From bones to beetles: Tasmanian caves as biological repositories
Prior to their attraction as tourist visitor destinations, caves were heralded as sites for biological study. Although the allure of glow-worms in Tasmanian caves has captured the imagination of many observers and scientists alike, most of the early biological interest in caves centred on the study of bone deposits. In the early 1840s, during the infancy of organised structures for natural science in Tasmania, naturalists and scientists were encouraged to look at the bottom of caves for bones. An initial fervour of activity occurred in the mid-1840s, with the discovery of bone deposits in caves on the eastern bank of the Tamar River, in northern Tasmania. Some twenty years later - with the encouragement of Professor Owen - Messrs Whintle, Allport, Krefft and other members of the Hobart-based Royal Society of Tasmania unearthed extant and extinct mammalian species from "ossiferous deposits" in caves west of the Derwent River, just north of Hobart. In the early 1880s, the searches for mammalian skeletal remains in caves at Mole Creek lead to the discovery and description of the first Tasmanian cave invertebrate: the Tasmanian Cave Spider. Although interest in the bone deposits of Tasmanian caves continued well into the 1900s, the focus of cave biology studies had broadened to encompass the range of invertebrates, including extinct species collected as bedrock fossils in caves and/ or the surrounding limestone. From around the turn of the 20th Century, the study of living species in Tasmanian caves included the first collections of cave crickets, harvestmen and other cave dwelling spiders, together with an on-going interest in the taxonomy of the Tasmanian Cave Spider and cave dwelling glow-worms. In 1910, a cave at Ida Bay in southern Tasmania yielded several new species, giving rise to description of the first cave adapted beetle from Australia.