BugWise

Supervising young BugWise volunteers. Photo: K Straw © K Straw.

What's important about the Tingira Heights Nature Reserve at Eleebana?

The Damjanovic and Giudes families live in a residential suburb that is surrounded by a bushland reserve that is managed by Hunter Water Corporation in Newcastle.  The bushland reserve provides a large variety of vegetation communities (littoral rainforest, wet sclerophyll) and the north east side forms the catchment for South Creek which eventually flows into Lake Macquarie.  Although the reserve does have weeds and is not in perfect condition, it does provide a lovely bushland setting for the local community, provides many opportunities for Landcare and there are lots of trails for exploring nature.

How is Web2Spider being used at Eleebana?

Four local boys have expressed a lot of interest in the plants, animals and insects in their neighbourhood to NPWS Ranger Kathleen Straw.  So when the Web2spider workshop came up, it was a perfect opportunity to get the boys out into the bush and really look at what is in the reserve.  The boys like the area around the water tank as it has some really nice undisturbed or 'reference' areas (spotted gum, ironbark) as well as some areas that are regenerating naturally where the bush has been cleared (Pultanea, Xanthorrhoea, Lomandra, Dianella). There are also areas of erosion and some degradation, but the boys were interested in seeing what they could find in these more natural areas.

Sunday mornings are now spent walking up to the water tank and counting webs!  As well, a number of other spiders have been found in the pool area (including red backs and funnel web spiders with gordian worms) to say nothing of assassin bugs, centipedes and all manner of insects.

Contributed by Kathleen Straw (NPWS Ranger)

Results and Discussion

Surveys were conducted over three days (February 17, 24 and March 3 2008). The most common web type in rehabilitated sites was W17 (35% of total) while W32 accounted for the majority of the total in reference sites (34%). A total of 141 webs (46 in rehabilitated sites and 95 in reference sites) and 16 different web types were recorded (9 in rehabilitated sites and 13 in reference sites). Seven web-types (W2, W3, W6, W8, W10, W19, W21) were unique to reference sites and three were found only in rehabilitated sites (W4, W13, W30). While mean diversity and abundance was higher at reference sites than rehabilitated sites, variability indicated that there were no real differences between the two habitat types (See figures below).

From the group’s results, removing weeds was probably beneficial for web-building spider diversity since there were no real differences between the two types of site. Future surveys at sites that contained weeds would help assess the success of rehabilitation attempts.