Christmas Bells

Christmas Bells
Christmas Bells - Blandfordia nobilis

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Creatures which inhabit the Scribbly Gums.

I wrote a little while back about the Scribbly Gums of Tourist Road. A few days ago, I found a live adult Scribbly Gum Moth. This was the first time I have ever seen one of nature's graffiti artists. This is about 8mm long (only) - a tiny, tiny moth, in real life. Here is an annotated image. Here is the same creature, image blown up about 10 x magnification. Cute, but so hard to see. I like its "owl-like" eyes.
And yet its larvae are such a feature of the Australian bush.This is a soft bodied creature which appears to have many, many legs, so if not to be classed as an "insect". I am assuming it is a larval stage of something which will look quite different eventually. But I have not been able to find anything like it on the Internet, yet. This is a composite image, with the same creature, which as you can tell is quite active, it has changed position in each photo.
Here is the same creature, in situ, on the Scribbly Gum tree bark. It is about the size of a match-head, and really was quite hard to see, at first. Fortunately I had my macro lens with me at the time.If anyone has any ideas what type of creature this is, I would appreciate a hint. I don't know where to look for any information about such a creature. It seems to have 10 pairs of legs, or 9 pairs, plus mouth parts. An unusual number, anyway.

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