Wonderful Nature; All Connected.

What we're looking at here are wattles also known as acacias. This one's called bipinnate. "Bi" means two and "pinnate" is eight little things so they've got little feathery leaves. This is also a wattle, and it's got complete leaves. Now, before we go more into how to work out what is a wattle, a quick thing about them, these are pioneer plants. If you think of a pioneer, they've come to a place early and they'll set things up usually ready for the later people to come. Now, in this case as pioneers, they fix nitrogen. That means, they are able to work with mycorrhizal fungi.

They are able to work to get nitrogen out of the air and to fix it into the soil. So then, the nitrogen is available for the other plants that come like the regrowing eucalips, gumptree that is and a whole range of other species. But, after a big disturbance of fire, you'll see a whole lot of pioneer plants. And, the wattles or acacias are one of the most abundant of the pioneer plants.

Now, a little about how to tell a wattle is because they look so different. All wattles have a gland, now, you may or may not be able to see that on the camera but if you're that interested in botany, you can look at some books and come out into the wild and see what you can see because it is actually really small. In this case, it's a tiny little dot, little brown dot there on the base of the leaf. Now, all wattles have glands so that's the one on this one and on this bipinnate, you can see it much more clearly. I'll get one out of the sun here for you. So take a look here, this little dot here, is the gland. So there's the gland along that leaf as well.

Now, what the glands do is they release a substance that the ants like to eat. So then you'll have ants visiting and being around wattle trees. Another really good thing about that is the seeds that fall have a little piece of food on them, and the ants will eat that food, but the ants don't eat that food all the time, the ants eat that food when there's no much else to eat. So, what the ants will do is they live near the wattles, they'll collect the seed, they'll take it down underground where their ant houses are, they'll pile all the wattle seeds up in there like a storage, and then , when there's a time when there's not a lot of food around or no food such as after a big fire, the ants will get those seeds and they'll nibble off the little food bit, little fatty carbohydrates on each seed called a lysosome. Once that food bits being chewed off, the seed is no longer useful to the ant so the ants then bring it up and put it up on the landscape around them. This means that the wattle seeds have a safe place underground during the hot fires and when there is no much food around, their seeds get deposited to the ash and ready to grow with the next rains.

So, this is just one tiny example of how things fit together. We have the wattles, pioneer plants. Fixing nitrogen for the other plants to come in. We have the association of the wattles with the ants that can protect their seeds underground and bring them up after fires. There's so much more to the wattles and to the whole ecosystem but this is just a little look at one tiny piece and they give appreciation to all those who pass on their stories, particularly the long history of stories from Australia's first peoples.