stumpy Southern Rock Agama, Agama atra, as it scampered into a rock crevice up on the cliffs between us and Potato Seed Production. I approached the crevice and found him or her squeezed between the rockface and a smallish boulder which was easy for me to remove. The Agama pretended that I didn't move his defensive rock and just lay there with its eyes open only to slits.

It was only a little one, about 120mm long, whereas an adult male can reach 250mm. This may be the reason why I spotted it, because it was too inexperienced to hide away quickly enough while I was approaching. I say that because these agamas live in colonies, and this is the only one I spotted. The colonies can be quite densely populated, reaching densities of 165 individuals per hectare! Within the colony, dominant males and females both establish territories, with the males' territory being larger (about 100 square meters) and encompassing two or three female territories. These territories are established to secure a small area where the individuals can forage for food without direct competition.

Food consists of insects, millipedes, centipedes and spiders, with ants being their favourites, while they, in turn, are favoured prey items for snakes and birds, ranging from the Southern Fiscal (shrike) to buzzards and eagles.

During the breeding season, which lasts for most of the summer months, the most dominant males' heads turn a glorious blue, like those of the closely related and well-known Blue-headed Agama or Bloukopkoggelmander that we see regularly in the Kruger Park. And, also like that species, the Rock Agama male performs press-ups, which makes this bright blue head bob up and down as an invitation to the females whose territories fall within his boundaries to mate with him, and as a warning to other males not to enter his territory. Interestingly, these males are a bit like chameleons in that they can, if stressed by a potential predator, quickly lose the bright blue colouration and return to a cryptic pattern to help hide from those predators.

Once gravid, the females dig a hole in the soil near the rocks and lay a clutch of five to eighteen eggs within, before covering them up again. They do this twice in the season, once at the beginning of the season, and once at the end. The incubation for the first clutch is between two and three months, depending on the temperature, while the incubation for the second clutch is the length of the dry, winter season, so that hatching will occur at the beginning of the following season.

Considering that these lizards live in colonies and that the males are brightly coloured, we get to see them very rarely. In fact, this is the first confirmed sighting I have had of this species since I have been here on the estate. This is, therefore, a new species for our Finsbury reptile list. The list does contain the Ground Agama, Agama aculeata, which I have featured in my blog of October 2020. Nice to have both species on the list now!

This photo was sent to me by Trish Myburg from Vakatsha (aka K9 Cafe). It is of a large, very boldly marked Puff Adder, Bitis arietans, that she encountered on the Kliprots road close to Lone Tree Cottage. Now, the weirdest thing is that in all my years here at Finsbury Estate, I have never seen a living puff adder! I Have seen a dead one that tangled itself up in the fence by Don and Anne's house and I found one that had burnt to death in one of our grass fires. But still, never a living one! This is odd, very odd, because many Finsbury visitors have seen them and they are, after all, Southern Africa's most common venomous snake and probably the most widespread snake species on the continent, with a very varied habitat tolerance ranging from sea level to more than 2000 metres above that. the only place you won't find them is in rainforest or true desert. 

Let's hope I see the first one I encounter before I tread on it. I should be alerted to its presence, though, because I have enjoyed many puffie experiences in the past and once you hear the "puff", the explosive sound it emits when issuing a warning, you never forget it. In most cases, a puff adder will puff before you stand on it and your body will just automatically respond to the sound by rapid retreat! This is very important because the specific name for the species, arietans, comes from the Latin word arietare which means "to strike violently" and it rather descriptive of the snakes striking capabilities. The enormous girth of the snake is not made up of fat, it is pure muscle, and when this muscle is strained up, it can produce the fastest strike of any African snake! Little ones sometimes strike so violently that the strike action lifts the body off the ground as the momentum throws it forward at the same time, giving the impression that it is leaping towards you.

The venom is powerful for the adders and, although cytotoxic like other vipers, is more haemolytic in action than that of the other adders (like the Berg Adders' venom is cytotoxic but with a heavier neurotoxic element than found in other viper venom, see blog of May 2019 for more), meaning it breaks down blood cells in addition to the normal cellular damage caused by cytotoxins. The body of the victim begins the digestive processes before being consumed.  

Trish told me it was a really big snake, as much as a meter long. If so, together with the longish tail and bold markings, I would suggest that it is a male snake. Females are generally smaller than males, have short, stumpy tails and, when as large as this, are less boldly marked. 

He will live his life concentrating on feeding and avoiding predation until he comes into contact with a pheromone trail left behind by a female ready to mate. Once on the trail, he will follow its scent with his flicking tongue until he finds her (refer to the publication of August 2020, Berg Adder, for explanation of scent). If she is already being courted by another male, the males will engage in a wrestling match to establish who is dominant.

Once the male has established dominance over others, he will mate with the female. Interestingly, the female does not use all the sperm the male deposits, often storing some of it for subsequent seasons so that she doesn't have to mate every time she wants to have offspring. The sperm can be stored for more than five years in the female's body.

After fertilisation, the eggs develop within the female's body and, when fully developed, hatch inside her body and the young are born alive (ovoviviparity). Usually about fifty of the little blighters come out with the record being for a snake in a zoo with 156 of them! A record for any snake. These 150mm long babies immediately radiate away from their mother and begin to look after themselves. They survive mainly on insects, like grasshoppers, and spiders until they are large enough to go for their favourite food, rodents, which they catch by ambush. 

In our area, their staple will most probably be the Highveld Gerbil, Gerbilliscus brantsii, because they live in colonies with burrows connected by little pathways called runs, although we have many other yummy rodent species in our vast grasslands too. The puff adder concentrates on the rodents that use runs to travel from point to point. The snake finds this by flicking its tongue in and out until it smells the rodent run. It then simply waits in ambush for the rodent to pass by, when it strikes at lightning speed, injecting a dose of venom, and retracting to its original position within a quarter of a second! 

The victim has no idea what hit them as they are hammered by the physical force of the strike, and simultaneously impaled by the enormous, scythe-like fangs and injected with copious amounts of venom! The victim is left to run off with a head start before the snake starts its pursuit by slowly following the victims scent trail, once again with its flicking tongue. This behaviour is necessary to avoid potential injury by the struggling victim if confronted immediately, since the venom does not affect the nervous system like the elapid snakes, and so is slower acting. Usually, once recovered by the snake, the victim has already succumbed to the venom and is ready to swallow.

When it is very moist and rainy, there is an incessant chirping from the vast grasslands that is hard to ignore. This chirping is emitted by male Mozambican Rain Frogs, Breviceps masambicus, as he hides in the entranceway to his subterranean nest. He is attempting to attract a mate with the call, as do all male frogs and toads. This family, Brevicipitidae, of frogs gets their common name because of this habit of calling only when the humidity is high enough, like when it is raining.

One day, not long ago, while it was drizzling continuously, it seemed like a good time for the termite alates to take wing. These are the future king and queens of the termite world and, as I'm sure you know, all the different colonies in an area somehow manage to synchronise their activity of releasing their winged males and females at the same time, resulting in millions of winged termites filling the skies! 

There were flying termites everywhere while I was climbing a grassy hill, and all I had to do was pinpoint the spots where the winged termite alates were being launched from, and I would find some sort of happy predator there and these were mostly in the form of Mozambican Rain Frogs guzzling these alates down like there was no tomorrow. These were both the smaller males and the larger females enjoying an easy meal. This male in the picture above is holding down his next bite while he swallows the current one.

Once he is satisfied, he will return to his nest, stand by the entrance, and begin to call. Like other frogs, the females respond and are attracted by the call. Unlike all other frogs, though, this does not take place in a water body where eggs can be laid in the water so that the hatching tadpoles are already in their medium of choice for development. These frogs, normally finding themselves far from a solid body of water, have had to come up with another plan to raise their tadpoles.

When she arrives at his nest, the male invites her in and begins to court her. If successful, he mounts the female by excreting a sticky fluid from his chest and pasting his little round body to the back of the much larger female, and amplexus (mating with external fertilisation) takes place. A dozen plus large eggs (instead of the hundreds of tiny eggs of normal frogs) are laid in the nest and on top of that, she lays water-filled sterile eggs that help to keep the real eggs moist. The tadpoles hatch within the larger, water-filled egg filled with nutrients and develop there instead of in a body of open water like other tadpoles. Once developed sufficiently, they then break out as froglings, with developed legs but remnants of a tail still, and are able to fend for themselves from thereon. 

The Afrikaans name for these frogs is "Blaas-op" which means to inflate. If one tries to pull one of these little frogs out of its hole, it will inflate its body so it looks like a little balloon, and this makes it very difficult to extract it from the nest.

Another bird photo sent to me by Dave De Vos from The Crofts (Unit 19). This time it is a lovely shot of a Chorister Robin-chat, Cossypha dichroa, not a rare bird on the estate, but an elusive one, sticking to the darkest thickets in riparian bush, forests and deep, shaded gardens. They are endemic to the forests of South Africa and Eswatini, our smallest biome, which means that they only naturally occur in these forests and nowhere else.

The male establishes a permanent territory of a hectare to a hectare-and-a-half in these dark forests and advertises it via a loud, musical voice. The song is very variable and contains lots of mimicry. The whistle is rather human-like, and it sounds just like a person whistling in the forest sometimes. Here, at Finsbury Central, our local Chorister Robin-chat loves to mimic a Fiery-necked Nightjar and, if it wasn't for the fact that the mime is made during the day, one would be forgiven for thinking it is the real thing! Before I got used to it, it caught me every time.

Besides successfully mimicking various other birds (including Fish Eagles), the bird is also accomplished at mimicking a dog barking!

It is not understood what the advantages of this mimicry are, except when the bird mimics a Red-chested Cuckoo (Piet-my-vrou), which sometimes parasitises the Robin-chat, because it is believed that it tricks a potential parasite into believing that there is already a parasite in the area, and so may protect the Robin-chat from parasitism by these cuckoos.

The monogamous male and female Robin-chat pair remain in this territory for their whole lives unless their territory is located in an area, like ours, that gets very cold in the winter. Then they migrate to lower altitude forests, the same place each year, for the duration of the cold before returning to their territory. These lower altitude forests are usually occupied by territory holders already, so the visitors are required to behave in a subordinate way and to remain silent during their visit.

One territory was observed over time and the same male occupied it for a mind-blowing 26 years!!!

The pair forage for insects, beetles and ants mostly, other arthropods like spiders, millipedes and, of course, every bird's favourite, earthworms. they also eat fruits and are therefore very important seed dispersal agents for Asparagus Ferns, White Stinkwood, the Currant Rhus species, both Red Pear species, the Cat thorn creeper, and the indigenous Forest Raspberry. Unfortunately, they also disperse the seeds of the bad invasive plants like the exotic Brambles and the Bug Weed.

In spring, the female constructs an untidy cup nest in a rot hole of a tree or a hollowed-out stump above the ground. This nest sight may be used over and over again annually if it remains undisturbed. Once completed, she lays between two and three eggs in the nest and incubates them alone while the male brings food for her.

Once hatched, both parents feed the young until they are able to leave the nest two weeks after hatching. The young are then cared for by both parents for a period of up to six weeks, teaching them what to eat and protecting them from danger, quite long for a smaller bird like the Robin-chat. 

During the late summer, the forests are the at their most moist and it is a super time for those that are searching for mushrooms and lichens. This year there seemed to be more of these very noticeable mushrooms than normal. You cannot miss them, their bright, almost luminous orange colour sticks out like a sore thumb! They are called Golden-scruffy Collybia, Cryptotrama asprata.

The Golden-scruffy Collybia is a saprobic fungus, meaning that it is responsible for the decay of previously living material. The mycelium, which form three-dimensional networks throughout the body, in this case a dead branch, release enzymes from these threads that break the body down so that the mycelium can absorb them as food.

We did have quite a few successful fungi walks this summer and our Finsbury list now boasts one-hundred-and-one species of mushrooms and lichens so far encountered and identified within the estate. These can be viewed by you at the following address:

www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=47170&user_id=jimmy_whatmore&verifiable=any

In my previous blog, I featured a Giant Cone-headed Mantis that I encountered in the grasslands north-east of Pebble Creek. Now, this month, I encountered another species also with a bizarre design. It is a male African False Flower Mantis, Harpagomantis tricolor, and I found it in the riparian bush alongside the Spekboom River. 

I went quite in-depth about Praying Mantids in the previous blog to this and so shall not repeat myself here. The life history is very similar with this species except the African False Flower Mantis is strictly seasonal, meaning the ootheca (foam-like egg sack) enters a diapause, allowing it to overwinter so that the little mantid nymphs hatch at the beginning of springtime and they will have the whole of spring and summer to complete their life cycle.

Also, the Giant Cone-headed Mantis from the previous article has that very useful cyclopean ear which can pick up the echolocation pulses emitted by bats, allowing them to be active at night, whereas this one, the African False Flower Mantis does not have this organ and must remain exclusively day active.

Since the African False Flower Mantis is a monotypic species, meaning it is the only member of its genus, it has been quite well studied for an African species. A lot of research has been done in the laboratory with this species, allowing observations into mating behaviour, egg development, sex ratio and more.

The results of this research suggest this species is strictly day active; has strong competition amongst males for mating opportunities; and has a lifespan, barring accidents like predation, lasting an entire spring and summer season.

Regarding the competition between males, it was noticed that they developed much quicker than the females. They matured at a smaller size with proportionally larger wings, allowing them to spend more time searching for females. Also, when copulating, the males ejaculate within twenty minutes but remain attached to the back of the female for six hours, blocking other males from accessing her.

Preying mantids are placed in the order Mantodea, and the Mantodea is grouped together with the insect order Blattodea (Termites and Cockroaches) in the superorder Dictyoptera, consisting of the more primitive insects that lay eggs within an ootheca. So, interesting, the closest relatives to preying mantids are cockroaches and termites! Who woulda thunk....

I was hiking the Rock Kestrel Trail on my way to the summit of Mount Andrson when I saw this anomaly on the ground in those high-altitude grasslands. The snail I could identify as the Giant Land snail that it was, but the ... things attached to it were very obscure (check blog of January 2019 for more on the snail).

At first, I actually got a bit of a fright because Rinkhals initially came to mind (think rough scales). Then I thought it was a girdled lizard, which are not found anywhere near here but have a similar scale pattern to what this looked like. Then, after bending down and moving some of the grass out of the way, I saw it was a group of insects, beetle larvae actually. Then I remembered that firefly larvae are predators of snails, and everything began to make sense.

They are the larvae of the beetles we know as Fireflies, and I've narrowed these down to the genus Lampyris. The larvae of all the species of firefly in the Lampyridae family of beetles are poisonous and, instead of their bodies being brightly coloured (aposematism) like most poisonous insects, the abdomen emits a flashing light, which will scare almost any predator away.

All adult males in all species in the family have wings and take flight, but some of the species' females, all in this genus, remain wingless and resemble the larvae, except they have compound eyes instead of the simple eyes of the larvae.

 

Now, because the larvae of all species emit light, while not all species' adults do, it is proposed that the insect evolved the ability to emit light as a defence against predators, again a type of aposematism. Only later did some species use this ability to luminesce as an adult, to emit light as a signal to attract the correct mate. Only later still, did the adult females of one particular species use this ability to attract unsuspecting mates from a different species, only to devour them as they arrive!

It is not common to see more than one larva eating a snail and I have yet to find a photo of one. The larvae have the ability to recognise the slime trails of snails and slugs and then to identify the direction which the snail or slug took. They will then follow the trail until they locate the victim and then attack it. With a snail this size, the snail will just pull itself into its shell to defend itself, but this group of larvae will simply crawl into the shell and inject a neurotoxin, via massive, channelled jaws, into the foot of the snail, paralysing it.

The fireflies then bite chunks of snail meat off the main body and vomit up enzymes all over the chunk, liquifying it. The firefly larvae then suck these juices into their mouths.

Interestingly, the firefly larvae (and unwinged females) have a tubular membrane connecting their heads to their thoraxes, allowing them to extend the head far out and to pull it in under the protection of the scaled thorax. Just like a tortoise does (or a bit like the snails that they eat). This adaption is for when the insect feeds on a smaller snail whose shell opening is too narrow for the insect to fit into, so it can stretch its neck to push its head far inside the shell to eat the whole snail.

Another interesting fact that you may have noticed which is definitely not common, is that the firefly larvae are both poisonous and venomous. They are filled with a poison that will make a predator sick if they eat a Firefly larva, and the larva can bite and inject a venom that will paralyse its prey. So, you don't want to pick one up or eat one. Just leave 'em bee...

I'm always very excited to add a new ant species to our Finsbury insect list, with this new species being the seventeenth species so far recorded on the estate. They are called Furry Cautious ants, Meranoplus peringueyi, and, once again, the common name is very descriptive. 

I kicked a rock over while climbing up a slope and exposed a few individuals. They approached the open area very slowly as if they were being cautious, so when I saw the name while trying to identify them, I immediately knew it was the correct identification. They are also very hairy, as their name suggests.

These ants belong to the same tribe as the very common Cocktail ants, Crematogaster species (see blog of July 2020), which is quite obvious when looking at the shape of the body, particularly the abdomen, although this seems where the similarities end.

These ants are much less common and have much smaller colonies, with an average of 150 individuals, as opposed to the thousand odd individuals that make up a Cocktail ant colony. Also, these ants are not arboreal (found in trees); do not build paper-like nests, and do not swarm aggressively when disturbed, unlike their cousins.

Instead, the Furry Cautious ants excavate a subterranean nest which is invisible from the surface, and they forage alone with an omnivorous diet consisting of seeds and scavenged animal matter. Also, when disturbed, instead of lifting their gasters and swarming like the Cocktail ants do, they roll in the dirt, gathering up sand particles in the long hairs of the body and display thanatosis (play dead), so that they lie still, covered in sand and blend in with their surroundings. 

I was climbing over the decades-old rockfall debris beneath the cliff between us and Potato Seed Production when I encountered a Perdepis tree there. I was excited because it is a forest-dwelling tree that can also be found on exposed rocky situations like where I was, and this was the first time for me to find one in the latter habitat.

While absorbing the differences the tree exhibits in this situation, I noticed a bird dropping on one of the leaves. On closer inspection, I realised that it was a caterpillar. I was excited because the caterpillar of a Citrus Swallowtail butterfly is supposed to look like a bird dropping, and that is exactly what I thought it was, so the description is accurate.

That fact and the fact that it was eating leaves of a tree in the citrus family, Rutaceae, confirmed it was the caterpillar of a Citrus Swallowtail, Papilio demodocus, which, incidentally, I featured in my blog before the previous one, and in the previous one, I featured the very close cousin to this, the Emperor Swallowtail.

All the instars of the caterpillar resemble bird droppings except for the final instar, just before the caterpillar constructs its pupa. The final instar is too big for this deception, so instead, it is similar to other Swallowtail larvae in being green with a swollen prothorax (area just behind the head) with large eyespots on each side. 

Then there is an organ called an "osmeterium" that lies inverted just before the head, and when the caterpillar is disturbed, it unravels this organ and it pops out just above the head of the caterpillar. It is reddish and looks very much like a snakes' forked tongue and this, together with the eyespots makes the caterpillar resemble a snake, hopefully scaring the potential threat away.

It seems as if all the members of the estate have visited the beautiful little waterfall behind Bulldozer Creek (U21) in the last little while. It is a very beautiful waterfall and looks like the prop for an adventure movie, with weeping rock walls and stunning plants and mosses!

One of the most abundant plants there is the Common Wild Forest Impatiens, a fleshy plant with beautiful pink flowers featuring a long spur. The spur is a twenty-odd millimetre long tube with its opening in the flower and the other end is the nectary, so only insects with a long enough probiscis can reach the nectar.

Each time I have gone there I have seen these Spider flies, Psilodera hessei, pollinating the Impatiens'. If you look at the photo, you can see the folded probiscis jutting out from behind the abdomen, meaning it is longer than the insect's body. When visiting the flower, the fly unfolds this probiscis and inserts it into the spur, reaching for the nectary right at the end, collecting pollen on its face at the same time as it enjoys its reward of nectar and, hopefully, depositing this pollen on the female parts of the following flower it visits, completing the pollination process.

The interesting part is in the name: Spider Fly. This is because the larvae of this species are parasitic on spiders. The first instar larva (maggot) is tiny, about a millimetre long, with a sclerotised (hardened) body and is highly mobile. This little larva quickly moves around until it finds a spider, to which it attaches itself prior to burrowing its sclerotised body into the abdomen and then, once inside, attaching itself to the book lungs of the spider. Once comfortably ensconced, it changes into its next instar which is immobile and it slowly, over its remaining instars, eats the spider's insides until the spider dies when the final instar is reached. The final instar exits the dead spider, drops to the floor and buries itself and enters its pupal stage, later emerging as an adult.

That's it then. Autumn is arriving together with a late Easter this year. Even though the rainfall has not been of the volume needed, the estate is looking gorgeous, so get over here and have some fun.