Completely Stuck

Part of my work duties entail setting/checking various pest traps around the premises. By and large it's a fairly quiet affair, the occasional Wood Mouse in a trap or a lost Endrosis sarcitrella in a guest room blunder trap. For me, the most eagerly anticipated part of the trap inspections is when I pop the lids of the five blunder traps that are strategically placed around the kitchen/drystore area. This is where I'm quietly hoping to find a decent exotic pest species. The one I'm really keen to find is Oryzaephilus surinamensis, aka the Saw-toothed Grain Beetle. So far I've come up with an Adistema watsoni, the first record for Scotland and barely found anywhere else in Britain other than in museum blunder traps, and an adult Dermestes peruvianus, found scampering in the drystore area and later handed to me in a cup! During lockdown the hotel was, of course, closed for business. The kitchens were deep-cleaned, the storerooms emptied and my hopes for Oryzaephilus were temporarily put on hold. I did find a Pholcus phalangioides, but otherwise it was quiet throughout.   

But now the hotel is fully open and the kitchens are busy busy once more. There are lorryfuls of food deliveries arriving almost daily, each with the potential of bringing me some lovely pest species to discover, happy days! Today I discovered one. Well, four of one in fact. 

Gotta love an indoor psocid!

I do sometimes find psocids in the sticky traps, but this stood out as something different and I was pretty sure I'd not seen one quite like this before. Scanning the rest of the sticky trap I found three more, all the same species. Psocids tend to shrivel in on themselves after they've been dead a while, these four were all in good shape, so clearly hadn't been stuck in the trap for very long, maybe a couple of days or so. 

Full complement of wings on this individual

I have a copy of the RES Key to Psocoptera (also available as a free download here) and the National Barkfly Recording Scheme has plenty of images and keys too, so it wasn't too tricky to determine my mystery arrivals as belonging to the genus Lepinotus. There are only three species recorded from Britain, two of which are strictly indoor species, the other one occurs outdoors as well as indoors. In short, the key features to check for are a blackish stripe between the eye and antennal socket, postclypeus patterning, the eye colour and whether or not the wings are reticulated. 

This is an awful crop of a wing. Sorry!

It's not particularly evident in this image, but there's a reticulated patterning running across the wing membrane. Look for the small, pale circular spots and suddenly you'll see it (I would take a clearer shot, except the one remaining wing on this specimen has now dropped off and the kitchen is busy at the moment, hence I can't grab another individual from the trap...)

This reticulated pattern is/was quite easy to discern through the microscope, so I'm happy that this is Lepinotus reticulatus. It doesn't have the blackish facial line or greyish-brown eyes of Lepinotus patruelis and it lacks the pronounced reticulate patterning across the postclypeus of Lepinotus inquilinus. 

This is a known pest species, I have informed the bosses and the head chef. The area in question is about to be hit rather hard with some deep-cleaning action and a fogging machine. I'll be monitoring the traps every two or three days rather than weekly (and hoping for one that's still alive and kicking so that I can tick it!)  

The best part of all this is that I know however clean they keep that kitchen, more pests will continue to be brought in by the delivery guys. One day I shall find my Saw-toothed Grain Beetle, and a happy day (for me, at least!) that will be. 

Here's a proper pic of a Lepinotus reticulatus, as found on a sticky trap in Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Teeny Tiny Tatties

Most folks that read this blog will already know what a plant gall looks like. These could be spangle galls on the underside of an oak leaf, as in the image below, Knopper Galls growing over an acorn, or the big lumpy growth sometimes found on bramble stems.

Neuropterus quercusbaccarum, plus remains of Neuroterus anthracinus on midrib

Gall of Jaapiella veronicae on Germander Speedwell bud

The gall causers in these images are insects, tiny wasps in the top pic and midges in the lower. Other gall inducing organisms include aphids, psyllids, beetles, moths, nematodes, bacteria, fungi and mites. Most of the more conspicuous galls encountered will be animal induced. Witch's Broom (aka Witches' Broom, Witches Broom and Witch's-broom) is one very obvious exception. Many of the less conspicuous galls are formed by an entirely different set of mechanisms and a few days back I encountered one such gall. 

And it's a goodun... 

Four of us headed off to Gedintailor, situated just a few miles south of Portree. I felt certain it was an area suggested as a possible future SNG venue, but nobody else remembered that, so we just bimbled about a bit seeing what we could find. Nick Hodgetts, god of bryology, had a great time finding 132 species of mosses and liverworts, bringing the Gedintailor tetrad total to a respectable 141 species. Stephen Bungard, BSBI Recorder for Skye, came away with precisely 200 species of plant, many of which were entirely new for the tetrad. Neil and I found various bits n bobs, some of which was new to us. Essentially we all had a damn fine time, even if we did get forced to backtrack across rocks through an incoming tide. Nobody nearly died, it was all good fun.

Before we had even left the parking layby, I spied several large clumps of Toad Rush growing in the roadside mud. Remembering that Toad Rush has a very rarely found gall on its roots, I duly uprooted a plant. Nothing, same as always. I decided to grab the largest Toad Rush plant present and pulled that up for inspection. Bigger root system means bigger chance of galls, right..? 

Holy shite!

That looks like a tiny potato growing on the roots!

I could hardly believe my luck, was this it??? The obvious worry is that I'd stupidly pulled up a Bulbous Rush by mistake and was merely eyeballing the bulbils. Nope, definitely Toad Rush, and this potato was down near the bottom of the roots, definitely not a bulbil! I carefully scraped off the worst of the dirt and realised there were several potatoes on the roots, some darker than others. 

Darker galls, presumably this means they are more mature?

Back indoors, I washed the roots in water and grabbed a few gall books whilst checking online too. I came across this amazing pdf a month or so back, scroll down to page 17 and see if anything looks familiar...

One potato... two potato... three potato... four!

This is Entorrhiza aschersoniana, a fungus that creates galls on the roots of Toad Rush. Related species of rush have their own host-specific species of Entorrhiza. So far as is known, in Britain this fungus only occurs on Toad Rush, though it has been found on Frog Rush and Minute Rush in Europe. So saying, before 2017 there was a single British record from Mull. Recently it has been found to be widespread in Wales (a survey found it in 31 tetrads), plus a few records from the Outer Hebrides and from Surrey too. It's possibly quite widespread, certainly its host is found across most of Britain, it just needs a bit of digging around to find it. Literally.

I haven't researched the mechanisms yet, I probably should have thought of that before I started writing this post, but I'm guessing the spores are distributed through the soil via water. Clearly they aren't windblown as are most fungal spores. Weird how one plant had the galls whilst a neighbouring plant didn't, maybe my pulling the right plant was just pot luck. Or maybe I really ought to concentrate on the largest plants from now on. 

I have a modest compound microscope, sadly lacking in any kind of a measuring graticule but it's alright for now. In truth I don't use it very often nowadays. The beetles and flies I look at tend to be large enough that I manage without it! Anyway, I knew I'd need to take a look at the spores if I intended to put the record through, so did a fungal squash and squinted through the eyepiece to see what I could see...

Hardly spectacular, I know. Sorry about that. One day I may treat myself to a SEM, but until that day arrives you'll have to make do with shite pics like these. So what can we see? Well, we can see that the spores are slightly oval rather than rounded and they are roughened across the surface. I'm sure the detail of the surface sculpturing looks phenomenal up close, sadly this is as good as it gets through my microscope. The good news is that Entorrhiza spores look exactly like this!

This is the pic from the pdf I linked above. Looks a fine match to me

I submitted it to iRecord last night. It's still awaiting review, but the automated email response made me smile

Rarely recorded. Please check full details inc microscopy if needed and consult colleagues.

So I asked Big John at reception, Annette in the kitchen and Chris Ann at housekeeping. They didn't know.  My colleagues suck. I shall ask the head chef when he gets in, he's ace at pub quizzes.

Brave New Whorled

Whorled Caraway is a plant that I've wanted to see for some time, yet have never really made any effort to track down. Last year I learned that it grows on Skye (see what I mean - I should have known that already, I've been living here for coming up four years, after all). A few weeks back I learned that it grew along a burn near to Sligachan Hotel and this afternoon I received this map from local BSBI recorder Stephen Bungard

Rough and ready pic of a screenshot type thing....

The blue dots along the burn indicate the position of Whorled Caraway plants from an August 2012 survey. You can read Stephen's blogpost about these particular plants by clicking here. The landscape can't have altered very much, if any, since then so I had high hopes of simply wandering the burnside vegetation and finding lots of lovely Carum underfoot. Fool that I am.

Several hundred metres west of Sligichan Hotel, looking east towards the Red Cuillins 

The first layby held several vehicles, I disdained it in favour of a larger layby several hundred metres further up the road. This would place me somewhat beyond the western extremity of Stephen's map, all I had to do was follow the burn eastwards and find the plants. I cut north from the road, found the burn and slowly wandered east towards the hotel. After a short while of yomping through deep Molinia and heather patches, I figured any Whorled Caraway would have to be in full flower and stand at least five feet tall for me to have a fighting chance of finding it. Sadly, it tops out at a shorter height than the dense sward of Molinia I was wading through. I headed for higher, and drier, ground and headed cross country straight for the hotel, hoping the vegetation there would be a bit lower and more conducive to searching.  

Larval mine and cut-out of Heliozella resplendella - just a couple of previous Skye records for this moth

I was being mercilessly harassed my swarms of midges, my midge spray was back indoors so I just had to shut up and put up as best I could. Not fun. Eventually I found myself walking through the shallow burn itself, far quicker and easier than picking my way through acres of deep Molinia and I soon outpaced the midges. Hateful wee things. And then, growing pretty much with its feet in the water, I spied this

(it's the white blob...)

For anybody out there sweeping the internet for plant gen...

I wish I had taken a bit more time obtaining decent pics of my first Whorled Caraway plants, because they have a whole suite of lovely features to appreciate. As it was, they all turned out shite. I could blame the hordes of biting midges. I could blame the dull weather conditions. But essentially, I had the camera on the wrong settings and I'm a complete dolt. Anyway, more poor pics follow...

So far we can see that it's a rather finely proportioned umbellifer, somewhat similar to Pignut I felt, though with obvious red anthers. But the basal leaves are a sight to behold

To my eye, these look more like the aquatic Mare's-tail than the leaves of an umbellifer. The arrangement of these deeply dissected leaves around the stem gives the plant its name (though apparently they are not true whorls, as such. But anyways...)

After a good deal of being eaten by midges, stepping into water-filled hollows and almost falling arse over tit, I emerged next to a metal walkway leading from the layby I forsook in favour of another. Guess what I found growing right next to this walkway, maybe 60ft from the layby...

Spot the white flowerhead amongst the pink heather?

In under a minute I was at the roadside layby. Several minutes of road verge walking later I was back in the layby where I'd chosen to park. At least I now know where to park for next time! 

This is from the last Maiden CD I bought, quite some while back now... 

But this, without a doubt, is the best track on that album (in my opinion)