Off Venus Drive: Life in a dead tree

Happily for my duck, For some reason, many of the bugs and spiders that we found this rainy morn seemed to harbour a soft spot for Joe's bosom, on whom they readily leaped and lorded. Even the platoons of slugs, which were patrolling the broad blades of the Alocasia macrorrhiza by the trail, tried to turn her into a pulmonatory trampoline until she threatened them with the same crabby fate as last night's Penaeid shrimps and earlier batches of spiced Scylla. Might any passing malacologist know if the littler slug on the left is conspecific with the big mama above? The former appears to have a vestigial shell atop its mantle. No matter, I wouldn't touch either of these slimey shellless snails with a ten-foot duck!

[Update: yan tells me the first animal is Parmarion pupillaris martensi (Ariophantidae) and the second is Helicarion perfragilis (Helicarionidae), and that these creatures are not slugs but semi-slugs, i.e. advanced snails that are in the process of losing their shells. Did I mention as well that slugs are hemaphrodites? This means that any two fellows who cross each other's path can happily engage in a bout of naked heteroerotic wrestling (click here for some safe-for-work slug porn) and neither will complain later that they stink of each others' unwashed testes. And you probably can't apprehend them either for violating Sections 377 and 377A of Singapore's Penal Code as for all that slimey bestiality, their mutual ducking fucking still serves a procreational purpose. (click here to see a slug expelling eggs from the side of its head and here to see come cute squishable baby slugs.]

The persistent rain kept us from our original plan to emerge stinky and sweaty from Rifle Range Road, but it was still a fruitful outing thanks to Art's naturist naturalist instincts. We spent nearly an hour by a 20 ft tall dead tree trunk by the stream, which in demise has turned into a high falutin penthouse for saprophytes and myriad tiny creatures that feed and fuck on the fungi and in the flaking bark. Swirling in equidistant swarms around the tree were tiny vinegar flies (Drosophilidae) that tire little, settling down on the basiodocarps for but a fleeting moment. At eye level, small annelid worms were poking their ends out of holes in the deadwood, seduced into the open by the humidity of the recent rains that had drenched my duck with a distressingly odour of damp mould.

Half a world away, Aydin puzzled over a similar observation in the woods of Maryland, but his duck worm clambered up a live beech and was only knee-high. It's not improbable that to an earthworm, the decaying insides of a dead tree become simply a vertical extension of the soil layer, allowing the creatures to chew their way up a tower of cellulose and poke their wantonly wriggling butts out for the benefit of biting ducks. In a slow and steady tithe of sustenance, the wasting wood releases the accumulated essence of its once budding years to the beings that are working to break down its ligneous shell. And when in turn they spread their spores or feed the beasts that capture them, life in the forest begins anew, in a cycle of rebirth and reclamation that has survived ice ages and methane belches only to wither before the might of metal saws that with careless ease break this chain of green and glorious growth.

Bumming around on the bark and amidst the mycological meadow are bright red Collembolans (which I thought were mites until corrected by Art). Tiny ladybug-like fungus beetles (Erotylidae) flit in and out of the bark layers, where the females lay eggs that hatch into larva that feed on fungi. On the elytra of the adults are even tinier mites that may be using the beetles as a host or simply hitching a ride from stump to stump.

Also brandishing gaudy colours were several earwigs with red heads and yellow sideburns. Both sexes appear similarly clad but the males (?) have noticeably longer abdominal forceps. I also learnt that the males of some earwig species actually have two (!) penises, which can  be longer than the insect's body. This suggests some interesting porn movie possibilities; think "Double the Duck: Twice the Pleasure". A couple of researchers, however, took a perverse interest in dishing out pain to their subjects. Under the pretext of academic curiousity, they took mating earwigs and pulled off the male in mid-copulation, causing the penis to break (!!), with the severed off end remaining in the female. Blue balls are bad enough; but dismembered ducks!? *shudder* 

Some folk believe earwigs are fond of crawling into people's ears and embedding themselves into the brain in order to take control of their minds. This reputation as a pest is wholly undeserved. The way my duck sees it, most people here already have their brainwaves afixed to unquestionably non-seditious thoughts echoes of daily-imbibed propaganda that already mirrors the hierarchical logic of colony-building insects with their dedication to designated order, rank and function as well as the total subservience of the individual to the collective. There's hardly any space left in those neurons for infiltration by a lowly crawler of primitive mien.

Higher up the food chain are rove beetles (Staphylinidae), which defy the family's rotund image with a slick and slim build with a reduced elytra (the membraneous forewing that covers the hindwings in most of the Coleoptera) and flexible abdomen. Rove beetles are predatory and one genus, Paederus, produces a toxin that causes painful blisters on the skin. A crab spider-like arachnid was also prowling the crevices, and prey was surely not unabundant, as each square inch of deadwood bore a rich fruit of minute arthropods, most of which my duck has never had the pleasure of eating knowing.

Comments

[Aydin]

Oooh, funky semi-slugs! That's a nice picture showing the see thru shell.