Dunning-Kruger Phase - is it real and should we care?

I'm not in any way a statistician, musician, artist or philosopher. Heck, I'm not even a particularly smart person. But I am passionate about the natural world that surrounds me. I harbour within me a very genuine desire to see plants, to see animals, to lie on my back and simply stare at the stars. I want to climb mountains, to play in rockpools, to get lost in the woods and, just occasionally, I even want to fall into fetid swamps. Luckily for me, I am still fit and healthy (and daft) enough to be able do all of these things. Yep, my life could definitely be a whole lot worse. Yet I have this niggle that is growing and it won't go away.

Many years ago I had an idea; I would tot up all of the animals, plants and fungi I had ever seen and I would create a mighty Organism List for myself. And so I did. Luckily for me, I did this during an early stage of my pursuit of all things natural, hence the list essentially comprised my British bird list plus a few extra bits and bobs such as easy plants, mammals and unmistakeable insects. I distinctly recall adding Bluebottle and Greenbottle to the insect section of my original Organism List. Get me, I'd even broken into the supposedly scary world of flies and it was a cinch! 

And then I started to delve a little deeper into these groups of which I knew so very little. I soon learned that 'greenbottle' is about as useful a term as 'seagull' (i.e. utterly unacceptable) followed by the slow realisation that the books I owned were sorely inadequate to the task at hand, none being in the slightest bit comprehensive in their coverage. Obviously this was all pre-internet days. Buying more books only helped prove to myself that there is always more to learn, yes always!

There's a thing called the Dunning-Kruger Phase and I feel it can be applied better to the current PSL movement than to almost anything else I can think of. Here's a very sassy comment written by one of the authors:

Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition. The problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don't see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don't know you're a member of the Dunning–Kruger club.

We definitely need to talk about this. 

Pan-species Listing, PSL for short, is a steadily evolving phenomenon that has gained a huge amount of publicity of late. Rather awkwardly, it has also gained a degree of notoriety from both outsiders and peers. Regardless of the direction it now seems to be heading (the wrong one, in my opinion...) one of my main worries regards the whole movement is that many folks are not being rigorous enough with their IDs. This could be because they lack the identification resources or equipment, or are perhaps unwilling to collect and kill a specimen. It could simply be because their knowledge base is inadequate, or perhaps they are, let's call it 'stretching their IDs' just to keep up. I'm going to dig into this in greater detail in a few moments.

Things like Common Pondskater (claimed by 150 listers) and Common Eyebright (122 listers) may well be common in their own right, yet it's been over thirty years since I compiled that original Organism List I still haven't seen either - and I don't think it's through being remiss or stupid on my part. Yet both are way up there on my list of Targets on the PSL website. I have to wonder how many listers have thought to themselves "oh, chances are it's just the common one" or "that looks exactly like the drawing in my (entry-level) book"  ***tick*** 

The PSL community is expanding faster than the average naturalist’s access to skills, equipment, or taxonomic depth, which creates a very real gap between what people want to record and what they can reliably identify. Pan-species listing attracts people who are enthusiastic, curious, and motivated but not necessarily trained in the art of microscopy, gen dets, hymenopteran morphology or even the ability to use a dichotomous key. The result is predictable - people want to list more species than they can confidently identify.

Some species groups have brilliant, fully accessible resources - butterflies, dragonflies, flowering plants and birds being good examples. Other groups are decidedly beginner unfriendly - fungi, lichens, springtails, staphylinids, ichneumonids and most diptera beyond the big families. So people often over-reach because the resources are either largely unavailable or do not exist.

Next we come to the equipment. I have a stereo microscope, a compound microscope, specimen storage boxes, a veritable library of keys and guides, a decent camera and then there's the plethora of field kit I own. Going back to those enthusiastic, curious and motivated folks I mentioned earlier; they have a phone camera, a hand lens and a desire to learn. This mismatch will inevitably lead to overconfident photo‑based IDs in groups where photos are simply insufficient. Equipment barriers are very real.

Then there's the ethical discomfort with killing inverts, and this is a big one. Many newcomers to PSL come from a birding background, or are general wildlife enthusiasts. They are not accustomed to the idea that some taxa cannot be identified without a specimen. So they attempt to identify inverts or fungi from a photo, entirely possible in some instances but entirely impossible for the majority of inverts. Relying on photographic images rather than microscopic examination of a specimen leads to systematic misidentification, even with good intentions.

OK, so that's all good and well. Or not, as the case may be. So far we've only discussed identification issues. But what of PSL social pressure and the numbers game?

Even if you are not by nature a competitive person, there's a psychological effect to being part of the PSL community. You see other listers adding new species on a near-daily basis. You see people hitting three thousand species, five thousand, ten thousand..! You feel left behind, you want to keep up but you just don't have the spare time, equipment, resources or expertise. So you start stretching IDs further than you should. This is not deliberate cheating, this is not a moral failing, this is simply human nature. And the current PSL climate is very much about big numbers and hence high social pressure. Intensely high, I would say.

The Dunning–Kruger phase is especially strong in PSL. Because PSL encourages breadth, people often get good at one group, assume that skill transfers, and start making confident IDs in groups they barely know. This is not malicious, it's just progression. The current PSL climate rewards breadth, not rigour. It celebrates big totals, rapid progress, personal firsts and new species for Britain. What it doesn't celebrate is leaving things at genus level, saying "I don't know", killing a specimen for certainty, spending three evenings struggling with the same wasp or rejecting an ID because it's only a 'probable'. Biological recording is only as good as its accuracy and PSL lists are only meaningful if they are honest. Some species require dissection, some cannot be identified from a photograph. Some species can't be done at all without DNA barcoding. 

So how do you keep the joy and openness of PSL while preventing it from drifting into a swamp of shaky IDs produced by a bunch of well-meaning  but ultimately Clueless Charlies? If PSL is to stay meaningful, it has to evolve in ways that protect rigour but without turning into a gatekeeping bureaucracy. 

Right now, PSL culture implicitly rewards species-level ticks and this is the root of the problem. A healthier culture would normalise and celebrate genus-level IDs or family-level IDs. If pan-species listers saw restraint as a mark of skill, not failure, the whole system would stabilise. This is the single biggest cultural shift PSL needs. Key phrases such as "I don't know" "I left it at genus" "I need to learn this group" or, importantly, "I'm not confident enough to record this" would see the whole community become more rigorous overnight. Sadly, the most vocal advocate of PSL, the PSL champion as some would say, does not see things in the same way that I do. So I continue to do things differently and, from time to time, I'll post a blog like this just to offload some pent up frustration.  

The weekend is about to begin so I will not have an awful lot of free time available for blogging. But I will try to write up a post detailing my exploits from earlier in the week. I saw an awful lot of stuff, found two plants that I've never seen before, discovered there's a genus of sawflies with excessively spiny larvae and found out why a thicket of Giant Hogweed is being kept inside an electrified enclosure. I also have red hot gen for Beavers, and permission to bunk a fence after dark to view them. Hopefully that'll be happening at some point over the next few weeks!

Sensitive Fern was very definitely not on my radar!

A very small hopper on Cock's-foot grass. I'll go as far as Cicadellidae for this...

Different Midges

Doubtless most folks reading this will have heard about the fearsome Scottish Midge, and trust me the rumours are entirely true. Here on Skye they are a minor annoyance most days, occasionally they will have me running back indoors before I am indeed bled dry, but usually they are entirely tolerable. Happily there are many other species of midge that do not descend in swarms to drive warm-blooded creatures into a panic. Yesterday, whilst in a Portree cemetery, I noticed several plants of Slender St John's-wort exhibiting deeply fuschia-coloured leaflets at the top of the stem. I popped three of these flushed tips into a pot and today I had a closer look at them beneath the microscope. 

Hypericum pulchrum with vividly pink-flushed uppermost leaves

Slender St John's-wort very often exhibits a pink flushing to the leaves at this time of year, but these plants really stood out as being just a bit too pink! A short distance away was a stand of unaffected Slender St John's-worts, clearly this warranted further investigation.

My initial thought was that they were infected by a fungus, but investigations quickly drew a blank. So then I figured it had to be invertebrate-induced and my mind turned towards thoughts of mites and gall-midges. I carefully peeled back one of the leaves and discovered several layers of very small green leaves within plus a sprinkling of suspicious-looking fly grubs. A-ha, a gall-midge it is then! But which?

I jumped online and soon realised that my midge grubs were either Dasineura hyperici or Dasineura serotina. Various features can be used to separate the pair, but the different websites I visited seemed to contradict each other. I even tried using the AI chat thingie on my laptop and it assured me I definitely had one, before going on to totally assure me that I had the other... Eventually, I have decided that I have Dasineura serotina which appears to be massively under-recorded in Britain and, as a bonus, is a lifer for me.

The two leaves have formed a tightly fitting 'purse' or 'pocket' and not a cabbage-looking mass

The fact that the discoloured leaves are tightly fitting is a strong pro-serotina feature. Dasineura hyperici forms a more cabbage-like gall where the terminal leaves are all bunched up together, a growth form also sometimes described as a loose ball. So far so good, serotina is the clear favourite.

Outer leaf removed to reveal a series of stunted, non-flushed inner leaves

This is also a good pro-serotina feature. Dasineura hyperici should have larger terminal leaves and they should be more readily visible as a loose fitting bunch of leaves resembling a cabbage. I wish I could find images of dissected galls for both species to compare against, just for peace of mind, but I can't. 

Unexpected hitch-hikers inside the gall

This batch of eggs (?) has been laid upon the first layer of hidden leaves, I don't know what they are but I suspect they are of hymenopteran origin. The genus Macrolabis (gall-midges) are known to occur within Dasineura galls, but I don't think that's what we're seeing here. It's sometimes quite boggling what you can discover whilst looking down the barrel of a microscope.

And these are the larvae of the gall-causer itself

These larvae are very small, though they may still be immature with a fair bit of growing to do, but importantly they are more-or-less transparent rather than white, pink or orange. Note the uppermost one is the same opaque colour as the background leaf whereas the (partly obscured) right hand grub is far greener, clearly matching the leaf surface behind it. In each you can discern a darker patch, which I'm guessing is something to do with the gut. The given descriptions for serotina larvae, depending on the website visited, are translucent, clear or hyaline whereas Dasineura hyperici larvae are white or whitish when immature, becoming pink and finally turning orange when mature. At no point are they described as clear or transparent. 

One website mentioned that the larvae of Dasineura serotina are 'surprisingly small' for the size of the gall they dwell within, but this is difficult to objectively judge. They could be surprisingly small because they are not yet fully grown. And anyway, how do you quantify 'surprisingly small' when the adult gall-midges are all of 1.5 - 2.5mm in length!

So there you have it, Dasineura serotina (fairly) safely in the bag and Dasineura hyperici (fairly) safely ruled out. Except that one of the galls had a more 'open' look to it. Almost cabbage like, one could say. And the grub seemed a little whitish to my eye...

 

Hmmmm.......

I feel the chances of finding both species of Dasineura that gall Slender St John's-wort side by side on adjacent plants is remote. I'm happy that at least two of the galls contain Dasineura serotina, I'll just overlook the third one. What I need to do next is inspect more galls in a couple of weeks time when the larvae will be mature, see if any have turned pink or orange. These are multivoltine midges, so there should be a succession of broods present as the "summer" (pah!) progresses.  

And the last Midge of this post is....

A New-to-Skye Plant

I took myself down to Portree on my break today and spent an hour in the cemetery, dodging the rain and hoping to find something of interest. And find something of interest I certainly did! First up was the well-vegetated pile of spoil that I'd parked next to, largely colonised by Rosebay Willowherb, Raspberry, Creeping Thistle and Coltsfoot. The Coltsfoot was strangely free of any leafmines, but the Rosebay soon revealed one of the target species I was looking for. Quite a few of them, as it happens.

The pile of spoil in question

There are four psyllids (barely) visible in the tip of this Rosebay Willowherb

And a huge crop of two of them

Craspedolepta nebulosa is a psyllid that I found here on Skye way back in 2017. I notified Murdo at HBRG who notified a few other folk and pretty soon it was discovered that this "new to The Highlands and Islands" psyllid was actually pretty damn common almost everywhere up here. Screenshot of their page below

Click to enlarge

No sign of any egg-laying Mompha, or indeed of their leafmines yet. I should mention that although we are fast approaching the middle of June, I was wearing a coat zipped all the way up and it was lightly raining throughout. Warm it ain't and I suspect many invert populations will be very suppressed.

A couple of bushes caught my eye as being something different. Clearly an alder, but with rounded glossy leaves and a cordate base surely they had to be Italian Alder? 

I broke a branch off and promptly returned to the car to identify the species

Sure enough, this is Alnus cordata (with the cordate leaf base...) aka Italian Alder, a species I've never recorded on Skye. A quick look online revealed that Stephen Bungard, Skye's BSBI Recorder, had recorded it from exactly here in 2021. I do sometimes wonder if there's anywhere he hasn't already been or anything he hasn't already seen...

Returning to my spot by the Italian Alders I duly noted Skye's only known plant of Rock Stonecrop, sat atop its wall as per usual

Rock Stonecrop Petrosedum forsterianum - a lovely plant

It was then that I looked down at the gravel track underfoot and thought to myself, "hmmm, this is very similar to the cemetery track in Inverness where I found all that Mossy Stonecrop a few weeks back. I wonder..." and boom! There in front of me was a small patch of Mossy Stonecrop, already turning a characteristic bright red. Wow, talk about knowing the habitat of a plant and expecting it! Mossy Stonecrop is a plant I see often whenever I'm in the Inverness/Nairn area, typically on sandy soils but also, as here, in gravelly tracks and paths. I checked the BSBI maps to see how many records there were for Skye, certainly I couldn't recall ever seeing it here before so it must be fairly uncommon. 

No records for Skye! 

I double-checked I wasn't making a stupid mistake, but it really was Mossy Stonecrop. I took some pics and pinged them to Stephen, just to doubly double-check that I wasn't being an idiot.

First record of Mossy Stonecrop Crassula tillaea for Skye!

Stephen came back with "Oh I like that - sort of! I added it to the VC105 list a few years ago and have been expecting it". I had a mooch around the rest of the track and several paths in the immediate vicinity and found small scraps of it dotted about in quite a wide area. The greatest concentration was along the margins of a small parking area, in fact I had parked directly on top of a patch, something I didn't notice until I returned to the car afterwards! Rough and ready map of the plant's distribution in this particular section of cemetery

I shall have to return soon, do a proper sweep of the cemetery and see where else it occurs. Presumably it arrived with the gravel used to surface the paths a couple of years back, or possibly fragments were brought in on visitor's boots or wellies. Mossy Stonecrop is considered native in Britain, but it would appear to be an accidental introduction to Skye. Either way, I'm happy it was me that finally bumped into it!

The Halfway Phase

Yesterday I reached the halfway stage of my quest to record 2500 living wild species in Britain during 2026. The halfway species itself was Smooth Meadow-grass, one of a handful of grasses that I managed to identify yesterday. There were, of course, several others that I completely failed to identify. Grasses...meh. However, I did find quite a few tussocks of Meadow Oat-grass scattered amongst the far commoner Downy Oat-grass, the former being a full-fat lifer for me. Get in! This all happened at Dornoch, close to the golf course. Today I returned to Skye via Inverness and added Wall Barley to the yearlist, which is a really decent record this far north. I found quite a bit of Water Bent too, clearly spreading after I found it new to Inverness just last year. I do quite like the idea of identifying grasses, it's the actual keying process that lets me down. I think 'moderately inept' sums up my ability with the confounded things. Electric shock punishment is probably the only way I'm going to improve with them. 

Gloriously unedited drive-by pic of Wall Barley at Inverness

And yet I am...tired. Hmmm, weary is probably a better word. Or maybe phasing. Yes, phasing is the perfect word. Halfway towards my target, a mere 42% of the way through the year and I'm absolutely ready to just jack it all in and walk Land's End to John o' Groats again. Maybe I'll actually make it up to Muckle Flugga and Out Stack this time. 

The issue is my workplace. A member of staff quit yesterday, just walked out due to the complete mismanagement of... well of pretty much everything. I feel bad because I got him the job here in the first place, and I know he's good at it. But he's not one to stand for piss-takers, so he's gone. I did 270 hours last month, this month could see me working more. We're back down to a "team" of 6 and one is leaving Skye at the end of the month. Ready with replacements? Of course not. More walk outs? I fully expect so. Will this include me? Quite possibly, yeah. Do I care? Right now the truthful answer to that is 'no, I really don't'.

I have four batches of inverts that I collected last month and so far not a single specimen has made it onto a pin or card. I suspect a number of them will head straight into the bin, irretrievably shrivelled and brittle. My downtime consists of a nap between shifts, or maybe popping to the shops, followed by a can of beer at the end of the night and oblivion until the next day when I get to do it all over again. Today is still my day off, I just happened to return early. Already I've been asked to help cover tonight's shift. I refused. Not my problem, not my issue, not my responsibility to pick up the pieces. It's the first time I've said no. I have a feeling it won't be the last. See all those f*cks I used to give...

Seeing as you're here for the nature and not to listen to me whingeing on about my workplace, here are some pics from Dornoch yesterday. Trentham Hotel is just £40 for a room, an extra £5 if you want cooked breakfast and a pint of Guinness at the bar will set you back a fiver too. I highly recommend it if ever you're in the Dornoch area. Other drinks are (apparently) available. I don't know why.

Pure genius

Meadow Oat-grass Helictochloa pratensis

Meadow Oat-grass has a noticeably glaucous look to it, in fact in certain angles the leaves look decidedly silver. The flowerheads were just opening, it seems to be a little later flowering than the ubiquitous and non-glaucous Downy Oat-grass. Needless to say, the lower sheath is glabrous rather than downy. 

Mystery plant which I accidentally pulled up

Note the revealed capsule is a swollen flask-shape and not straight-sided

This is Thyme-leaved Sandwort, a plant which I have seen before, but only infrequently. It catches me out every time. Happily, the fact that this plant had finished flowering and had formed seed capsules allowed me to confidently identify it as Thyme-leaved Sandwort and not Slender Sandwort. Maybe I'll actually recognise it the next time I see it! My attempt to pull off a single stalk resulted in the entire plant coming up, rather surprising considering its extensive root network. To be fair the soil was exceedingly friable. Apologies for the grimy fingernails, I'd been grubbing around earlier. 

A very small Northern Marsh-orchid indeed!

Now then, I believe I have the rest of my day off to enjoy. Maybe a quick nap first, see if I can dream up a decent route up to Out Stack and back. Not sure which of these I prefer, the sublime original or the incredible kids who cover it. As ever, hope you enjoy!

Also...

Delightful Dalavil

Last week I finished work and headed down to Sleat, arriving sometime after 11pm and then kipping overnight in the car. The simmer dim is almost upon us here on Skye and, thanks to the cloudless northern horizon and a large moon, it was still bright enough at midnight to make falling asleep awkward. I really do need to start using my tent again. Either that or I'll have to buy myself an eye mask.

I awoke early and entered Dalavil, a magical valley that runs down to the sea. Today I was aiming for a patch of woodland two miles into the glen in search of some rather special butterflies.

To briefly recap; it was this time last year that a local birder asked a bunch of us for advice. He wanted to break into butterflies and moths, did we know any good sites with suggestions of what to look for at each. Amongst others, Dalavil was suggested. He casually wandered in and immediately found a colony of Chequered Skippers entirely new to Skye. Talk about beginner's luck! A few of us subsequently visited and found yet more Chequered Skippers and I knocked up a rather crude map of our sightings. This year I planned to put a bit more effort into trying to figure the full extent of the colony and to hazard a guess at numbers. Today was that day. It was also the hottest day of the year so far and I ended up absolutely sunburnt to buggery. And covered in mud, but more on that later.

Approaching the deer-fenced area of Coille Dalavil SSSI

The wooded area on the foreground slope is the area that holds the Chequered Skippers. What I didn't expect was to encounter the first ones out on the open heathland half a mile earlier

My first Chequered Skipper of the day, netted and potted for a pic then immediately released

By the time I reached the deer fence I had recorded three male Chequered Skippers, each of them sunning themselves in the rapidly warming sunshine. I took a meandering path through the meadows and lower slopes, then entered the woodland proper where I concentrated on the pathside vegetation and sunlit glades. Eventually I dropped down to the loch edge and open grassland before beginning my trek back towards the car several hours later. 

Freshly emerged males with not a scale out of place!

I always associate Chequered Skippers with Bluebells, and this largely held true at Dalavil. But several were way out on the valley floor, seemingly a long way from any flowers never mind Bluebells. One plant that was present throughout was Purple Moor-grass (Molinia). This is the larval foodplant, as such I'm somewhat bemused that Chequered Skipper isn't Skye's commonest butterfly for Molinia grows pretty much everywhere! Clearly the butterfly has further requirements that I'm not aware of. Bluebells are a favoured source of nectar and are having a simply stupendous showing this year. I repeatedly watched the skippers slip their proboscis between the overlapping petals which surprised me (I'd always assumed the petals were fused into a solid tube but clearly this isn't the case at all).

My first Painted Ladies of the year

Other inverts of interest included three Painted Ladies (good numbers have been arriving further south, primary migrants from overseas), a single Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary (common here, but this is right at the very start of their flight season), a few Beautiful Demoiselles (very range-restricted on Skye) and a couple each of Silver Hook and Argent & Sable moths. 

Assorted invert yearticks. I think the Horse Leech may in fact be a Skye tick for me.

Eventually I finished wandering the area I had planned to survey. The good news is that Chequered Skipper occurs throughout, in fact with a bit less heat and a lot more liquid refreshment, I could have continued further down the glen and surveyed that as well. My grand total was of 25 Chequered Skippers at 18 sites, and that's an absolute minimum number of individuals because I chose to move on rather than unintentionally count an individual twice. Many were feeding unobtrusively on flowerheads or settled on stems ready to chase away any incoming rivals, undoubtedly I missed more than I saw. Almost all skippers seen were males, these are far more flighty than the females and I suspect they emerge first too. My plan is to return in a couple of weeks and do it all again, but this time extend my search area further into the surrounding grasslands east of the main area. Or what I thus far perceive to be the main area. For now, I have discovered that Chequered Skippers occur in an area one mile long by 300 metres wide. My suspicion is that they fill the lower reaches of the glen, meaning the colony could be nearer three miles long and half a mile wide, but only further searches will show that to be true or otherwise. I may actually camp out in the woods next time. 

The assistant BSBI Recorder for Skye has asked me to collect a Carex from the lochside which is currently defying identification. It may be a hybrid, or it may simply be too early in the season to be properly identifiable. Either way it should be doable by mid-June, so I'll add that area to my search zone. 

There is an old (1994 I think) record for Spring-sedge from Dalavil. I went and had a look and sure enough it's still there, though already past its best.

Spring-sedge, the first time I've seen this species outside of Wiltshire

There is also a 1977 record for Lesser Water-plantain which I thought I might as well have a look for. This, it transpired, did not work out quite so well for me...

Arse. And no sign of the plant either.

I actually had to forcefully lever my feet out of the wellies, the trapped water within had created some sort of a vacuum. I then wandered back to the river, sat on the bank and washed my socks and jeans in the flowing water. Being a bit of a dolt I didn't think to wash the wellies out too, they remained under a tree with my rucksack whilst I concentrated on getting to and from the river without standing on any Adders. Hence my feet were once again covered in mud by the time I made it back to the car some two miles uphill. The socks went straight into the first roadside bin I encountered. Back at the hotel I discovered that the water pump had tripped, hence my much-needed shower was reduced to the merest cold trickle. It's been a long time since I was skinny enough that I had to run around in the shower just to get wet, but tonight I had to do precisely that. I dressed, fixed the pump and began my evening shift with muddy dirt still beneath my toenails. The following day I had an infected big toe. Three days of squeezing pus from the side of the toenail did the job and, so far at least, I appear to have averted the need for amputation. And I'm doing it all again in a fortnight's time...yay.  

The general consensus between we Skye naturalists is that Chequered Skipper almost undoubtedly occurs in other glens on the Sleat Peninsular. The hills above Armadale are an obvious start point for further searches. There's no real reason that it wouldn't occur in other parts of Skye too. I fancy Talisker Bay area as being likely, maybe the peninsular north of Elgol too. Old Corry, if it's not too sheep grazed, could also be suitable. Hopefully we can build a fuller understanding of Chequered Skipper distribution on Skye in the coming years, something to look forward to.

Bucketful of Jelly

I'm writing this between shifts, so it's gonna be a very short post. Today the chef told me there were a lot of jellyfish in the loch. The housekeeper's niece is helping out today seeing as she's just finished her exams and in need of some money. She looked at the chef, looked at me and said "ooh can we go see them? Can we? I want to catch one!" So we went and had a quick look, saw quite a few Moon Jellies drifting by and decided to come back after the shift had finished to see if we could catch any.

Moon Jellyfish plus a net-wielding grinning weirdo

We managed to pop quite a few jellyfish into a bucket, plus a couple of Sea Gooseberries which are ctenophores rather than true jellyfish, the first I've seen for a couple of years or so. I saw a larger ctenophore swimming against the current (jellyfish generally swim/drift with the current) but it didn't come close enough to be netted. It didn't look quite right for Beroe cucumis, which I've seen before but not for a good few years. I wondered if it was a new species for me and went online to see what the options were. Not many!

After work, I changed into casual clothes and returned with my net and bucket. A short while later and I'd snagged myself a ctenophore, it was another of the one I hadn't seen before. The pics of it in a white bucket were awful, so I tipped it into shallow water, shoved my camera underwater and hoped for the best

This is Bolinopsis infundibulum, aka the Northern Comb-jelly and a lifer for me. 

In life the cilia beat with a gorgeous shimmering colour, seen as greens and purples and partially captured in the third image above. This individual was around 8 or 9cm in length, but they can approach double that size. This is my third species of ctenophore, finding two on the same day (at work!) was decidedly unexpected.

Incoming tide with the hotel's slipway in the background

I have eight minutes until I'm back on shift, but I have tomorrow off work and the weather is meant to be glorious. Stay tuned folks!