Tayatea: The Giant Freshwater Crayfish.

The Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish (Astacopsis gouldi) is the largest freshwater invertebrate in the world. The species is only found in the rivers in northern Tasmania. It is listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List due to overfishing and habitat degradation. The tayatea requires pristine environments to survive without erosion or silted rivers.

The diet of the freshwater crayfish varies with age, but predominantly consists of decaying wood, leaves and their associated microbes. They may also eat small fish, insects, rotting animal flesh and other microbial detritus when available. A. gouldi is very long-lived, surviving for up to 60 years. It has previously been reported to attain weights of up to 6 kilograms and measure over 80 centimetres long; however, in recent years the majority of larger specimens are 2–3 kilograms. When fully mature the species has no natural predators due to its large size, while smaller individuals can be prey of platypus, riverblackfish and rakali.

The dispersal and migratory patterns of A. gouldi are largely unknown, but they are recorded to be most active during summer and autumn when water temperatures are higher, they are also known to walk over land. Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish have extremely slow maturation rates, with females reaching sexual maturity at approximately 14 years of age, a weight of 550 grams and a carapace length of 120 millimetres. Males are thought to reach maturity more quickly at around 9 years, 300 grams and 76 millimetres carapace length.

Females mate and spawn once every two years in autumn after a summer moult, producing 224–1300 eggs proportional to its size. Gestation of the eggs takes about nine months, with females carrying the eggs on their tail through winter. After hatching in mid-summer, the hatchlings of about 6 millimetres attach to the female's swimming legs and will remain with the mother until a few months later in autumn. A long reproductive process means that females spend much of their life attached to their eggs and hatchlings.

Pollination was produced as part of the Laughing Waters Residency, in 2011. It explores mutually symbiotic relationships in the region, between invertebrates and flowering plants. It captures the complicated and complex plethora of diversity that is required to maintain the health of an ecosystem, both in floral and faunal composition. Pollination is a work on paper, using the mediums of watercolour, ink and resin to explore this idea. The resin was used as a way to portray the succulence and moist environment within the reproductive organs of a flower. Through a microscope, one is able to understand the important role of the flower anatomy to protect the precious reproductive structures that enable movement of microscopic sex cells into their final resting place of a zygote.

This image is a detail of the work which is 270 x 70 cm.

Kept in private collection.

I remember that nothing is ever lost, yet everything will die, only some will survive. I remember giant species of birds and the stones on a forest floor, cushioning the fungi and listening to the dead…I remember the haunting cries of the huia. I remember the huia. I remember the hui.

Huia of Aoteroa, New Zealand, our avian feathered friends from the land of the long white cloud. Extinct. 1907. Aoteroa, this island landscape separated itself from its gondwanan supercontinent 80 million years and with it, took a community of lifeforms, reptiles and invertebrates, diverse floras and fascinating feathered avian birds, but no mammals. Weathering stones and volcanoes, earth tremors and changing climates, glacial rivers and slivers of genetics. Life force arranged and became. An evolving, emergent convergence of life… devoid of wombs, the mammal looms. Time passed. Inhabitants of the old forest floor, wattlebirds hopped and bounced, ushering in the new dawn with duets. A complex old forest the only home for the hui. A forest of multi ages, new and old, dead and growing, seeds sowing, ancient giants and dappled sunlight. Insects decomposing the fallen were the tasty morsels of the morning bird. Old growth worlds of weka, huhu, grubs and larvae living amongst the decay of the fallen, a nutrient rich relay of cycling. Di morphic breeders worked together. The female, a long and elegant bill of 15cm, the male, shorter, sturdier 6cm. In collaboration they would tackle a fallen log, a decaying branch, being crucial cogs in the forest’s soggy ability to feed itself. The short billed partner would use its bill, short and fierce, exposing and extracting huhu larvaes and grubs, the long billed would probe deeper, extracting from the solid of wood. Sharing the spoils, the toils of daily routine, the comradierie was crucial to their existence. The genius of this relationship created a nutrient rich distribution for all to enjoy, multiple niches for multiple opportunity, a complex diverse ecosystem of multiplicity…of synchronicity, inspired and rigourous insistency..intimacy life in all the layers, incorporating many players…strata’s of chance…an intimate death life dance. Their foods included the weta’s. Their ovipositors dug deep, eggs asleep. And beaks were long and strong, The soft rotting forest floor of decay, of wood and bark, and lichen clay, offered up spiders and mantis and butterfly food, forest fungi and fruits of hinau, coprosma and berry poo. The huia was forest health, sharing its decomposed meals of insect, seed and fungi poop, keeping the nutrient rich loop of life safe from the harsh strike of the mortal knife. Planting young trees with the nutrients of the old.. Keeping the forest strong, gifting it a life long. The arrival of mammals saw changes in the ecology of this land.... the sapien, the polynesian rat landing on the beach sand… Dancing, singing an enmeshed geo- biology A series of new relationships weaved a new ecology some creatures thrived and some died. An acceleration and increase of disturbance imbued the late 1800’s consumed… the onslaught of colonial eurpoean settlers, of colonization, an industrialization of land led to mass deforestation and settler inhabitation. An embedded and enmeshed connection of relationships swept from the story, lifelines broken, the blood wept. Once, a forest floor soft with moss and quiet tendrils of feeding songs became a battleground . Adrenilin reeked to the sound of a gun. Our feathered cousins, assaulted by the stoats, cats, rats and foxes, were harassed to extinction by the scientist. There was no outwitting of the ferocious naturalist, no escape from the fashionistas, the cultural “elite” seeking to dominate and own that which cannot be owned. Arrogance roamed. It was a thirst for dissecting, bisecting, intersecting…for stuffing and owning. the colonial scientific acquisition and the macabre cultural fashion inquisition led to the death of the huia. The sacred birds who duetted in the dawn. There was once more than 90000 of this forest floor dweller, an ecological storyteller, a bouncer, a hopper. For the Maori they were tapu. Sacred. Honour. But this honouring became misguided amongst a eurpoean elite, and hunting for science, specimen collection, taxidermic mounting and fashionista’s lead to expeditions where hunted huia’s reached 600 dead a session, a procession of morbid fascination, an inethical decimation. The onslaught continued and within the briefest of time there were more huia’s within museums then there were in their home, within the forest loam. And then there were zero. Except for a few moulting, rotting mounts in far away places, far from the forest home. And now the forests suffer, the memory of the huia haunts the land, from its legacy of feeding and frolicking, of controlling the weta and spreading their seed, the forests destroyed by greed. the huia, the dawn bird of the long white cloud. Beak, claw, forest floor, feather tethered, connection severed. The land, the sea the birds and bees will perish if we don’t step right back and cherish. A learning, living and becoming with, the earth, the land, the bird and the sand.