A
beautiful sunny start to 2018 and I wish you all a Happy New Year.
The other day I passed the back of a curious concrete structure south
of Lithines and I decided to stop and walk around to the front of it.
Here it is, come on I'll show you. Once upon a time these hexagons
were all mirrored which would have been a spectacular sight for that
buzzard up there. Despite looking like something out of a Bond movie,
it was actually an early solar power experiment. Crete is no stranger
to discovering the power of the sun of course. Back in the day an
engineer called Daedalus was imprisoned on Crete with his son Icarus
by King Minos. In an ingenious escape plan Daedalus made wings of
feathers and wax for the pair of them. Icarus flew too close to the
sun, the wax melted and he fell back to earth with a splat. Actually
both Icarus and the story crash at this point because the higher you
fly, the colder it gets. Far from melting, the wax was more in
danger of icing up. The result would have been the same of course.
Many
animals shun the heat of the Cretan sun by hiding under rocks and
with so many of these hexagons lying around in the undergrowth I
reckon we can have a flipping good day finding some of them. Lets
start with a couple of myriapods and dispel a few myths about legs.
As children we were taught that centipedes had a hundred legs and
millipedes a thousand (and their names reflect this). Neither fact is
true. Myriapods, the group to which they belong means ten thousand
legs and that's wrong also. Centipedes can have anywhere between 30
and about 350 legs (this one has about 40) and even the most leggy of
millipedes only has 750. Our curled up friend here has about120. In
addition to this they grow to adulthood by adding segments and legs
as they develop, starting with as little as three segments and six
legs, so counting legs is not a good way of differentiating the two
animals. The trick is to look at the arrangement: centipedes have one
pair of legs per body segment, millipedes have two.
I
don't know if you've noticed but there's a door in the floor over
there which can only mean one of two things. It's either a portal to
another dimension or a flat-pack fridge (I often wonder what IKEA do
with ideas that don't quite work). Let's open it up and find out what
lies within. Corrugated cardboard which seems to be of interest to
hundreds and hundreds of ants. I wonder what they find so
fascinating? When reading about ants one often comes across the
prefix 'myrm' (people who study ants are myrmecologists, seed
dispersal by ants is called myrmecochory and so on) and the words
come from the Greek 'myrmex'. There is an ancient Greek myth
regarding Aeacus and Aegina who grew up alone on the island of
Aegina. Getting rather bored of calling out “Aegina” and getting
the response “Are you talking to me or the island?” (which wasn't
a very good joke in the first place but pales considerably after the
hundredth repetition) Aeacus asked Zeus to provide a bit of
alternative company. Never one to do things by halves Zeus turned all
the ants on the island into men and women and they were known as the
Myrmidons who later fought with Achilles at Troy. There is an
alternative version in which the Myrmidons were supposed to have been
descended from the son of Zeus and Eurymedusa whom he seduced whilst
appearing in the form of an ant but that seems somewhat impractical
on many levels, even for Zeus.
Moving
on to this Lentisc bush for a moment we seem to have something
interesting going on. The spider is our old friend Cytophora,
the
Tropical Tent Web Spider, going about her business of cocooning food
trapped in her web. But I'm rather more interested in this little bug
that she seems to be ignoring. If I just extract it and turn it over
in my hand... Yes, despite the faded colours which indicates that it
may have been trapped for some time, it is definitely Zelus
renardii.
This Assassin Bug, you may recall, is a newcomer to Europe having
been discovered on mainland Greece in 2011and here on Crete by
ourselves in 2014 (see Red
Autumn). Now the question is, why has she not parcelled it up for
later consumption? We'll have to keep our eyes out for further
instances and see if this is just a one-off or a more general
occurrence.
*********************************************************************
LINKS:
Share
your nature thoughts, photos and comments on Naturalists
(the
facebook page that accompanies this blog)
Explore
the region with the #CreteNature interactive Hiking
and Nature Map
Great stuff, as usual. Love the story of the ants.
ReplyDeleteThe grasshopper is beautiful, surprised to see one with wings, had no idea there was such a thing
ReplyDeleteYes the structure you came across was a solar generator project that ran out of funds ..the parabolic concrete thing covered in mirrors were focused on a devise that heated water to make steam that powered a generator that produced electricity ... A while back I found a British engineer who worked on it ... he was a bit dismayed to hear that the site was wrecked ....
ReplyDeleteReally interesting!
ReplyDelete