It was a bit discouraging to look for termites in the Daintree, because they were very evasive, but when we drove out to some of the other dryer sites, I had a hayday chopping open dead wood and finding termites and other things inside.
This is the first piece of wood we chopped open. Can you see the animals in this picture?
It was frogs! Likely Cane Toads, the very invasive species that has been ruining things in Australia for years.
When I thought of Australia, this savanna area was more what I was thinking of than the rainforesty areas in Cairns. What's really cool is this dry savanna area is only minutes from the damp rainforest. It's called an ecotone-a transition area between two biomes. There is a small mountain range, the Kuranda range, which is big enough to cause a rain shadow on the land behind it so there are Eucalyptus forests and savannas but it is all very dry. This termite mound is home to thousands of little termite friends. One of the advantages of termite mounds is that they are perfectly engineered to allow ventilation to happen, cooling the nest when it's very hot outside and also conserving water.
This tree has a really cool Orthoptera (grasshoppper), but it also has these little things called termite runways. Termites live in many different habitats. One of them is trees. They build these runways so that they can run up and down trees carrying food without being exposed.
This is a really cool/big/pretty spider that got on the antenna of our car. It stayed on there when we started driving until a professor took pity on it, pulled the car over and released it into the wild. I was impressed with his courage in touching the spider.
This is one of the termite mounds that we found that was pretty big. What I thought was really cool is that you can see layers of older mound and newer mound.
This downed tree was hanging over the road, so of course I had to hack at it to look for termites. We didn't find any, but I saw this amazing red colored bark! So cool.
It's a lot of fun to see the life that happens in areas you think of mostly being dead.
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