1.
Pearcedale, Victoria
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Pearcedale is a township and coastal rural locality in Victoria, Australia,49 km south-east of Melbournes central business district. Its local government areas are the City of Casey and the Shire of Mornington Peninsula, a bus service operates to and from Frankston railway station via Baxter. At the 2011 Census, Pearcedale had a population of 3,871, Pearcedale is a township and rural locality on the northwestern corner of Western Port, in the northern extremities of the Mornington Peninsula. The land is flat with a rich and sandy soil type ideal for market gardening. Its mangrove saltmarsh coastline on Watson Inlet, west of Quail Island and these mangrove saltmarshes are of international significance and are incorporated within the Yaringa Marine National Park as well as being protected under the United Nations Ramsar Convention. The mangrove saltmarshes are not accessible, by land, to the public, Pearcedale was originally called Langwarrin and was also known at various times as Langwarrin Estate or Old Langwarrin. When the Mornington and Stony Point railway lines opened in the late 1880s, a new town developed east of the railway station and was locally called New Langwarrin. A meeting of rate payers was held in November 1905 and it was voted to rename the original town Pearcedale, the name Pearcedale came from local landowner Nathaniel Pearce. Nathaniel and his wife Mary Grace are first listed in the Shire of Cranbourne Rate Books in 1894, Mary was a midwife and helped deliver many babies in the area. The town of Pearcedale had a slow beginning, in 1889 it had a few shops and a Post Office, Public Hall and Primary School. However the depression affected the town and the School closed in 1892,38 years before the depression began, the School re-opened in 1902 and the Post Office in 1907. The original hall burnt down and the replacement was opened on August 23,1918 and this event was witnessed by 400 people, who were entertained with a concert and a dance which finished at 4. 00am. The Methodist Church was opened in 1918, the Anglican Church in 1938, electricity was connected in 1957, the Guides and Scouts both formed in 1957, the R. S. L in 1958 and the Infant Welfare Centre in 1961. Town water was connected in 1962, a meteorite known as Cranbourne meteorite No.11 was found 2 kilometres north north-east of Pearcedale and 5 kilometres east-south east of the Langwarrin Railway Station. The meteorite weighed a massive 762 kilograms and was found in 1903. The find was not reported at the time and, from all accounts the meteorite was kept in the possession of the finder until 1938, another known as Cranbourne meteorite No.12 was discovered in April 1982 it was donated to the then Shire Council for display purposes. This meteorite was first found in 1927 but only came to scientific notice. Weighing 23 kilograms it has registered in the collections of the National Museum of Victoria and is on a long term loan to the City of Casey
2.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
3.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
4.
Zoo and Aquarium Association
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The organisation is based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The ZAAs Wildlife Conservation Fund provides critical funding to projects that aim to protect, the ZAA holds workshops, meetings and conferences for zoo and aquarium specialists. These networks develop and share resources and develop Australasia-wide initiatives in wildlife conservation, the ZAA acts as a focal point for unifying the efforts of zoos and aquariums in contributing to wildlife conservation. The ZAA publishes news, guidelines and management plans for zoos, the ZAA is overseen by a Board elected by the members. ZAA’s headquarters are located in Sydney, Australia and are hosted by the Taronga Zoo, the ZAA New Zealand Branch office is hosted by Auckland Zoo in New Zealand. It also operates its own separate Species Management Program, the ZAA offers four types of Institutional Membership Full - Requires inspection and board approval
5.
Mornington Peninsula
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The Mornington Peninsula is a peninsula located south-east of Melbourne, Australia. It is surrounded by Port Phillip to the west, Western Port to the east and Bass Strait to the south, geographically, the peninsula begins its protrusion from the mainland in the area between Pearcedale and Frankston. The area was home to the Mayone-bulluk and Boonwurrung-Balluk clans. Much of the peninsula has been cleared for agriculture and settlements, however, small areas of the native ecology remain in the peninsulas south and west, some of which is protected by the Mornington Peninsula National Park. The peninsula is primarily a local tourist region, with natural attractions such as the variety of beaches both sheltered and open-sea and many scenic sights and views. Other popular attractions include the various wineries, mazes and the array of water sports made available by the diversity of beaches and calm waters of Port Phillip. Most visitors to the peninsula are residents of Melbourne who camp, rent villas, the peninsula was formed by the flooding of Port Phillip Bay after the end of the Ice Age about 10000 BC. It may have extended into Port Phillip at various times, most recently between 800 BC and 1000 AD when Port Phillip Bay may have dried out, indigenous Australians of the Mayone-bulluk and Boonwurrung-Balluk clans lived on the peninsula as part of the Boonwurrung Peoples territory prior to European settlement. The territory hosted six clans who lived along the Victorian coast from the Werribee River across to Western Port Bay, the peninsula may have been home to between 100 –500 people prior to European settlement. The first European settlement on the Mornington Peninsula was also the first settlement in Victoria, the Sullivans Bay settlement was a short-lived penal colony established in 1803,30 years before the establishment of Melbourne, by Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins. At the time of European settlement in 1803 much of the Mornington Peninsula was covered with she-oak forests and these were quickly cleared to provide firewood for the growing city of Melbourne, and much of the peninsula was then covered with fruit orchards. Nevertheless, much natural vegetation still exists, especially in an area of bushland in the known as Greens Bush. Most large areas of bushland are now included within the Mornington Peninsula National Park, as serious farming has declined, hobby farmers with an interest in the aesthetic and the natural environment have taken over much of the peninsula. This has led to an expansion of natural bushland on private property, the local council also has a slight lean towards sustainable practices. On 17 December 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt went swimming at Cheviot Beach on what is now Point Nepean National Park, at the time this was still a restricted area. Mr. Holt, who was 59 and had had a recent shoulder injury and he disappeared from view and was never seen again. Despite an extensive search his body was never found and he was officially presumed dead on 19 December 1967. The peninsula extends from the mainland between Pearcedale and Frankston in a direction for about 40 km at a width of about 15–20 kilometres
6.
Melbourne
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Melbourne is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in Australia and Oceania. The name Melbourne refers to an urban agglomeration spanning 9,900 km2, the metropolis is located on the large natural bay of Port Phillip and expands into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon mountain ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley. It has a population of 4,641,636 as of 2016, and its inhabitants are called Melburnians. Founded by free settlers from the British Crown colony of Van Diemens Land on 30 August 1835, in what was then the colony of New South Wales, it was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837. It was named Melbourne by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, in honour of the British Prime Minister of the day, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. It was officially declared a city by Queen Victoria, to whom Lord Melbourne was close, in 1847, during the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, it was transformed into one of the worlds largest and wealthiest cities. After the federation of Australia in 1901, it served as the interim seat of government until 1927. It is a financial centre in the Asia-Pacific region. It is recognised as a UNESCO City of Literature and a centre for street art, music. It was the host city of the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the main passenger airport serving the metropolis and the state is Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia. The Port of Melbourne is Australias busiest seaport for containerised and general cargo, Melbourne has an extensive transport network. The main metropolitan train terminus is Flinders Street Station, and the regional train. Melbourne is also home to Australias most extensive network and has the worlds largest urban tram network. Before the arrival of settlers, humans had occupied the area for an estimated 31,000 to 40,000 years. At the time of European settlement, it was inhabited by under 2000 hunter-gatherers from three indigenous tribes, the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung and Wathaurong. The area was an important meeting place for the clans of the Kulin nation alliance and it would be 30 years before another settlement was attempted. Batman selected a site on the bank of the Yarra River. Batman then returned to Launceston in Tasmania, in early August 1835 a different group of settlers, including John Pascoe Fawkner, left Launceston on the ship Enterprize
7.
Nocturnal
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Nocturnality is an animal behavior characterized by activity during the night and sleeping during the day. The common adjective is nocturnal, versus diurnal meaning the opposite, nocturnal creatures generally have highly developed senses of hearing, smell, and specially adapted eyesight. Such traits can help such as the Helicoverpa zea moths avoid predators. Some animals, such as cats and ferrets, have eyes that can adapt to both lowlevel and bright day levels of illumination, others, such as bushbabies and bats, can function only at night. Many nocturnal creatures including tarsiers and some owls have large eyes in comparison to their size to compensate for the lower light levels at night. More specifically, they have found to have a larger cornea relative to their eye size than diurnal creatures to increase their visual sensitivity in the low-light conditions. Nocturnality helps wasps, such as Apoica flavissima, avoid hunting in intense sunlight, diurnal animals, including squirrels and songbirds, are active during the daytime. Crepuscular species, such as rabbits, skunks, cats, tigers, cathemeral species, such as fossas and lions, are active both in the day and at night. While most humans are diurnal, for personal and social/cultural reasons some people are temporarily or habitually nocturnal. The most known creatures to be nocturnal include cats, rodents, and owls, while it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, there is a leading hypothesis out in the evolutionary biology community. A recent study attempts to answer the question as to why so many modern day mammals retain these nocturnal characteristics even though they are not active at night, the anomaly to this theory were anthropoids, who appeared to have the most divergence from nocturnality than all organisms examined. While most mammals didnt exhibit the characteristics expected of a nocturnal creature, reptiles. A larger cornea and pupil correlated well with whether these two classes of organisms were nocturnal or not, being active at night is a form of niche differentiation, where a species niche is partitioned not by the amount of resources but by the amount of time. Hawks and owls can hunt the same field or meadow for the same rodents without conflict because hawks are diurnal and this means they are not in competition for each others prey. Nocturnality is a form of crypsis, an adaptation to avoid or enhance predation, one of the reasons that lions prefer to hunt at night is that many of their prey species have poor night vision. Many species of rodents, such as the Large Japanese Field Mouse, are active at night because most of the dozen or so birds of prey that hunt them are diurnal. There are many species that exhibit some nocturnal behaviors. For example, many seabirds and sea turtles only gather at breeding sites or colonies at night to reduce the risk of predation to themselves and/or their offspring, another reason for nocturnality is avoiding the heat of the day
8.
Zoo
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A zoo is a facility in which animals are confined within enclosures, displayed to the public, and in which they may also breed. The term zoological garden refers to zoology, the study of animals, the abbreviation zoo was first used of the London Zoological Gardens, which was opened for scientific study in 1828 and to the public in 1857. The number of animal collections open to the public around the world now exceeds to 1,000. In the United States of America alone, zoos are visited by over 180 million people annually, London Zoo, which opened in 1826, first called itself a menagerie or zoological forest, which is short for Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society of London. The term zoological park was used for more facilities in Washington, D. C. and the Bronx in New York. Relatively new terms for zoos coined in the late 20th century are conservation park or biopark, adopting a new name is a strategy used by some zoo professionals to distance their institutions from the stereotypical and nowadays criticized zoo concept of the 19th century. The term biopark was first coined and developed by the National Zoo in Washington D. C. in the late 1980s, in 1993, the New York Zoological Society changed its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society and rebranded the zoos under its jurisdiction as wildlife conservation parks. The predecessor of the garden is the menagerie, which has a long history from the ancient world to modern times. The oldest known collection was revealed during excavations at Hierakonpolis, Egypt in 2009. The exotic animals included hippopotami, hartebeest, elephants, baboons, King Ashur-bel-kala of the Middle Assyrian Empire created zoological and botanical gardens in the 11th century BCE. In the 2nd century BCE, the Chinese Empress Tanki had a house of deer built, other well-known collectors of animals included King Solomon of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, queen Semiramis and King Ashurbanipal of Assyria, and King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia. By the 4th century BCE, zoos existed in most of the Greek city states, the Roman emperors kept private collections of animals for study or for use in the arena, the latter faring notoriously poorly. The 19th-century historian W. E. H. Lecky wrote of the Roman games, first held in 366 BCE, At one time, a bear, four hundred bears were killed in a single day under Caligula. Under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants, in a single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, five thousand animals perished. Lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles, henry I of England kept a collection of animals at his palace in Woodstock, which reportedly included lions, leopards, and camels. The most prominent collection in medieval England was in the Tower of London and it was opened to the public during the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century. During the 18th century, the price of admission was three half-pence, or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions, the animals were moved to the London Zoo when it opened. The oldest zoo in the still in existence is the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna
9.
Tiger quoll
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The tiger quoll, also known as the spotted-tail quoll, the spotted quoll, the spotted-tailed dasyure or the tiger cat, is a carnivorous marsupial of the quoll genus Dasyurus native to Australia. With males and females weighing around 3.5 and 1.8 kg, respectively, it is mainland Australias largest carnivorous marsupial, the tiger quoll is a member of the family Dasyuridae, which includes most carnivorous marsupial mammals. This quoll was first described in 1792 by Robert Kerr, the Scottish writer and naturalist, who placed it in the genus Didelphis, the species name, maculatus, indicates this species is spotted. Males and females of D. m. maculatus weigh on average 3.5 and 1.8 kg, respectively, the next-largest species, the western quoll, weighs on average 1.31 kg for males and 0.89 kg for females. The tiger quoll has relatively short legs, but its tail is as long as its body and it has a thick head and neck and a slightly rounded and elongated snout. It has five toes on each foot, both front and hind, and the feet have well-developed halluces. Its long pink foot pads are ridged, an adaptation for its arboreal lifestyle and this makes up for the fact that its tail is not prehensile. The tiger quoll has a pelage with white spots. It is the only species with spots on its tail in addition to its body. Its fur and skin are covered in orange-brown-coloured oil, the underside is typically grayish or creamy white. The average length of D. m. maculatus is 930 mm for males and 811 mm for females, for D. m. gracilis, the average length of males and females, respectively, is 801 and 742 mm. The tiger quoll is found in eastern Australia where more than 600 mm of rain fall per year, historically, the quoll was present throughout southeastern Queensland, through eastern New South Wales, Victoria, southeastern South Australia, and Tasmania. European settlement has severely decimated and fragmented the quolls mainland distribution, tiger quolls are rare in southeastern Queensland and mainly restricted to national parks. In Victoria, quoll populations have declined by nearly 50%, the range decline was not as severe in New South Wales, but they are still rare. The quoll was probably never very numerous in South Australia, in Tasmania, the tiger quoll mostly frequents the northern and western areas where rains are seasonal. Tiger quolls were once native to Flinders and King Islands, but were extirpated since the 20th century, tiger quolls live in a variety of habitats, but seem to prefer wet forests such as rainforests and closed eucalypt forest. They are arboreal, but only moderately, as 11% of their travelling is done above ground. Prey items eaten by quolls include insects, crayfish, lizards, snakes, birds, domestic poultry, small mammals, platypus, rabbits, arboreal possums, pademelons, small wallabies and they may scavenge larger prey such as kangaroos, feral pigs, cattle, and dingoes
