1000 Species Challenge Complete!

Done. Dusted. Over. Phew!

Today I found my 1000th species in NG3963 for the year, and so have finally made it to the finish line in the 1000 in a 1ksq Challenge.  Species no.1000 was a lifer for me too, hence was a doubly pleasing find. Here it is, in all of its, er... 'glory'

Jenkin's Spire Shell Potamopyrgus antipodarum - an invasive non-native freshwater snail

I found this beastie quite by accident, there were several of them in the fine sediment attached to some water-weed I had collected in the hope of finding more microscopic algae. I didn't even notice them in the pot until I'd removed the weed and found them motoring around the edges of the container. Only 4 or 5mm in length, with several even smaller specimens mixed in, this is a species I had never heard of before today.  

A quick bit of online research informed me that this shallow-water Australian sea snail has successfully invaded much of the planet, soon moving into brackish waters, then freshwater. It can tolerate both low and high temperatures, can survive limited desiccation, can occur in huge numbers (several hundreds of thousands per square metre in parts of North America), is happy in running or still water, even surviving in sewerage, and can clog water pipes and turbines with its sheer numbers. And it's taken me until now to find...bloody amateur! It has a very widespread distribution throughout most of Britain as this NBN map shows. Here's the habitat where it occurs in this particular part of Skye.

Small, nutrient-enriched stream with associated area of boggy woodland floor

This stream comes out from a grazing field, currently home to a few sheep and young cows. It travels just 150 feet or so before leaving the cover of woodland and spills into a channel at the top of the saltmarsh above the beach. It's a very different type of water chemistry to the one I've been recently checking up at the Sphagnum bog, so I had high hopes for a different suite of micro-algae. Unfortunately, all I found was a single unidentified diatom and a few nematodes. I think that standing water is going to prove far better than flowing when it comes to micro-algae colonisation. 

But anyway, I've hit 1000 for the year - huzzah! 

My next post will be some sort of a breakdown of those 1000 species into various categories. At the start of the year I made some projected guesses for how many species I hoped to find in each taxonomical category. I think I hoped for 90 species of birds, it's actually 94 so that's pretty close. I hoped for something like 170 species of plants but have ended up with over 280 species, so my guesswork was way out that time. I have even bigger plans for 2018, but you'll have to wait until after the next post before I spill the beans. It's a masterful plan though.

(Leave 'em on a cliff-hanger, yeah that's the way to do it...)

As an aside, I've just submitted this years' moth records to the CMR. I never did get a light-trap running, hence only managed to drum up a tad over 90 species, but it did include a few microlep records (for which he was most happy seeing as his database is almost devoid of micro records) including one which is new to Skye. That "masterful plan" for 2018 WILL include a light-trap with associated "trap notebook". It's been a very long time since I ran a trap and I'm looking forward to it immensely. Not quite so keen to experience the "midges an inch deep in the bottom of a trap" that I've heard talk of though.