Sunny Fleas!

 Happy New Year, folks! 

The year has started off absolutely beautifully here on Skye with wall to wall sunshine on New Year's Day, a little bit of rain yesterday morning, which soon cleared, followed by another near-cloudless sky today. I'm not sure how long it'll last, but it's absolutely gorgeous out there for now. This was the view looking up Glen Conon towards snow-capped Beinn Edra a few miles away, taken early this afternoon. I live about 400 metres downhill from where I took this pic. Lucky, lucky meeee!

Although this is the first post of the year for this blog, I've already made a good start with my 'other' brand new blog. I use this blog to showcase the wonderful nature I discover across Skye, whilst the other blog will solely concern itself with my 2021 attempt to get to grips with a load of spiders and flies. If you haven't seen this second blog, click on the 2021 Challenge tab just below the header image at the top of this page. I won't bang on about it for much longer, but I am planning to keep both blogs running concurrently with as little content overlap as possible. The 2020 Vision blog has now ended, though it's still online to view should you so wish. 

With the weather as gorgeous as this, there was never any doubt I was going to be out and about and Uig Wood seemed the sensible option. I had a sieve, a tray and a pooter filled with alcohol. That's pure alcohol, not the drinking type! 

Last year I undertook a beetles and flies challenge, this year it's a spiders and flies challenge. In order to find spiders in the winter time you need to employ some sneaky tactics and filling a sieve with leaf litter, moss or grass tussocks and shaking the whole lot into a deep white tray is one way to hopefully find them. Despite putting in quite a bit of effort, the rewards were few and far between. This was all I'd retained after an hour's worth of sieving

Six money spiders, a harvestman, two springtails, a hopper nymph and a tiny fly

The larger of the two springtails is around 4mm in length, which gives you some indication of the size of everything else in there! To be fair, I also sieved quite a few beetles, almost all staphylinids or featherwings, plus a handful of snails, slugs and other odd assortments which I wasn't interested in keeping. 

Othius punctulatus - at 12mm this was by far the largest invert I found today

I found a disused mammal run beneath one tussock and gave the debris a good sieving, more out of curiosity than any real expectation. Guess what...

That's more fleas than I've previously ever seen in the wild! 

Poor vole/mouse must have been scritching and scratching like a goodun! I have the RES Handbook to Fleas, which is also available as a free download from here, so thought I'd have a quick go. Er...no! I need more magnification, though maybe I'd do better with my compound microscope. Hmmm, I may well try that later. There are 62 species listed in the RES key, clearly these are mammal fleas so I can probably discount the bird fleas for starters, plus they're unlikely to be squirrel, otter or mole fleas, but without keying it's pointless guesswork. For now they are safe and sound in a tube of alcohol. If nothing else, I now know likely spots to search for more of them, should I somehow get hooked on flea ID. Ah, there's a FB page dedicated to flea recording, maybe the guys there would want them? I'll try the compound, see how I get on with that before sending them off to the grown-ups.

I collected the springtails for two reasons. Firstly they looked big and distinctive and I'm bound to see loads more of them whilst sieving - so it would be good to know what they are and which lookalikes are out there too. Secondly, I'm now using alcohol to store soft-bodied spiders. You can't pin a springtail (or a spider) in the way you can pin a beetle or a fly, they shrivel up and fall to pieces. That's probably the main reason I've never seriously attempted to get to grips with springtails before, But now I'm finding that alcohol storage is pretty easy and not as space-consuming as I thought it would be, I may start making more of an effort with them. This is a pic from the other blog (I know I just said I would try to avoid content cross-over, but hey ho) showing the storage unit for my alcohol tubes.

My beautiful wall-mounted alcohol storage system

This unit has 60 drawers, and each drawer has a divider. In effect I have 120 compartments in which to store my tubes of specimens in alcohol. I can fit something like 3600 of the smaller tubes or about 1200 of the bigger sized ones in it, so it should keep me going for a wee while!  

The weather tomorrow is looking cold but sunny. There's a spider that lives on the shore here that I'd like to find, plus there may be small flies in the washed up seaweed. I shall take my binoculars out with me for the first time this year (!) in case there are any white-wingers in the gull flock. Last week I found four Iceland Gulls amongst the commoner gulls. Four! I've never seen that many together before and there's every likelihood that numbers will increase as the month progresses. Be nice to get a Glauc in there too, I need one to send down to Skev. Naturally the local bird recorder had to take things a little too far. He told me to find a Ross' Gull next...

Stay tuned for more winter sunlit shenanigans, folks. I am back and I am positively raring to go!

 

EDIT: I sussed the springtails. Rather disappointingly (for me, at least) they turned out to be the exceedingly common  Pogonognathellus longicornis, which is one I've seen before. Here's a quick pic of  the claw at the end of the foot. Note the long wispy thing to the left of the claw - that's called the empodium and you'll see that it's length exceeds that of the claw.

And this is a (poor) pic of the tip of the furca showing several teeth along the top edge and many hairs along the mucro itself. Crap pic but it does slam home the fact that this springtail is Pogonognathellus longicornis and not anything new to me. 

I could definitely get into these!