BZ3620 Trip 3: Smithfield Regional Park and Machans Beach/Redden Island

Smithfield Regional Park is the large rainforested conservation area behind the JCU Cairns campus. There are plenty of trails winding their way through the area. This area was pretty normal rainforest, large emergent trees, defined shrub layer, epiphytes, woody and herbaceous climbers. I didn't take many photos, but I did get some photos of a stinging tree (Dendrocnide moroides) which is one of my favourite plants, because they will fuck your shit up with their stinging hairs.

They are pretty easy to find and identify. If you can find a patch of sunlight from a tree fall in the rainforest, or any disturbed area in general, you will probably find a stinging tree. They have large, furry leaves held out horizontally, and their leaves are often chewed up by beetles.

This one had fruit on it. Yes, you can eat the fruit, but you have to brave the stinging hairs to get it. Bear in mind the hairs cover every part of the plant, and often cause severe allergic reactions that often lead to hospitalisation. Even if you aren't allergic, being stung is not a walk in the park.

After lunch, we headed out to Machans Beach to look at mangroves and sandy soil forest. This was a really cool part of the trip for me, because I finally got to see a proper tropical mangrove forest.

This is Bully the bull, he lives in the park and is taken care of by the public.

So yeah, tropical mangroves forests. So cool. There were epiphytes galore in there, as well as other understorey plants. The trees themselves were nice and tall, and there were species other than Rhizophora and Avicennia. Back at home, there are huge mangrove forests covering the mudflats. These forests are mainly made up of Avicennia and Rhizophora. There are other genera present, like Bruguiera, Ceriops, Excoecaria, Xylocarpus, and Acanthus, but you have to look very hard for them.

Platycerium in the mangroves.

Dendrobium discolor. We have this growing at home, both in the wild and in the greenhouse. Such a nifty orchid, it can take a beating and just bounce back. I have seen it growing on primary dunes in full sun enduring salt spray and very little rainfall.

Crinum pedunculatum. Swamp-lily, it can take some shit as well. Really pretty white flowers.

The mangroves at Machans Beach were so cool, but they don't even begin to measure up against the mangrove forest we saw at Marrja Boardwalk in the Daintree. Still, waaay better than the ones down around Gladstone.

We then left the mangroves to walk along the main track through the park and do some botanising.
The forest was pretty open in places, with a shitty shrub layer, and plenty of vines.
Another botanical bucket list tick was made with Myrmecodia beccarii. This is an epiphyte, and has a symbiotic relationship with ants. The swollen stems of the ant plant are riddled with tunnels, which the ants inhabit. The plant gives the ants a home, and the ants protect the plant and it is thought that the plant gains some nutrients from dead ants, ant poop, and bits of leftover meals. A really, really cool plant. What is even cooler is that there are heaps of plants that have this sort of relationship with ants, like some african acacias, and an apocynaceous vine, Dischidia major, which we will encounter later.

Those little white nubs are the flowers. Myrmecodia is in Family Rubiaceae, which includes gardenia, coffee, those sorts of things.

Growing as an epiphyte alongside Myrmecodia beccarii was Dischidia nummularia, which many people know as button orchid. It is not an orchid, but a succulent in Apocynaceae.

There was another Apocynaceae at Machans Beach - Tabernaemontana orientalis, also called Boat Tree.

 

I also found some Cardwell lilies, but they weren't flowering. Still, a nice find.

Next trip is the Daintree trip! Yay! Proper mangrove forests, Australian endemics, and super old rainforest. Very cool stuff.

BZ3620 Trip 2: Davies Creek

Our second day trip was to Davies Creek on the Atherton Tableland. Eucalypt woodland dominates the drier areas of the watershed, with rainforest further up the creek towards the falls. Wet sclerophyll, a very cool and rare type of forest, runs along the creek in a narrow band.

Upon arriving at Davies Creek, we split up into two groups, one group started at the rainforest, and the other started in the eucalypt woodland, and then swapped over after lunch. Luckily the group I was in was the rainforest starting group.

Above, native bees gather around a wound on a Bursaria. Doing what, I don't know. Maybe gathering the sugary phloem?

On the way to the rainforested area, we stopped at the Eucalyptus grandis wet sclerophyll ecotone. Eucalyptus grandis dominates this area, and is similar to the mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests down south, in that they need devastating fires to reproduce. The understorey was composed of ferns, mostly bracken and Cyathea, Dianella, gingers, and heaps of other things that I didn't get a good chance to look at.
The Greater Mahogany Glider inhabits this type of forest, and the marks that it leaves on the trees are quite distinctive. The glider drinks the sugary sap, and as it works its way up the tree, it moves in a spiral, so there are these cool spiral shaped scars on the trunks. I didn't get a good photo of any of the scars, but they are there.
These ecotones are very cool, because of the reproduction by fire method, and also because they get invaded by rainforest. Most people think that the rainforest would be being invaded by the sclerophyll, but without a consistent fire regime, the rainforest is quite aggressive in moving into and taking over the fire affected ecotones. So if the rainforest invades fully, then there is no habitat for the gliders.

From there, we moved through the teeny tiny patch of ecotone to the rainforest. Yay!

And of course, because we were standing still talking about plants for so long, the leeches found us.

As with most rainforest areas in tropical Queensland it seems, there is history of logging in the area.

On the side of the path, there was a dead bush pig. Someone had killed it and separated the head from the body. Bloody hell, it was ripe. Worst thing that has even been smelt in the history of mankind. It had been dead for a while I reckon, it looked like it had gone past the bloating stage of decomposition and had turned to mush which had soaked into the ground. Urgh. Never again.

We then headed up into the dry eucalypt woodland. Nothing too exciting there, so no photos. Nothing except this cute little dragon that Fiona caught.

My old enemy, Erythrina vespertilio. Thorny little buggers.


Nothing to do for the rest of the trip, so I poked around the flooded gums along the creek.

And that's Davies Creek.