On July 13^th, the club held one of its two meetings for the year. We were transported to the Central Highlands of Tasmania to learn about a number of threatened species there.

A small group from our club had met Karen Richards briefly at Lake Augusta / Carter Lakes in 2015 when both parties were on a hunt for the Miena Jewel beetle. Our interest was merely as citizen scientists, but Karen and her party were on a mission to discover more about an insect first described in 1934 but thought extinct until observed in small numbers in 2013.

Karen’s work as Senior Zoologist with NRE has been at the forefront of the science around the Miena jewel beetle and in her talk she elaborated on the steps taken to find out more about the beetle, Castiarina insculpta. To that end she published a number of papers which are available on-line and can be read and down-loaded on ResearchGate. They include observations about food plants,  male / female biology and the effects of the 2019 bush fire.

One salient subject which came up for discussion was about the amount of attention that is paid nowadays to DNA when doing science. It seems there may be less attention paid to the ecological ‘story’ of species, the sort of stories we enjoyed hearing from Karen. It seems Karen’s interest in narrow range endemics leads itself to gaining insights into the poorly understood ecology of species.

The Tas Land Conservancy allowed us to download and show their hour long film about another narrow range species living in the harsh environment of Tasmania’s Central Highlands. The cider gum, Eucalyptus gunnii which was known to first peoples for the intoxicating exudate which weeps from the tree, is critically threatened by the effects of climate change, grazing by deer and bushfire. The story consisted of contributions from first nations people, artists, scientists and photographers who explained the special place this tree holds in their hearts and the attempts by the TLC in their various reserves to protect it.