​​Greetings fellow Foxies,
After the first major rain of the season, I noticed lots of tiny creatures called entognathans, which had floated out of ground litter into puddles. On discovering that they were of ancient origin, I embarked on a fascinating journey to identify our oldest land animals. This is my interpretation.
Evolution is unrelenting. About 500 million years ago Australia was a part of the Gondwana supercontinent, an apparently bare mass of rock and soil above a teeming mass of algae and animals in the water.
About 470 million years ago relatives of today’s mosses and fungi colonised moist parts of the land, and within 30 million years great forests of ferns and other early plants like horsetails had arrived.
Amazingly, a huge fungus called Prototaxites towered above the earliest plants. Lichens with small to large trunk-like structures up to 1 metre (3 ft) wide, reached 8 metres (26 ft) in height. Huge amounts of dead plants and (fungi?) was material for earliest coal deposits and provided another food source for any animal that could live above water. Crustaceans evolved into groups that filled this gap.

Earliest animals were probably wood lice, millipedes, and ancient spiders. I haven’t seen any woodlice in Foxes lair but the introduced pill bug runs rampant in my garden, where they eat plant residues and chew potting mix and roots in pots.

​​The first spider that may have evolved to eat the wood lice and millipedes was an interesting beast, which  didn’t spin silk and resembled a giant tick. Visitor numbers to Foxes Lair would plummet if they were still here!

​The native millipede can occasionally be found in litter in drier spots such as around dead tree. Alas it has been overrun by that stinky intruder, the Portuguese millipede. Centipedes evolved later and are commonly found hiding under rocks and logs 

About 395 million years ago silverfish and entognathans appeared. Next time a silverfish runs out of a book that you are reading, resist the squashing urge and marvel at its resilience. They are amazingly adapted to eat and survive in dry organic matter. The silver sheen is actually a wax to prevent water loss, and they can absorb water from relatively dry air through their anus!
​In the bush I see them occasionally under dead bark on trees.

 Entognathans that include Springtails (Collembola)  are very common but mostly rarely seen. They are tiny wingless, six legged arthropods. Lucerne fleas are introduced pests of crops and pastures. Incidentally I produced the MyCrop web pages and would take better photos if I had my time again 😊. There are huge numbers of active springtails in Foxes Lair ground litter, that shred plant residues. They are very beneficial little animals that eat microbes. I often see them on fungi but they mostly eat the spores and are very useful for spreading mycorrhizal fungi.
As ancient fern forests were replaced by towering gymnosperms (pines), more animals evolved.
Along came the first vertebrate amphibians (today’s frogs and salamanders) to eat the arthropods and dragonflies, which grew to sixty centimetres. That is another story.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
Last summer I photographed what I thought was a damselfly on a woolly bush plant. It was actually an Heoclisis species adult antlion, which belongs to the order Neuroptera (lace winged insects).
Having large compound eyes and four clear wings,and a similar body shape, Neuropterans can resemble dragonflies and damselflies (order Odonata), but they evolved much later..  

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• Adults have large antennae because they hunt in the evening and at night
• Adults are proportionally  much larger than their larvae than dragonflies. They are more flimsy with a thinner exoskeleton and are clumsy fliers.

Owl flies (family Ascalaphidae) are closely related to antlions, but are active fliers that can catch their prey on the wing like dragonflies. They have similar looking larva to antlions that hide in bark or ground litter.
Owl flies have enormous golf club-antennae, and amazing compound eyes, which enable them to hunt in twilight.
Their compound eyes are split, The front half exclusively detects ultraviolet, and the rear has extra sensitivity in the blue-green range. Apparently this sharply delineates their prey against a uniform background. They are the nightfighters of the insect world. They stay immobile on during the day with abdomen raised to resemble a twig.
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I wish I had taken more photos of this one I found it in the morning.

​Dragonflies and damselflies are common but amazing creatures. They are amongst the earliest winged insects which evolved about 325 million years ago to eat land dwelling animals like spiders, silverfish and millipedes. At this time our ancestors were large lumbering amphibians like giant salamanders. (I suspect that some humans are reverting to that state).

 Dragonflies are expert fliers. They can fly straight up and down, hover like a helicopter and even mate mid-air. They catch their insect prey by grabbing it with their feet. They have the best vision in the insect world and may be able to see more colours than us. This may explain why dragonflies and damselflies have such colourful bodies, and why males of some species, are more colourful than females.
​Dragonflies and their larvae are aquatic and eat just about anything—tadpoles, mosquitoes, fish, other insect larvae and even each other. Adult dragonflies are top predators in the insect world, and apart from being caught by the odd bird, live a full adult life (from a week to a year depending on species).
​Dragonfly common names meant more when I learnt that they  referred to hunting methods.

Hawking - Most dragonflies capture their prey in flight, plucking live insects out of the air. By forming a basket of sorts with its legs, a dragonfly can overtake a fly or bee and simply scoop it up and pop it into its mouth, without stopping. Some, like darners and spread wings, will just open their mouths and swallow whatever they catch as they fly. Dragonflies that use hawking to catch their prey include darners, emeralds, gliders, and saddlebags. Unfortunately some common names can be misleading. Common names for Pantala flavescens are wandering glider, globe wanderer and globe skimmer.

​Sallying - Perching dragonflies will sit and watch for prey, and then rapidly sally forth to capture it as it passes by. Salliers include skimmers,perchers, clubtails, dancers, spread wings, and broad-winged damsels.

​Gleaning - Hovering over vegetation and snatching insects perched on plant leaves or stems. Most pond damselflies are gleaners.

Click here for more great information

Net-winged insects like lacewings can be confused with damselflies. They evolved about 50 million years later as land hunters that do not need water for breeding. A way to detect them is to look for their antennae, that dragonflies and damselflies do not have. They are most active in the evening.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
It is amazing how a single question can open up a new world of knowledge.

When I photographed a couple of fly species pollinating sandalwood flowers, I noticed that the surface of their eyes had facets like gemstones, unlike the round shape of most insects.  I caught house and March flies (an easy task this time of the year) and found the same. Why is this so?.

​I Googled insect vision and was blown away by a wealth of fascinating information that explains so much about insects and how they behave.

​​​Our own eyes provide us with very clear coloured images with good depth perception and can detect fairly rapid changes of movement. We have two large movable eyes with lenses that can change shape and regulate light intake, and a sensitive retina that is backed up by large computing power.
Insects have compound eyes consisting of hundreds of single focus lenses that each have relatively few receptors (ommatidia). Most don't see very clearly but they are good at detecting movement. Ommatidia are packed together in a hexagonal, pentagonal or occasionally square array.

​Most insects have a less comprehensive colour range than us and don't differentiate orange and red. However they can see ultraviolet colours that we can't. Many flowers have ultraviolet pigments that we can't see, but make patterns specifically designed to attract pollinators. Similarly insect eye colours act a sunglasses that filter out some colours and make their targets and predators more visible.
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There are many tweaks that different insect have to adapt their vision to their lifestyle.
To get a full understanding please have a look at these fascinating blogs? 

• Through the compound eye.
• Insect vision.

​None of this explains why many flies have gemstone facet eyes. A possible link is that they are all fast flying insects that often interact with animals The facets enable more individual ommatidia to provide better focus in fewer directions that would enable them to react faster to say a swatting hand or tail. The slower flying insects below all have more rounded eyes.

Dragonflies are an fast-flying exception but the following features greatly enhance their vision.

• Enormous eyes with more sensors per ommatidia. 
• A huge range of colour receptors, and have the fastest movement detecting ability (flicker fusion frequency).

They can detect 300 images per second compared to our 15 to 20.

Have you ever caught a flying dragonfly?