Crikey steveirwini that much!! lol

I am sort of into insects and spiders. Sometime you do see things strange and google to try and identify it with no result and wonder if it had been discovered yet. I imagine many small creatures have been seen by people, just so few people would recognise it as not being officially discovered. The forest up here is very difficult to access the virgin areas. Most access is by old logging tracks. We often try to get into a virgin area but almost impossible. Still some gems of places that nobody ever visits and see all sorts of wonderful insects. Just the leeches, mmmm not partial to those much.

TheMissus, who knows what lies out there in the deep dark rainforests of the far north. Some pretty interesting things no doubt.

A lot of plants from this area, which is my botanical backyard - the Wet Tropics between Townsville and Cooktown - have only quite recently been described. Others are known but yet to be described and named.

Recently named species even include very large rainforest trees, such as a precursor to the genus Eucalyptus which evolved out of the rainforest at the end of the Tertiary - Stockwellia quadrifida: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118944202/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
a very primitive Proteaceae, being a possible precursor to Macadamias and the like - Eidothea zoexylocaria: http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/abstract/94/8/1282 and an undescribed species of Argyrodendron.

If there are huge canopy trees that haven't been sorted out yet, then you can imagine that there must be all manner of small inconspicuous things. And it is not only in rainforests, it is across sclerophyllous Australia as well, not least with the ironbarks, other species of Eucalyptus, Acacia, Melaleuca, etc.

As far as insects go, it seems that the butterflies are pretty well sorted, but their sister group, the moths are nowhere near done. And just about any other group of insects or invertebrates has still got a very long way to go.

So yes, it is highly likely that you have seen a variety of undescribed critters.

Now wouldn't it be great if people were encouraged and facilitated in taking an interest, collecting specimens, field data, photos, etc and submitting them to the museum and herbarium.

I'll explore this further in the next post tomorrow.

I very strongly feel that there should be concerted efforts made to encourage lay people to be involved with the contribution of specimens, data, photos, etc.

We recently had a Weedspotters program in Queensland, in which landholders and indeed any member of the public were encouraged to participate in order to build up the database of where particular weed species occur and to gain some idea of abundance and rate of spread, etc.

It was a minor success for a few years. Now I think it has ceased to be funded.

This is the sort of thing that we need for all flora and fauna. If it was done properly, the rate of improvement in our knowledge could greatly increase. With a large-scale increase in interest, big increases in funding would be easier to secure.

Crikey, what we really need is someone like Steve Irwin to promote this stuff.

Pity he has left us