Adventure Ausrama Blog

Forget your plastics. There is a naturally occurring material with better properties. It is produced in the nests of the Australian masked bee. The substance is resistant to fire and repels water. Furthermore, it is very strong. A company called the Humble Bee located on New Zealand is reverse-engineering the cellophane-like material in an attempt to create a biodegradable substitute for plastic.  If successful, world pollution will be substantially reduced. We are so dependent on things made from oil. The little bees sourced from Noosa in Queensland hold out great hope for a reduction in such products. A way of trapping the Hylaeus nubilosus has been developed by Chris Fuller of Kin Kin. Veronica Harwood-Stevenson has spent her house deposit and winnings from the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency's Bright Ideas Challenge on the project. It is in the early stages. Ways of manufacturing are being studied. The aim is to initially make outdoor apparel and ...

Spider webs are advanced pieces of evolutionary engineering. They are also collecting vats for what lives in the neighborhood. The DNA of what a spider had for dinner remains on the web for months. Silk from spiders webs is in demand for potential pest management, conservation, biodiversity monitoring and biogeography. It is a natural source of accumulated data and analysis of it is informative. If the DNA makeup of a web changes then something is wrong. In the tests, black widow spiders were kept alive by feeding them with crickets. When a spider died its DNA remained on the web for 88 days. In the wild, the net of the web catches insects, small animals and flora debris. Going out and getting some web silk is proving to be a valuable way of monitoring changes in spider populations, particularly when new species move into an area. Importantly, an eye can be kept on those on the endangered list. The method is only good for small animals because large ones take the whole web wit...