Wildlife Wednesday

This fish is a Whiting. I extended my backyard and there was supposed to be a heap of fish in a row - but when my blog went crazy and posted about 4 Wildlife Wednesdays on the one Wednesday, it ruined the effect :) Now this poor fish stands alone - but anyway, enough whining for the whiting!

These are my favourite fish and for the dumbest of the dumb reasons. I like their pointy nose, I like that when you catch them they give a decent bite (like they whack into your bait and they're committed) and best of all, I love that you can get them off the line easily and painlessly (not for the fish but for me!!). Whiting never seem to get hooks in dumb places like other fish, and they don't have really awful spines. So you can wrap your hand around them, and jiggle the hook out. All easy, all painless. Love these fish!

Plus, in my family, no one except me liked eating them, which meant they usually got thrown back in the water and didn't end up as dinner.

See, I told you, dumb reasons :)

Sunday Story

The month of May I'm dedicating to The Virginity Mission in the lead up to release... but I reserve the right to change my mind if I get sick of plugging, or looking at the cover!


The Beginning of this Story

I borrowed an event from my life as the setting for this story. When I was young, I went on a scientific expedition to the Daintree Rainforest in North Queensland. I'd been camping all my life with the Girl Guides. I'd done a bit of bushwalking with guides but also with a bushwalking club. I 'd done a few overnight bushwalks. I was studying an environmental biology degree. I was fairly fit. I figured this would be easy.

OMG was I wrong!

It was the hardest, most challenging thing I've ever done. I knew no one when I went - except my Mum made me have a lunch for the Sydney people who were on the trip a couple of weeks before I went; I think she was trying to make sure I'd be safe, but I'm not sure how the lunch worked!

I was chosen to go from an application I submitted. So it was a big deal to me. I'd never flown by myself anywhere, and here I was heading to Cairns. Staying in a youth hostel, then catching a bus to Mossman to meet up with the expedition people. There were 120 people on the trip, plus the expedition staff (leader, quartermaster staff, medical staff) and half a dozen Army guys there for transportation (and disasters).

I was so far out of my depth but too naive to really know! Fortunately, I wasn't the only one like that.

I kept a diary during the trip - which lasted 6 weeks. I was tempted to read the diary while I wrote this story... but I didn't. I wanted to fictionalise the trip and not get fact and fiction all confused. So I wrote the story using what I remembered, and inventing Mac (my heroine) and Jason (my hero) and their romance.

This is me - yonks ago - at the start of the rainforest trip

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And last week I grabbed my diary so I could do some blogs with real vs story... and what a shock I got...

Next week I'll show you what I found :)

I've got some photos (nothing as good as the cover though) to show but because they're old, they're stuck into an album on sticky pages (are you old enough to remember those?) and I can't take them out without damaging them. So I cheated and took a photo of the photo in the album - apologies for the glare and the wonkiness.

Phallic Friday - pussy pride

After my penis envy post last week, I came across a post by Remittance Girl about the relationship women have with their vaginas (or non-relationship) and that led me to a Pussy Pride Project site. So I thought I should do something here to show some love for my vagina. A photo was too much information I thought. And I'm not sure I can eloquently write a description of it - although I have been thinking about that, so maybe one day I'll find that courage. Today I decided on a little " poem".

Pulsing, pounding
Underneath all
Slick
Sexy
Yearning for more

Playful touching
Reamed, stretched
Inched inside slowly
Dying for release
Exploring, exposure, explosion.

Wildlife Wednesday

These beetles are EVERYWHERE at the moment. Over the last few weeks they've been here - you see the occasional one at the beach, down the street, in the yard - but this last fortnight, there have been hundreds of them. At the beach was most noticeable where they were constantly landing on me and I was trying to save them from drowning... but there was a high tide mark of dead beetles that looked like a black line of small shells - I wasn't saving many! I don't recall ever seeing so many of them.

My sister was visiting last week and she said she'd Googled copulating bugs (!!) to find out what they were (it didn't work for me) - they're Soldier Beetles. And that's what a lot of them are doing - the bug piggy-back - but no photos of that, sorry!

Here's some info from CSIRO -
It is still something of a mystery why the Plague soldier beetle (Chauliognathus lugubris), a native species found in temperate southeastern Australia, occasionally builds up to massive numbers. Its grubs live in the soil, feeding on other small creatures. The adult beetles don’t seem to eat the plants they settle on, although the sheer weight of a mass of them may break weaker twigs. What they are more interested in is sucking nectar from flowering trees, and copulating.

Our researchers have recently found the genes that give the chemical (they exude a white viscous fluid from their glands that repels any predators thinking of getting too close) its anti-microbial and anti-cancer properties, and were able to replicate the synthesis in the lab. This may one day lead to the development of new anti-biotic and anti-cancer related products.

It seems like the south-east of Australia has had perfect conditions for the Soldier beetle this year. I hope they've done a lot of copulating to keep the beetles going. Antibiotic and anti-cancer products from them could have us saving them all from drowning in the ocean.