Fish Porn!

With a title like that I'm anticipating a huge surge in page views, maybe even into double figures if I'm lucky...

To continue on from the previous post, Ali and Pete were here for their second full day on Skye and Neil had agreed to join us for a second dose of natural history madness. Our targets today were to enter the otherworldly Spar Cave  located at the far end of the Elgol road, and to then work our way back northwards stopping off at various sites of interest including the sole known breeding grounds on Skye of the Brook Lamprey, an eel-like fish with a sucker for a mouth. 

We met Neil and his better half Debs at Elgol and wasted no time heading off for the cave. The route is across a field, down a steep track through trees, across the bottom of a boulder-strewn canyon, around a headland via large boulders exposed at low tide, then along narrow ledges until reaching the inlet with Spar Cave at the far end. It's great fun traversing the ledges, fingertips gripping whatever you can find whilst shuffling your feet along narrow ledges. Knowing that Ali probably wasn't going to enjoy the ledges, I decided to wade welly deep through the water-filled inlet and guide him along in case he got stuck (to be fair, if he fell it would only be a few feet into water a foot deep. I was just feeling heroic, I guess). Anyway, Ali was perfectly fine and I got an entire welly full of seawater seeing as the water was deeper than I thought. Arse. But soon we were at the cave entrance. Turns out neither Ali or Pete had thought to bring a torch (...!) luckily I'd brought three for just such an eventuality. Into the gloom we went.

I didn't actually take any pics of Spar Cave, so I've nabbed some off the internet for you to look at instead. They're better than any I would have taken anyway, though in real life it's far more impressive altogether, what with the water dripping everywhere and the huge weight of rock poised overhead, flowstone formations under your feet and the coldness you feel as soon as you're more than about a hundred feet in. If you get the opportunity to visit Spar Cave - do it! Just check the tides first.

Flowstone staircase heading up and up and up....

Some randomer at bottom of first flowstone staircase

Very cold pool beyond second flowstone staircase. Folks swim in this!

Over-dressed randomer attempting a hero stance

We did see a couple of very small critters skittering about in a pool, and a solitary Cave Spider on a wall, but essentially it is a lifeless - if pretty damned cool - kind of place and we didn't fancy being caught out by the incoming tide, so we headed for the open air once more to find that Neil had found a few choice bits 'n bobs in the rockpools below. 

Meta menardi - one of the Cave Spiders and really quite sizeable too

We quickly joined Neil standing knee-deep in the rockpools and amassed a small but varied selection of weird creatures. Plenty of Broad-clawed Porcelain Crabs, a handful of fish, various seaweeds, many small molluscs and lots of different sponges, including this one which I think looks a bit like a squashed purse

Grantia compressa aka the Compressed Purse Sponge

Neil decided to take the bull by the horns, or rather the prawn by the tail

Palaemon serratus aka the Common Prawn - and a monster-sized one at that!

Potentially the best find of the day was discovered as Neil overturned a large slab of submerged rock and found three sea slugs gathered in the middle of a mass of fish eggs. Two were quickly potted (sadly I don't think any of us took pics of them in situ on top of the fish eggs) and passed around to be admired. This was Pete's first sea slug, I feel he was slightly underwhelmed by their lack of gaudy frills and rainbow colours, but they were pretty cool nonetheless. I took some seriously crap shots, so I've "borrowed" a couple of Neil's pics. Ahem....

These delightful little creatures are a species of Calma. We didn't know that at the time, Neil later put these pics up on a FB group and I did a bit of internet trawling that night. Happily we came up with the same answer - Calma gobioophaga, which translates as 'goby egg eater' coz yep, those fish eggs they were swimming across is what they eat! I had no idea that sea slugs ate fish eggs, but these do. In the bottom image you can see that the eyes are slightly ahead of the second pair of 'tentacles' (actually rhinophores) which is at odds with the two species of Calma known to occur in Britain. See this link for details. Eventually, a European expert came to the rescue and told us that sometimes the eyes can be ahead of the rhinophores in Calma gobioophaga, mystery solved and a very decent new 'dot' on the distribution map has been made. Skye is substantially further north than any previous British records for this species. Neil and Ali have been asked to formally submit the record and their images are likely to grace the cover of a certain marine mollusca magazine sometime soon! Fame, fortune and glory shall be theirs! 

We pottered about for a while as the tide slowly came back in. A young couple were still making their way into the cave and half an hour later they rounded the corner and back into view. He was wet up to his waist and she didn't look madly happy, I think he piggy-backed her out of the cave. Kids nowadays. 

We had a quick lunch break on the midge free rocks, Ali swept a male Eristalinus aeneus, a hoverfly with very spotty and partially hairy eyes which was a lifer for me. True to form, I took a barrage of crap shots. 

I spotted this lichen on a coastal rock, which looks to me like Caloplaca flavovirescens, but Ali thinks it's more likely to be Caloplaca crenulatella. To be fair, Ali knows a lot more about lichens than I do, so he's probably right. Any takers out there?

Caloplacaflacca oojiwotsit

Quitting Spar Cave and the Elgol area, we headed northwards and stopped at a small pond where I remembered finding a pondweed that Stephen named. We saw the pondweed, and that night I asked Stephen if he could remember which one it was. He could, and named it a second time for me - Red Pondweed Potomageton alpinus. Yep, that sounded right and was new to the guys. 

It was at this point that I realised I was sharing the back of Pete's car with a horsefly. I potted it up, fully expecting it to be the ubiquitous Haematopota pluvialis. But in fact it was a female Haematopota crassicornis, which would have been a lifer for Pete and Ali had they bothered to turn around and look at it - but they didn't. Lifer for me though! I also potted a male Northern Blackbottle Protophormia terraenovae from the same back seat of Pete's car. Not a lifer, but only the second I've seen this year.  

We stopped beside a small stream running into Loch Cill Chriosd and quickly walked down the bank, scanning the shallow water for movement. "There's some!" I yelled as I caught sight of thrashing silver bodies between stones. Brook Lampreys spawning, fantastic! They were a lifer for Ali, Pete and Neil,  I'd already seen two at this exact same spot just a week or so back, I was very relieved that they were still present for the guys to admire too. Eventually, I thought 'sod it, I'm going in', and carefully waded across the stream for a closer look. I think it was probably worth it...

Arse end of spawning Brook Lampreys. But I can better that...

They're very short clips, and I can only apologise for the awful voice-overs, but I'm quite pleased with my first attempt at filming spawning lampreys. I had no idea the camera would record our voices whilst I held it underwater, I'm quite impressed with that. 

As I was clambering out of the stream bed, I noticed a freshly emerged Golden-ringed Dragonfly sat by my foot. This was a new species for Ali and he was quite keen for a closer look. Can't say I blame him, they're amazing creatures when you see one up close.

A teneral individual - check the still milky eyes

The eyes will darken up and the wings fully harden once the insect has been adult for a few more hours. I didn't see the excuviae it had crawled from, but presumably it wasn't too far away. 

Just across the road from the stream is a small patch of woodland. I asked Neil if he remembered whereabouts the Mountain Avens grew and he replied, "och aye, just over in the thingme" which is a pretty poor impression of how he actually talks, the important thing was that he knew where they were and both Pete and Ali were uber keen to see it. Two minutes later....

It's a pretty enough flower, but to my mind I think it's at its very best when in seed. It has extensive, shaggy pappus which gives it a really distinctive fluffy look. It was whilst it was in this stage that I first encountered the plant. Right here with Neil, in fact. 

We had to be back for our pre-booked evening meal, so bade farewell to Neil and Debs and slammed northwards. But not before I talked the boys into a quick pitstop at Sligachan for a couple of very decent plants. First up was a mini-twitch all of about 100ft to see Whorled Caraway poking up through streamside Heather. Just one plant was visible, and sadly not in flower yet, but nice to see and a lifer for Ali. Then we hit the moorland in search of a certain lochan I'd visited once before. 

Less than five minutes later we had to stop for Ali to lifetick Mountain Everlasting before continuing on in search of water. I wasn't sure how many new plants the guys had racked up so far during the trip, but it seemed quite a few. Pete had set himself a target of yearlisting more species of plant than was on his entire British plantlist when he first totalled up his PSL in 2017. His target was to beat 819 species, Mountain Everlasting was one nearer that tally so he too was pleased to see it. Not as pleased as Ali, who was distinctly punch-drunk with lifer overload!

After a couple of false starts, I finally found the lochan in question and started scanning the bottom for rare aquatic plants. They may not look much at the moment, give it another month and they'll look a lot better when in flower, but these are Water Lobelia with it's strap-shaped leaves and Pipewort with it's sharp poiny-looking basal rosette. 

Pipewort is a ridiculously scarce plant in Europe, occurring in the southern half of Skye, the western tip of Ardnamurchan and on Coll. It also occurs on the west coast of Ireland, and that's it. It's main distribution lies in North America, I don't know how or why it occurs in The Hebrides and Ireland but Sligachan is a reliable site for it. Pete even found one of last years' stems floating about in the lochan. We coud hear a distant Greenshank calling from an area of bog, a nesting bird here, and Ali ticked his second dragonfly species of the day - this time a Four-spotted Chaser. Again, not something you're likely to find in Fife though common enough on Skye. 

We hurried back for our meal, another excellent day safely under our belts. 

The Pipewort lochan

Pete (foreground) and some dodgy fella holding his sweep net upside down (pic by Ali)