Dead-nettle Surprise

Yesterday, whilst en route to the shop for vino, I spied what looked to be a single Red Dead-nettle plant flowering in a garden border. Hmmm, I couldn't recall ever seeing dead-nettles before in the square, or anywhere else on Skye for that matter. Could it actually be a 'decent' plant to find up here? Surely not. Anyway, I emailed the vice county BSBI Recorder who immediately wanted to know if I'd ruled out Northern Dead-nettle, Cut-leaved Dead-nettle and even Henbit Dead-nettle. Um...I decided I needed to go back and take a pic!

Today the weather was lovely; hardly any wind with not a sniff of rain, sleet or snow. There was even a great big bright yellow thing in the sky, possibly a yeartick in itself! I've had to pick up an extra day at work tomorrow (somebody needs to let the contractors in and babysit them whilst here). So, at 1pm I thought buggerit - I'm off down the beach! I'll more than make up for the lost hours tomorrow. 

First the Red Dead-nettle. I leaned as far over the garden wall as I could and managed three crappy shots, all massively over-exposed. Here's the best one, which I've adjusted so that you no longer need sunglasses to view it. 

Bog standard Red Dead-nettle Lamium purpureum, I reckon. 

Happily the BSBI Recorder agrees. This constitutes the first ever record of Red Dead-nettle from my monad. An adjacent square has an earlier record though. From 1968 - that's FIFTY YEARS AGO!!!! Incredible how this "common urban weed" (as it was where I lived in London) is such a good plant up here. I bet it's more widespread than suspected, maybe the backstreets of Portree would be the place to check, or around the dump maybe? 

Down at the beach I spied a very distant immature Iceland Gull, waaaay out at the water's edge. The tide really was pretty darn far out today, I should have taken a pic, but I was too busy lifting stones for starfish and crabs and other cool goodies to think about that. 

Disappointingly, the only starfish I saw was fast disappearing down the neck of a Herring Gull, not my best views ever. No sea slugs, the only anemones were Beadlet Anemones. The only fish were a Shore Rockling and about ten Butterfish (including three with eggs!) and the only crabs were Green Shore Crabs. A few pics for you

Lots and lots and lots of Dog Whelk Nucella lapillus eggs on the undersides of rocks

Mystery chiton species. All of my chitons are mystery species. I may have to address this one day soon.

No idea!!! Possibly a Serpula, I need to drag one out and key it through. Cool tube though, whatever it is

Final pic is something I've seen here loads of times, yet never really paid much attention to. It's common as muck on both the undersides and lowersides of many rocks at the low tide mark

Spirobranchus lamarcki - a very common tubeworm

I assumed that this was going to be Spirobranchus triqueter, which I've seen before. But clearly these tubes have the raised ridge running along the midline of the tube plus a ridge running along each shoulder of the tube, you can see this quite well on the uppermost, large tube in the image. These extra ridges mark this species as Spirobranchus lamarcki, which is a new one for me - happy days! It tends to occur in shallower water than S.triqueter, though both are common around the coasts of Skye. 

I think I need to spend a (warmer!) day studying these animals, undoubtedly there are several other species present and it would be nice to compile a photo gallery of each. Let's face it, they aren't exactly hugely mobile so I should do alright with the camera set up in macro mode. I'll have to find some that are already submerged and grab images of the animals themselves, not just the calcified tubes. 

At the end of today, I'm at 325 species for the square this year. Ali is really storming ahead on the 1000 in a 1KSQ Challenge, he's on 341 already and has 500 in his sights for his end of Feb total. Totally bonkers, and somehow he blames me! Ha, we shall see. I doubt I'll top 400 by end of February, I shall tell you why later...

Nearly forgot - music! What do you fancy tonight? Really??? Tough, you can have this instead. Enjoy!

Far better than the original (I don't like AC/DC - never have. Live with it...)

AMAZING band, I need to start listening to these guys again!