#Chapman Road Scientific Reserve

[drhoz]

The Great ACT-NSW-NZ Trip, 2023-2024 - Chapman Road Scientific Reserve

Another place of scientific interest that was promptly put on the To-Do list when @purrdence found out about it. The reserve was established to preserve the salt-pan habitat, which used to be much more common in Central Otago until agriculture and irrigation trashed most of them.

As a result the reserve is one of the few places in Central Otago that still has salt-loving plants like Atriplex buchananii, and two species of moth that feed on that plant - Paranotoreas fulva and an undescribed Loxostege.

Unfortunately the reserve is also overrun with introduced weeds, but at least a few were new to me. I also got a closer look at Golden scabweed than I did in Cromwell, where I had to lean over the fence.

[drhoz]

#2722 - Xanthoparmelia cumberlandia - Cumberland Rock Shield

First described as Parmelia cumberlandia. Also known as rockfrong lichen, supposedly, but I suspect that might be a typo.

The photobiont is the alga Trebouxia. Widespread, apparently, growing on acidic rock.

Chapman Road Scientific Reserve, Aotearoa, New Zealand

[drhoz]

#2717 - Atriplex buchananii

The binomial is derived from an ancient Latin name which may have come from the Greek a-traphein - ‘without nourishment’ because many of species grow in arid deserts. John Buchanan (1819-1898) was a New Zealand botanist and scientific artist.

A short-lived chenopod found in open, salt-enriched, poorly draining clay or gravel strewn ground. It's most common in open turfs or gravel field near the high tide mark, on offshore islands in guano enriched soils or guano splattered rock. In Central Otago it grows in salt pans and slicks.

The main food plant for two endangered moths from inland Otago - Paranotoreas fulva and an undescribed Loxosteges.

Chapman Road Scientific Reserve, Aotearoa New Zealand.

[drhoz]

#2723 - Xanthoparmelia semiviridis -

Resurrection Lichen 

AKA Parmelia semiviridis, and Chondropsis semiviridis.

Found in the drier parts of Aotearoa's South Island, and semi-arid southern Australia. Very unusually for one of these lichen, it grows unattached to any substrate, and during dry spells curls up into a ball that can blow around like a tumbleweed. Once it rains it flattens out again.

In decline in Aotearoa because of habitat loss to agriculture, and invasive species like hawkweeds.

Chapman Road Scientific Reserve, Aotearoa New Zealand.

[drhoz]

#2716 - Paranotoreas fulva

 First described by British-born entomologist George Vernon Hudson in 1905 as Lythria fulva. Hudson is more famous for proposing Daylight Savings Time, at least partly to give himself more time for insect collecting. Hudson's collection of insects, the largest in New Zealand, is housed in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, but his notes describing thousands of species are recording in a coding system of his own invention. In 2018, Te Papa launched a project calling for digital volunteers to help decipher those codes.

The moth is endemic to the southern half of the South Island, and has been collected from the salt pans of Otago, the mountainous grassland areas in South Canterbury and Otago, and the glacial outwash terraces around Lake Tekapo. But the caterpillars preferred food are two increasingly rare native plants - the Slender Chickweed Stellaria gracilenta and the saltbush Atriplex buchananii. Some success has been had feeding them on weeds like the buck's-horn plantain (Plantago coronopus), Crepis sp., and Heiracium.

The Chapman Road Scientific Road near Alexandra was erected to protect some of the remaining saltpan habitat of the moth.

Central Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand