Beetling about in flood debris

Anyone who's not been living under a rock for the past two months can't fail to have noticed that the country is slightly damp at the moment.  Large chunks of Somerset, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and others have been underwater as rivers reclaim their flood plains, while the sheer volume of water has saturated the soil, leaving rainwater pools on the surface.

Of course, floods are horrendous when they affect your property, family or livelihood, but if you're interested in insects and other invertebrates, they can also provide something of a bonanza.  Huge numbers of invertebrates - snails, harvestmen, beetles, and more -  live in the soil, amongst roots, in leaf litter or at the bases of grass tussocks, and at this time of year they're joined by a whole load of extra species that go there to spend the winter.  When the water rises, these invertebrates are flooded out and washed downstream with all the other flotsam and jetsam - litter, sticks, etc.  This all accumulates in heaps of debris around obstructions, and picking through these mounds can turn up all kinds of species.

Flood debris collecting between the bank and a narrowboat

My local river, the Thames, has been flooded to varying degrees since Christmas, and I've been out a few times to see what's been washed up.  The main groups  have been beetles and snails, both terrestrial and freshwater.  Probably the pick of the 27 species of snails that have turned up so far has been the ribbed grass snail, Vallonia costata - a species I'd only ever seen once before, at last year's Bristol bioblitz.  Although it's only 3mm long, the ribbing combined with Mick Jagger lips makes it both distinctive and (for a snail), really rather attractive.

Vallonia costata, photographed down the microscope

Something I hadn't ever seen before was a tiny but very smart harvestman, Nemastoma bimaculatum - black and leggy with two white flashes (hence bi-maculatum).  By far the biggest fraction in the debris  has been beetles, particularly carabids (ground beetles) and staphs (rove beetles), but some smaller stuff has turned up as well.  Some has been impressively small - one that I've yet to do anything with is a featherwing beetle, family Ptiliidae, well under 1mm long!  Because there's so many beetles they're a bit on the back burner until my PhD corrections are finished, but all the other species, plus a bit of judicious lichen-spotting in the back garden, have taken my 1km square list up past 300 for the year - well on track for four figures by year's end!

Nemastoma bimaculatum from flood debris

A still-mysterious featherwing beetle, Ptiliidae sp. Image width approx. 1.5mm!

Flood debris beetles waiting to be identified - mostly carabids, particularly Bembidion spp., but also Heteroceridae, Aphodius, Hydrophilidae, mostly Cercyon spp., and some Chrysomelidae in tribe Alticini

Slightly further afield...

A slightly busy week last week - my PhD viva, two days of a bumblebee meeting in Southampton, and some filthy weather meant I didn't get out into my local patch, other than running to and from the car in the pouring rain.

My local patch, currently.  Not pictured: dry land

Come Sunday though, I'd arranged to brave the floods and meet up with some friends down in Somerset. Despite the non-stop news pictures, most of Somerset is well above the current high-water mark and we all made it to Shapwick in time for for the sun to come out.  After a quick sit-down for coffee and cake, watching small birds on the feeders - Coal tits and Reed buntings new for the year, Collared doves clumsy as ever - we headed down the road to the Hawk and Owl Trust's new reserve at Shapwick Moor

Glastonbury Tor from Shapwick Moor, looking across the grazing pasture and rhynes.

Not many birds about, but some nice snails in the rhyne dredgings, notably the Viviparous snail (Viviparous viviparous) and the Greater ramshorn (Planorbarius corneus), and, in the sandbanks, marine bivalves dating back to the last ice age. A quick lunch stop later, and we were off again, walking down past the route of the Sweet Track, a 2 km wooden walkway built in 3806 BCE and abandoned after less than a decade due to rising water levels, a fate it was suffering all over again with the last month's rain.  It wasn't the only casualty we saw - once ensconced in the hide at the far end of the track, we could see three or four fresh scars in the peat where trees had been blown over that week.

We weren't the only ones to have noticed: a flash of orange and electric blue announced a kingfisher, eagerly prospecting the new earth banks for a nest site.  Overhead a marsh harrier drifted slowly, wheeling effortlessly in the blue sky. As dusk fell, four lapwings flapped lazily by; one of Britain's handful of great white egrets swooped low over the reedbeds; swans slid smoothly across the reflection of the setting sun; several thousand starlings buzzed us, hurtling low overhead with a susurration of wings, as if the reedbed had taken to the skies. Summer's great, but winter has plenty to recommend it if you know what to look for!

Casualties of the storm.  Somewhere in this picture is a kingfisher, but it was a long way away...

Glastonbury Tor, from Shapwick heath

Reedbeds at Shapwick heath

It's important to have all your ducks in a row

Reedmace, Phragmites and ducks

Settling down for the night

What's lurking in the Oxfordshire undergrowth?

The prey shifts nervously, raising its head from grazing under the hunter's multifaceted gaze.  Sensing oncoming eight-legged movement, the would-be prey item strikes out with its forked tail, catapulting itself backwards and spinning head-over-heels through the sky as the pincers of the wannabe-predator close on empty air.  This is the seriously weird world of the British microfauna, and it's at least the equal of the charismatic macrofauna you can see on TV.

Pseudoscorpions - the thwarted predator from the scene above - are symptomatic of how this miniature jungle is overlooked.  They look amazingly similar to 'real' scorpions, complete with huge pincers, but lack a sting at the back end.  Although they look far too exotic to be British, in fact we've got at least 27 species and many are quite widespread, particularly in moss, leaf litter, and under bark.  I found this one - Chernes cimicoides - under the bark of a dead Eucalyptus around the corner from my house last weekend.

Chernes cimicoides

Having wandered down to the river Thames to see how high the floods were getting (answer: worryingly high), I spotted that the dead tree had some loose bark and had a bit of a poke around underneath.  These kind of sheltered spots are some of the best places to find insects over the winter, and there were plenty here - woodlice (Porcellio scaber and Androniscus dentiger) scuttled in all directions when exposed to the light, while bean weevils (Bruchus rufimanus) tried the opposite tack and froze, pretending to be lumps of misshapen wood.  Ladybirds (Harlequin Harmonia axyridis and 2-spot Adalia bipunctata) trusted in their defensive chemicals and warning colouration to repel me, sitting in obvious groups, and it was when peering at these (I'm very fond of ladybirds after studying them for four years for my PhD!) that I noticed a 3mm flattened, rounded blob tucked in nearby.  Spotting the pincers I almost jumped for joy - my second ever pseudoscorpion!

Chernes cimicoides in its overwintering cell underneath bark

Reaching 3mm long in Britain and only up to 12mm in the largest species yet found worldwide, these tiny arachnids are close cousins of spiders, harvestmen, scorpions, mites and ticks in Britain, and of whip-scorpions, vinegarroons and camel spiders overseas.  They may not be cute and fluffy but they are amazing to look at, and in their habits - the first I ever saw was in a photo that a friend had sent me to identify a beetle.  When you looked closely, an odd bulge on the antennae was clearly a pseudoscorpion, clinging on for grim death as the beetle unwittingly flew it to pastures new.  And when was the last time you saw a lion do that?

A pseudoscorpion on the antennae of a Black-headed Cardinal beetle (pic courtesy of Jo Cartmell)

Patch listing 2014

This time last year I started properly paying attention to the wildlife in my local area, particularly in the 1km square centred roughly on my house.  Then at Easter I got a job monitoring insects in oilseed rape fields in Wiltshire that meant I barely visited the square for four months, and most of the rest of my spare time went to finishing writing up my PhD, so it ended up with a fairly small-scale effort, though I did eventually reach 4,609 records of 1,059 species (with a load more stuff in pots awaiting a spare minute!).

This year, with just one full-time job and a few side projects, I've got the chance to try it properly.  In addition, I start as one of BBC Wildlife's local patch reporters on the 10th February, so I'll be documenting everything I find over the next year.

So far,I've taken advantage of the warm January weather to wander round a few of the local paths, checking on the progress of the floods (most of the top half of the map has been underwater for much of the year so far) and poking through the flood debris.  So far, I've found and identified 221 species in my square: the full list is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnHCIn7ZT3T3dDZkX2xTekhja0sxRVFub2NyVURMRVE&output=html but the highlights include four pairs of goosanders and two kingfishers on the lake at bottom right, 16-spot ladybirds in the flood debris, and a water scorpion:

(cross-posted at Insect rambles and 1000 species for 1km)

What’s in a name?

How something is named colours our perception, even our experiences with it – they’re the same thing but the Killer Shrimp is perceived very differently to Dikerogammerus villosus!

In wildlife, common names have generally been given to those species which people care about enough to talk about.  Species or groups which are big and colourful, or useful, or dangerous, or just those which are common enough around people to be seen every day, get common names – more obscure species get left with just a scientific binomial.  Ladybirds get the common name treatment: in fact, they’ve got a lot of common names in the British Isles alone!  

Ladybird common names in the British Isles

The now-standard common name – ‘ladybird’ – is an odd one: they’re definitely not birds, and they’re not all female.  ‘Birds’ is the easy one to explain.  If you go back far enough, pre-Linnaeus, names didn’t have quite the zoological precision of today.  Anything that lived in water was a fish (have you ever wondered about crayfish & shellfish?), and everything that flew was a bird.  The little shiny red beetles did a lot of flying: hence, they were birds.

‘Lady’ is the more interesting bit, and a look at the names for ladybirds from around Europe shed a bit more light on the reason why.  In the pre-insecticide era, infestations of pests were hugely damaging, and so when aphids were spotted accumulating in the crops, farmers would pray for help (alongside taking more useful action like squashing as many as possible).  Shortly afterwards, as the aphid colonies hit their peak, hordes of ladybirds would descend on the crops, devouring the pests, seemingly in answer to the farmers’ prayers.

Ladybird names across Europe

By far the commonest species would be the 7-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata.  Each beetle bore seven black spots, signifying the seven sorrows and seven joys of Mary, and each was bright orange-red, the colour that Mary was often depicted wearing (before the Vatican banned her being shown wearing red, and use of lapis lazuli blue as a high-status colour became standard).  Therefore, the tiny predators were thought to have been a gift sent from the Virgin Mary, and many of the local names reflected this - ‘The Virgin’s beast’, ‘Mary’s beetle’, ‘Marygold’, ‘Lady-clock’.  Others reflected the luck implicit in receiving a gift from the gods – ‘Lucky beetle’ and the ‘Good luck bug’

A seven-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata, featuring 7 spots and a red background

Where are all the ladybirds?

'Where have all the ladybirds gone? I've hardly seen any this year.'  In this case the question is relayed, second-hand, via a friend and through Twitter, but it's becoming a worryingly frequent refrain this year. As a professional ladybird-fancier (my very-nearly-finished PhD is on ladybirds and in my spare time (what spare time?!) I'm part of the UK Ladybird Survey team) I probably hear it more than most, but a lot of people seem to be missing the gardener's little spotty friends this summer. Rather than just repeating it to everyone, I thought I'd blog the answer here.

The British summer, 2012

There are many threats to ladybirds in Britain. The Harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis) is causing declines in native species (open-access paper here), while others are suffering from habitat destruction. However, the 2013 ladybird-lack is down to a natural phenomenon: the British weather.

In essence, it's because of what this picture shows: summer 2012 for most of the UK was a washout.  It started raining about Easter and basically never really stopped.  In general, rain is pretty bad news for insects;as cold-blooded animals wet, cold conditions stop them flying, which in turn prevents feeding, dispersing, breeding, and so on. Many insects, including several species of ladybird, are on the edge of their range in Britain, as far north as they can go before conditions get too cold, so damp, dark summers don't do them any favours!

Southerly bias in the distribution of the 24-spot ladybird, Subcoccinella vigintiquattuorpunctata, in Britain.  © Crown copyright and database rights 2011 Ordnance Survey. Mapping from the NBN Gateway

The timing of the rain was particularly bad in 2012.  Ladybirds usually only have one generation a year, breeding between May and August (though a few species are later), and they spend the winter as adults, tucking themselves in for the winter in October and not feeding until the following spring. Emerging from their overwintering lairs in March and April, they desperately need to feed, and they can usually stuff their faces on aphids, which emerge from overwintering and set up new colonies at roughly the same time. In 2012, however, April was a near-unrelenting monsoon of torrential rain - the ladybirds couldn't disperse looking for food, or mates, or egg-laying sites, and in any case the aphids were gone, washed from the leaves before colonies could be established.  Numbers of winged aphids - the dispersive stage - wouldn't reach normal levels in Rothamsted Research's aphid-monitoring traps until October.

That meant that the 2012 generation of ladybirds - the ones that would try to survive the winter and appear in spring 2013 - was very poor.  Numbers were lower than normal, especially of species that lived mainly in trees (it's much harder to climb back up a tree than a small flower once you've been washed off it), and many of the individuals were smaller than normal, a sign of a lack of nutrition as a larva.

Once they emerge as adults in late summer, ladybirds have one job - to eat as much as possible to have the best possible chance of surviving six months asleep.  Hamstrung by the lack of aphids to eat, it's likely that the majority went into the winter underweight, only to be faced by a winter that went on and on - personally I was still wearing two coats and a woolly hat for pollinator surveys into June!  That meant that a lot of the ladybirds that went into dormancy last autumn simply ran out of energy and never woke up again, further lowering numbers. I spent almost every day in the field (well, in several fields) this spring, and only saw a ladybird on 29 occasions between New Year and the end of May, far fewer than normal. I did see several hundred Orange ladybirds (Halyzia sedecimguttata) at the Kings Weston BioBlitz in Bristol, but this is a mildew-feeding species at home in wet weather, and they were still in their overwintering aggregation in early May!

A 7-spot ladybird larva (Coccinella septempunctata), snapped at dinnertime.

The cold spring held back the aphids as well, but once they finally appeared, they really went for it, and, with very few predators about, big numbers began appearing.  The summer heatwave provided ideal conditions climatic conditions for sun-loving insects, and ladybirds began the recovery process.  I only found my first ladybird larvae of the year on the 9th of June, about six weeks later than normal, but over the last six weeks or so ladybirds have made a welcome return to my village, with larvae and new adults abundant on limes and sycamores in the local churchyard.  Hopefully they'll be able to keep feeding and - weather permitting - next year's generation will start from a much better position than did this year's!

If you see a ladybird, please do send us a picture record at the UK Ladybird Survey website or using the iRecord Ladybird app from CEH and Naturelocator (Android or Apple) - without records we have no idea what's going on anywhere else!

The 2013 Garden Bioblitz, #GBB13

On the weekend of the 1-2 June 2013, hordes of people all over the UK went out into their gardens and scoured them for wildlife - birds in the trees, ants in the lawn, bees on flowers, the trees and flowers themselves were all spotted and logged. Two weeks after the event, 495 people have submitted 22,632 records of 2,424 taxa, 1,743 of which have been identified to species.  On average, each and every recorder submitted 46 sightings - an amazing effort from everyone! 

The reason for this burst of activity? The first national Garden Bioblitz!

With 29 million trees and 5 million bird boxes in 23 million gardens across Britain, there's a lot of private habitat tucked away nationwide. While hedges and fences parcel up the area in human terms, they're a trifling obstacle to most (although not all) wildlife - birds, butterflies and the like can happily soar or flutter up and down entire streets or more, taking advantage of the fragmented mosaic of different plantings. At the small end of the scale, springtails and snails may never reach the distant hedges, and scrubby corners of the lawn can host entire populations, undisturbed by the outside world.  Although the more obvious wildlife - the deer, otters, peregrine falcons – may be more often associated with wilder areas, they can all appear in gardens if you look at the right time, and smaller species – butterflies & bees, frogs and toads – are year-round residents.  Once you start looking – and especially if you have a pond, or leave an outside light on – you’ll be amazed by the diversity of life living alongside you.

As digital cameras get better and cheaper, more people are using them to take pictures of the weird and wonderful wildlife around them, and getting sucked into natural history.  Luckily, with the rise of the internet, more ID resources - keys, photo galleries, discussion threads - are more widely available now than ever before (self-serving plug: check out my previous blog post for a list of what's where!), and more experts are easily contactable to check what you've found.

The most important thing you can do with your sighting is to record it, and turn your sighting into a biological record.  These records build into data, which can be used in myriad different ways - scientifically, to indicate the general health of the countryside, to determine the effects of an invasive species on native populations, or just to prove that this particular field is a wildlife haven that shouldn't be built on.  None of it is possible unless you write down what you've seen and when!

Garden wildlife refuges, biological recording and the internet come together in the form of the Garden Bioblitz, the brainchild of Liz Shaw and brought to life by Liz, John van Breda, Jane Adams, Ryan Clark & myself. After a small trial event in 2012, 2013 was the first national event - even BBC TV's Springwatch got involved!

A huge range of wildlife was encapsulated in the 1,743 species identified to date. Plants were the biggest group (687 species), possibly reflecting the uncertain weather (and the comparative ease of working on something that doesn't fly off as soon as it sees you!), but insects were close behind on 605. Birds didn't quite reach three figures, ending on 92.

Taxon Group	Species
Plants	687
Insects	605
Other inverts	185
Birds	92
Lichens	50
Fungi	49
Mosses and liverworts	35
Mammals	27
Amphibians and reptiles	8
Fish	4
Bacteria	1

Within the insects, moths came out best, on 159 species. Almost half the UK's butterflies were seen, while more exotic creatures like scorpionflies also put in an appearance.  It was striking how few bees, moths, and particularly ladybirds were seen, despite many people looking out for them specially - last year's washout summer and a long, cold winter, on top of the existing long-term declines, seem to have done nasty things to the populations of these most charismatic insects.

Insect group	Species
Moths	159
Beetles	124
Flies	97
Bugs	77
Bees, wasps & ants	71
Butterflies	25
Springtails	18
Dragonflies and damselflies	9
Barkflies	5
Lacewings	5
Earwigs	3
Fleas	3
Grasshoppers and crickets	3
Mayflies	2
Bristletails	1
Scorpionflies	1
Silverfish	1
Stoneflies	1

David Fenwick's Penzance garden was particularly striking, a 10-metre by 10-metre square producing 189 species, including a springtail and flatworm currently unnamed by science, and another half-dozen flatworm species more at home in Australia than Cornwall - clearly an amazing site! 

After rushing around Cornwall to bioblitz three separate gardens, Sally Luker spotted just under 300 species, and several people made it over the 200-species barrier. Natural history is alive and well in modern Britain!

With a virtually non-stop 24-hours of searching and then identifying, I managed to find 301 species (and lose a lot of sleep!). Loads of species new to me for the year, even a couple of species I've never seen before, despite having spent a lot of time poking around the garden in the three years I've been in the same house - just shows how much there is to see once you start looking properly!  My personal favourite sighting of the weekend was a tiny ladybird, Scymnus interruptus - there's fewer than 20 sightings in the national database for this 2mm-long, black-and-red species, but it seems to be on the increase over the last couple of years.  

Elsewhere, there were garden Pine Martens (Martes martes) in Scotland, a Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) in Norwich, and six records of Ravens (Corvus corax).  Roe (Capreolus capreolus), Fallow (Dama dama) and Muntjac Deer (Muntiacus reevesi) all made appearances, along with the bright pink Rosy Woodlouse (Androniscus dentiger) and yellow Brimstone moth (Opisthograptis luteola).  

Maybugs (Melolontha melolontha) were spotted bumbling around lights; cat fleas (Ctenocephalides felis) were spotted on, then removed from, pet cats.  For the full list and more, check out the Garden BioBlitz info centre.

Same time next year? :)