A Rainy Desert Trip

I write this a day after coming home to Sydney from the Simpson Desert, the place I go to work on the border of Queensland and the Northern Territory. I’m a biologist, a desert ecologist to be exact. 

Yesterday I stepped out of our field vehicle, a very off-road worthy thing, after an unusually long drive back. Something happened you wouldn’t expect in the Simpson. It rained.

It started raining while we were in the desert. Rain is a little magical out there. Dusty, yellow clumps of prickly spinifex grass change colour instantly and become light green. The dust settles and the sand turns a deeper shade of red. Burrowing frogs dig their way out to the surface. Birds fly in for both the water and those frogs. The whole place comes alive.

Burrowing frogs emerging from the sand - Notaden nichollsi

And then it rained more. We started hearing about road closures on the radio, more every day. Rivers that have been dry beds for years start flowing, usually straight over the roads we needed to take to get out. We laughed about it at first and carried on with our work, enjoying the conditions. We found ourselves stuck, flooded in, and it felt like a great adventure!   

When the day we need to leave drew closer we got a little more serious. We all needed to be places, meet people, teach classes, start the first day of a new job, catch that plane home. Our real lives invaded the adventure of being stuck. Eventually we drove out, not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into.

We got out of the desert to the first town, the part we thought would be most tricky. We thought we done it. But from there we were pushed further and further north due to road closures. Keep in mind we were trying to go south, back to Sydney. In far West Queensland towns are easily 200-300km apart. These detours were costing us many hours.

After another very wet night camping beside a flooded road full of frogs we conceded defeat – quite grumpily.

We stopped at the information centre of the nearest town we could reach for the latest updates on the roads. A middle-aged lady beamed at us when we walked in. ‘How GRRREAT is this rain?!’ I admit I raised an eyebrow and produced a frown at that.

It turned out she and her husband own a cattle property. They had been waiting for this rain for 3 years, struggling through that time to keep their cattle alive. She told the sad stories of farmers who couldn’t manage the financial burden and resorted to killing their livestock. While telling us her story the rain got even worse, it was pouring down. She got so excited she started bouncing up and down, doing a little rain dance behind the counter, hopping around in circles.

It lifted my spirits and provided some welcome perspective. The rain was inconvenient for our trip, our jobs and our appointments but it brought life and hope to others. We continued our journey further north, racing the floods, eventually making it to Sydney. 3000km, a day late and one teaching session missed. I think my students will forgive me.

Pictures by Frank Bird

Made a new friend!

Me and my friend in the Simpson Desert
Pic by Shaun Doyle

I’d like to introduce you to one of my new friends here in Australia! He is a bit of a loner and somewhat prickly at the best of times, but bear with me and you’ll come to like him too!

His name? Thorny devil. Yes, really. In Latin it gets even worse, Moloch horridus. Moloch refers to an ancient god, revered around 2000BC by a people living on the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean shores (modern day Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan and Syria). This god was associated with a particular kind of child sacrifice through fire. Not a great start. The last part ‘horridus’ means bristly or secondarily dreadful.

This reptile might look fearsome but it is not as dreadful as its name suggests. In a land filled with deadly dangerous animals, this one uses clever disguise and innovation to survive.

Poisonous? No

Fast? No

Ferocious? Eh.. no. When picked up it might looked slightly annoyed and then just close its eyes.

So how exactly does it survive?

Thorns. Lots of them. Not many animals enjoy swallowing something that looks worse than a cactus.

Holding at your own risk! Pic by Enyi Guo

Camouflage. You don’t see a thorny devil until your foot hovers right over one and you were happening to look where you were walking. Even when you know what you are looking for they are exceedingly tricky to find. Their body colouration is patchy, partly the red of the desert sand, partly the yellow/green (it varies per individual) of the vegetation. When the animal is undisturbed the colours are quite dull. However, when moving or picked up they brighten up considerably as a warning sign to potential predators: do not think about eating me, it’s going to be unpleasant!

Body colouration can rapidly change. Here, the colours are dark and distinct.
Pic by Shaun Doyle

Deception. On its neck, it grows a bump with thorns about the same size as its head. When threatened the thorny devil tends to tuck its real head between its front legs which manoeuvres this bump where the head usually is. Many predators will aim for the head first when attacking. When they get in contact with the spines some might decide they like their stomach without holes and dismiss the attack. The moloch survives without damage to its real head.

Notice the 'extra' head on top of its neck. Pic by Shaun Doyle

Innovation. The thorny devil is endemic to Australia, meaning it is only found there. It thrives in the dry, sandy interior of the continent. One thing is very hard to come by in this place: water. Luckily, the thorny devil has got a rather unique solution to this. In its skin it has a system of small grooves, all leading toward the corners of its mouth. These grooves collect and move water from the entire surface of its body towards its mouth by means of capillary action. The only thing he has to do is swallowing. If you put a moloch with its feet in a dish of water, within a matter of seconds its body will be glistening with moisture and without lowering its head it will start to swallow the water brought to its mouth from its feet. All tested by yours truly of course.

A thorny devil can drink via its feet

You won’t find these animals in captivity often; they are notoriously hard to keep. Outside Australia, only a zoo can get a permit to keep them as they are a protected species. And few zoos actually do keep them. The problem lies in the feeding behaviour of these animals. They are very picky eaters, only feeding on 2-3 species of tiny black ant. And even then, they will only eat those when they are moving in a line, picking them off one by one, consuming around 2000 every day. So keeping one in captivity requires keeping a few large ant colonies of a particular ant species as well, and training them to walk in a line through the enclosure of the thorny devil where most of them will be eaten. It is a daunting task.

In short, I am a lucky person to have such an elusive new friend!