One of my very favourite things about living in a tropical environment happens after dark!

When night time falls and we humans are getting ready to sleep, a whole range of nocturnal creatures start to awaken and get themselves ready for a night of eating, mating and making noise. And what a beautiful noise it is - like a natural insect orchestra in which every creature has their specific part to play. I find it amazing that at times the sound intensifies suddenly as if being conducted to rise to a crescendo and then fade away just as mysteriously.

I definitely prefer those creatures that stay outside – I don’t like to watch the suicides of the moths and creatures attracted to the light and the buzzing sound of something in the bedroom can be insomniacally disturbing.

It’s a strange phenomenon that these night bugs should be so attracted to light even to the point of suicide. In researching I found out that it’s because of phototaxis. According to ‘How Stuff Works’ phototaxis is “an organism's automatic movement toward or away from light.” Certain bugs have a propensity to the light and are positively phototactic, whilst others such as cockroaches are negatively phototactic and will run away as soon as you switch on the lights.

Continue reading "Orchestral Movements in the Dark"

Continue reading "A Captivating Rhythm – The Pulse of the Steel Pan"

Water Lemons. The name sounds like a mispronunciation and most times when I mention the words, people look at me strangely and ask: “Don’t you mean watermelons?” No I definitely mean water lemons, the common name for the fruit Passiflora Laurifolia also known as Bell Apple, Yellow Granadilla or Golden Apple. They are a relative of passion fruits and grow in the same way on a vine. But unlike passion fruits they are hardly cultivated and quite rare.

I tasted one a few years ago and ever since then we have only had very sparse and intermittent encounters. Very few people have even heard of them much less tasted one which I find weird as they are one of the most delicious fruits on the planet! (By my classification of course!) Continue reading "Why Are Water Lemons So Rare?"