Black Dots to the Fore!

I had a great day yesterday, beginning with another attempt for the Humpback Whale in Loch Dunvegan (no joy once again, I really do think it's moved on elsewhere) before dropping in to what used to be Dunvegan Woods before it was felled last year. I've only ever known this as a dark, dank hillside hidden beneath the dense cover of a mature conifer plantation, this was my first visit since the felling and it was something of an eye-opener. It still very much resembles a disaster zone, which I guess it was for the trees and everything dependent upon them and their humid shade. A few tenacious Hard-ferns and Foxgloves remained, providing a vague clue as to the lost habitat. Plus the less subtle clue of a few thousand tree stumps. But almost everything else, including the carpets of mosses, has died off. Killed by a lack of humidity and the wind, I expect.

Visibility, on a bright day, used to be about 100ft in any given direction

A few rises and falls of hillsides later, I left behind the decimated plantation and entered Dunvegan Estate lands, still gloriously dark, dank and full of life. I spotted a substantial resin run on one particularly large tree (no idea which species, the branches were very far above me) and wondered if any resinicolous fungi might be present. I was in luck...

Typical type of resin run that hosts resinicolous fungi

The pale yellowy-orange fruiting bodies of Sarea resinae

Sarea resinae only occurs on old resin runs. Resin is a pretty inhospitable place to live, full of various chemicals designed to inhibit bacterial and fungal growth. And yet Sarea resinae manages very well. In wet and warmer conditions Sarea resinae deepens in colour to a lovely warm amber and the discs themselves swell and become softer, today they were in their cold midwinter-mode, pale and hardened. 

Through my handlens I suddenly noticed some smaller, black fruit bodies. I remembered that a second species of Sarea occurs on resin runs, one which is far less commonly recorded. I squinted some more and was happy that what I was seeing was a smaller, all black version of Sarea resinae. I took some pics, knowing that this was a fungus I had never encountered before. They weren't great...

Behold! Each black 'cup' is about half a millimetre in diameter, maybe less

This is Sarea difformis, a rarely recorded fungus (can't think why...) and the winter months seem to be the most profitable time of year to go searching for it. Remember, it only occurs on old resin runs. My thoughts are that if you find the more obvious orange fruiting bodies of Sarea resinae, look a little closer and you may find its smaller, less visible cousin growing right alongside. 

Sarea difformis is a new species for me, and when I added it to my PSL I discovered that it is, in fact, a new species for the entire website! No other pan-species lister has recorded this fungus (and there are plenty of folk with a larger fungi list than I). That's cool, between us we have a lot of angles covered, yet there's always room for additional species to sneak in.

I continued through the woods, finding what I took to be a patch of False Londonpride in the undergrowth. There are a couple of confirmed False Londonpride populations already known from Skye, one of which is just a few miles down the road. I picked a sample and took it with me to the known Edinbane population for a side-by-side comparison. They matched, though the Dunvegan plants are a little more hairy than the Edinbane plants.

False Londonpride, here at its third known Skye site

I carried on towards Skeabost Bridge next, where for the first time in a very long while I took my sieve and tray out of the boot and put them to use. I sieved a few Molinia tussocks without much success. I targeted tussocks that were growing in wet areas, my thoughts being that invertebrates would have taken refuge in these tussocks as the surrounding lands became inundated with standing water after all the rains we've had lately. A month ago this may have been a good tactic, but we've had a few mild days lately and the standing groundwater/snow has all gone now. What I did find very productive though was sieving big handfuls of mosses that were growing over rocks and stumps. I missed a few exciting looking flies that departed the tray quicker than I could poot them, but a reasonable selection of small beetles, spiders, springtails and millipedes went up the pooter's tube. Later that evening I went through the specimens and was amazed to discover that thirty minutes of sieving had given me a small haul of lifers, namely the beetles Stenus latifrons, Perapion violaceum (a bit overdue that one, to be fair), the stunning Reichenbachia juncorum rocking in at 1.5mm of weirdness, Olophrum fuscum and the spider Poeciloneta variegata which I actually knocked from Gorse. Alongside those were Stenus impressus with its tibial spurs, the ensign scale Arctorthezia cataphracta, the springtails Dicyrtomina saundersi and Pogonognathellus longicornis, plus a lively micromoth which I'm calling Caloptilia elongella even though the experts say it can only be reliably differentiated from Caloptilia betulicola by dissecting out the genitalia. I went by the colour of the hind coxae and femora, coupled with the grey-brown colour of the scales on the underside of the forewing, seemingly a good character. Luckily Ghostie is a moth gen detter par excellence and has offered to chop its bits for me. I bet it turns out to be elongella though. 

Heading back for the hotel, I realised that there was still enough daylight in the sky for me to hit one last site. I chose nearby Greshornish Forestry, some five miles of tracks through young plantation. It's a pretty wet site and there are drainage ditches either side of the track. I noted how Bulbous Rush seems to love the bare earth of spoil heaps created when the ditches were dug out

If this keeps on proliferating exponentially, I expect it to have taken over the world by 2027

I continued along the tracks for quite some way before a patch of Selfheal caught my eye. It was covered in black 'splash marks' and at first glance that is exactly what they appeared to be. Except none of the neighbouring Ribwort Plantain, Procumbent Pearlwort or White Clover had splash marks on them. I looked a bit closer, intrigued as to what I was seeing

Not splash marks, that's for sure

I popped a sample into a pot and took it away with me for further investigation. Continuing along the tracks I saw plenty more infected Selfheal plants, weirdly many of them were growing right alongside uninfected plants. It soon started to grow dimmer, the days are slowly lengthening but it is still midwinter and there's a very long way to go until the simmer dim. As I headed back towards the car, a vocal flock of Crossbills flew overhead, my first of the year. 

As viewed down the barrel of my microscope

This is Leptotrochila prunellae, a fungus associated solely with Selfheal. The blurb actually states 

Apothecia 1-2mm diam., dark brown to black, in small groups seated on mats of radiating black hyphae which envelop stem leaves and cover some of the lower leaves of plants growing on paths and rides in woodlands. Jan-May.

If that isn't a perfect description of the habitat I was walking, then I don't know what is. I scraped a bit onto a microscope slide and whacked it beneath my compound microscope. No sign of any spores just yet, I shall try again in a month's time. 

Jumping back onto the PSL site to add my SIXTH lifer of the day, I was somewhat amused to see that nobody else has recorded Leptotrochila prunellae on their lists. So that's two lots of black fungal dots I've seen today that nobody else on the PSL site has ever seen. This doesn't mean I'm 'better' than anybody else, it just means that I'm looking at things that others aren't. Or if they are, they aren't bothering to follow them up with an identity. These six additions put my PSL on 7315 species, but perhaps more importantly they put the overall species count of all pan-species listers up to 29,333 species. That's incredible! Pan-species listing is fast becoming a powerful movement. It's not about the individual, that's just crass. PSL is about the combined knowledge and might of the whole. 

But it's also about black dots, ideally sub-millimetre ones that nobody else has ever seen :) 

Life Under Rocks

The days are slowly lengthening, to the point that I just about had time to nip off in search of the Humpback in Loch Dunvegan once more. I blanked, once again. I'm starting to think it may have moved on to fresh hunting grounds. The five Whooper Swans were still on Loch Suardal, it's going to seem strangely empty once they depart (I've managed to get the site added to the national census map for Skye. Crazy that it wasn't listed already) and a young White-tailed Eagle lumbered by, so hardly a wasted journey. Plus Common Dolphins are always entertaining to watch. 

Back at the hotel I noted three Red-throated Divers on the loch outside but still no sign of any Otters as darkness properly fell. I donned my headtorch and hit the garden once more, hoping not to encounter too many New Zealand Flatworms. I found seventeen of them, so I guess I lucked out there!

They're just not a very appealing kind of creature

I heaved over a few biggish rocks that were quite deeply embedded in the soil, which is where most of the flatworms were concentrated. Amongst them was a (sluggishly) active nest of Myrmica ruginodis, a very common red ant here on Skye and my first hymenopteran species of the year. I potted a couple of elongate staphylinids which both turned out to be Lathrobius fulvipenne, the second and third individuals I've had here this year, plus a couple of flat-backed Polydesmus millipedes which I keyed through shortly afterwards. Both were adult, so I was happy they could be identified. Here they are side by side

The larger individual is a female Polydesmus angustus, a common species

The larger was an adult female Polydesmus angustus and readily identifiable as such. The smaller individual was an adult male Polydesmus, but the gonopods didn't match the usual angustus at all. With these it's mostly a case of picture-matching the gonopods to the illustrations in the key, not always particularly straightforward as the shape changes depending on the exact angle you're viewing them from. Essentially there are a pair of longish hooked arms with a secondary smaller pair of arms tucked behind them, plus a few bumps and teeth and whatnot mixed in. It's quite a complicated structure, even in 3D nevermind trying to interpret a 2D illustration. But I got there in the end, finding a perfect match with Polydesmus inconstans, which is a new species for me. Here's the best image I managed through the microscope

It took me a long time to take an acceptable image!

This closely matches part of the gonopods visible in my image above

The angle is a little different, hence the shape doesn't quite line up, but hopefully you can see that my millipede's gonopods match those of the illustration. Polydesmus inconstans, quite widespread in Britain with records from Cornwall to Shetland, and yet it's taken me until now to identify one. I did say there were plenty more myriapod species available for my PSL. This is the second new one for me in the last two weeks, following on from Brachychaeteuma bagnalli. 

The final thing I noticed beneath the same rock was a tiny snail shell, measuring around 2mm diameter and looking faintly glossy and translucent. I popped it into a pot and was soon admiring it beneath the microscope. Using the FSC Key to Land Snails I quickly narrowed it down to the genus Vitrea where it was a toss up between Vitrea crystallina and the very similar Vitrea contracta. Mark Telfer showed me Vitrea crystallina a couple of years back on the Isle of Wight, I've never knowingly seen contracta.

The top image shows some black marks which, after reading this account led me to think it might be Vitrea contracta. But the actual shell morphology fits Vitrea crystallina better, in particular note that the width of the final whorl just above the opening is 1.75x wider than the preceeding whorl at the same position (I measured) which is outside the range of contracta but well within the range of crystallina. I needed to view the shell edge-on to check the profile of the spire and of the aperture, which was easier to do than to photograph. How to balance a 2mm shell on it's edge without it falling over..?

I'm just too good :) 

Note that the spire is exceedingly flat, hardly raised at all. This in itself doesn't necessarily split it from Vitrea contracta which also has an exceedingly flat (in fact even flatter) spire. Comparing with images in the key and images online had me swaying back and forth between the two. Happily the mouth opening itself is just too rounded for contracta, and so I hope that I've correctly identified this as Vitrea crystallina. If you're reading this Mark.....

The yearlist is still coming along quite nicely. I'm up to 474 species so far, so just 26 more to find in the next week or so to hit a personally very pleasing 500 in January. Fingers crossed!

Two Patch Surprises

Last night I fired up the light trap for the first time since 1st January. It was relatively mild and I really did expect a small haul of goodies to be attracted. As it turns out, a male chironomid was the only insect inside the trap and a male Trichocera hiemalis on the wall nearby appeared to be the only other insect lured in. I headed off to look elsewhere for invertebrate interest, pausing to raise the sheet of ply that has been laying on the back lawn for a few weeks now. Bingo! One of my favourite invertebrates lay there before very slowly heading off away from the bright light of my headtorch.

Kontikia andersoni - an alien terrestrial flatworm

When I lived in Uig, a few years back now, I used to regularly find these beneath piles of dumped bricks and the like. I've also found it once at Aird Woods, right down at the southernmost tip of Skye. But this is the first time I've ever found it anywhere else on Skye. Notably, I seem to only ever see these in the winter months - but that may well just be observer bias as I'm usually too busy swiping my net at flying inverts during the summer months. The common flatworm here is the New Zealand Flatworm, one of my least favourite invertebrates, I see them every time I lift debris here at the hotel. The novelty has well and truly worn off and I now find them mildly disgusting. 

Arthurdendyus triangulatus the New Zealand Flatworm. Yuck.

These are typically found beneath anything heavy that is in contact with bare soil. I see several each time I roll logs or check beneath compost bags and plant pots. Usually they are coiled up as shown in the image, but sometimes they are sliding away and that's when you realise quite how large these are. The longest individual I've found here was about 15cm long, which is pretty huge compared to the 1cm long Kontikia andersoni. 

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the smaller of tonight's flatworms and headed off to check around the external lights in case a moth was sat under one. No joy there, but I did find this lady

Female Steatoda bipunctata

To say I was surprised for the second time on this headtorch safari would be an understatement! Discovering that a population of Steatoda nobilis live around most of the buildings here was a bit of a shock, to now find a second species of false-widow was equally shocking. This is Skye for crying out, how on earth did these spiders get here?? 

Today is my birthday. Yesterday I pre-warned the boss that it was unlikely I'd be at work... 

...and today I took myself on a trip around the top end, finding a low-flying adult Golden Eagle, an exceedingly pale Buzzard which caused a fair degree of panic until I realised what it was, a flock of 90 Barnacle Geese and (best of all) a flock of ten Woodpigeons! I'm probably the only guy who gets as excited about Woodpigeons as I do about eagles (I had a White-tailed Eagle sat in a field today...) I then spent a lot of time scanning a huge area of land for the handful of Greenland White-fronted Geese that turn up most winters. No joy this time, I don't think they've been reported at all this winter, but a bonus sighting of two Roe Deer way out in the fields was my first sighting of that species this year. 

I checked out a couple of rivers, finding the freshwater flatworms Polycelis felina and Dendrocoelum lacteum on the underside of submerged stones, along with River Limpets. But best of all was this Bad Boy. Talk about charismatic megafauna (as Ghostie once named it). Or, as I stated at the time, a pebble with its gob open...   

Freshwater Pearl Mussel. Good luck spotting it!

Back to work tomorrow, so far I've managed to add something to my yearlist every day of the month. That's three weeks without a blank, will I make it to month end I wonder? 

I've Definitely got the Hump

Today was somewhat unusual; the weather was lovely and there was not a breath of wind nor drop of rain. The sea outside was absolutely flat calm. I needed to get myself to a viewpoint and check a certain stretch of loch not too far away. I jumped into what's left of my car and headed for a minor road that runs north of Dunvegan. 

To fill you in with the backstory, a rather impressive bit of phone footage came to light yesterday. A fish-farm worker in Loch Dunvegan posted a video of a Humpback Whale absolutely catapulting itself out of the water and landing with one almighty splash. The video was shared on the local WhatsApp group about twenty minutes before sunset, which is roughly the time I started gnashing my teeth. I checked the maps and figured I needed to be viewing from the east side of the loch with the light behind me and with little chance of losing the whale beneath cliffs if it was close in. There are a couple of roadside laybys just south of Claigan, that would be my vantage point. I went to bed hoping the whale would stick around until I could get there in the morning. 

I headed off noting zero Whooper Swans on Loch Greshornish and five on Loch Suardal (today is International Swan Census day and Skye has a handful of allocated sites to check) and was soon parked up in a suitable layby, simply scanning the loch with binoculars from inside my car. Almost immediately I started seeing Porpoises, then a small pod of Common Dolphins moved through. A large raft of Shags suddenly took flight and I truly expected the Humpback to burst into view, lunge feeding from beneath. Sadly the best I could muster was another small pod of Common Dolphins. 

And then there it was, a long body broke the surface and lazily rolled under once more, small dorsal fin atop a hump clearly visible. It rolled into view once more, giving better views. I watched it for a short while longer then realised I could probably just about grab a quick pic with my camera...

Images straight off the card

And cropped 'just a tad'

A car pulled up just behind me and I took my eye off the whale as I realised the driver was hanging out of his window with a pair of binoculars, scanning the sea in the same direction that I was. "Hiya buddy, there's a Humpback Whale out there" I called over to him. "I was hoping that's what you were looking at!" came the reply. Out hopped Ellie and Lance, a lovely couple from North Wales on their final day of a fortnight whale-watching up in the Skye area. Rather embarrassingly I failed to show them the Humpback, it had temporarily disappeared from view. Temporarily turned into 30 minutes and then I had to quit (rumour has it that I do actually work for a living, my boss will soon be forgetting what I look like). We swapped numbers and Lance later messaged to say they'd seen the whale well, moving between two fish farms. Phew, that's good news! Local birder Andy Stables later turned up and posted some pretty decent images on the WhatsApp group. He has a much better camera than I do, so good in fact that the distribution of barnacles can be seen on the left fluke in one of his pics and thoughts are that it may match images taken of the long-staying Ullapool individual which disappeared a few days ago!  

So that's me finally nailed a Humpback for the year after numerous attempts at various sites. Now all I need to do is identify the fly that flew inside my car whilst I was parked up (yesterday a Scathophaga stercoraria flew inside my car whilst I was parked up. This is a very easy technique to find flies!) It looks like a Heteromyza, I'll have a proper look this evening. The yearlist is up to 442 species now. Will I hit 500 by the end of the month??  

Not-so-sweet Honeysuckle

A few years ago several Skye stalwarts botanised the mean streets of Portree as part of the Urban Flora of Scotland Project ('urban' being any town with a population over 1000. Skye has two such towns). My own survey area consisted two monads to the north of the town centre and today I recalled finding a spot behind bushes that had been used as a dumping ground by the houses opposite. In particular, I recalled a large amount of Pick-a-back Plant growing beneath trees and I 'needed' Pick-a-back Plant for my yearlist. With an hour to kill in Portree, I parked up and took a wander down towards the area in question. Pretty soon I was ducking beneath trees and entered a small dell full of alien plants. Mostly it was wall to wall Pick-a-back Plant, but also a lot of Montbretia, some small Rhododendrons, plenty of Yellow Archangel and the like. A typical scenario here on Skye, green waste fly-tipping is not seen as an issue whatsoever. Personally speaking, I would love to slap the householders with a huge fine and then make them dig up the results of their illegal dumping. Happily (for them) it's a good thing that I'm not in a position to demand any such punishments. 

I spied a small growth of honeysuckle, twining its way up a brash pile. The lanceolate leaves immediately put me in mind of Henry's Honeysuckle, though they seemed rather too pale and limp for that species. I've only ever seen Henry's Honeysuckle at a site in Lochgilphead in Argyll and that was back in 2022. I did briefly revisit it in 2024 so that Ghostie could tick it, but from memory it was a far more vigorous and robust plant. Of course, the plant in front of me was a mere youngster, maybe it will bulk up as time progresses. I took a few phone pics and a sample sprig before wandering back to the car to consult my copies of Stace and Poland. 

Stace, in this instance, was of no use to me at all. Stace is all about the flowering parts and my plant didn't have any. Poland was much better but, for once, it failed to lead me to a confident conclusion. I suspect the plant is just too immature to identify. It's definitely not Henry's Honeysuckle, the petiolar ridge and distribution of hairs on the leaf are completely wrong. Japanese Honeysuckle seems a better fit, but I've never seen it with leaves anywhere near as lanceolate as this. 

Just to clarify, I've mostly written this post as a memory jog for myself. If I'm reading this in a couple of year's time I might say "oh yeah, I better go see if that honeysuckle is flowering and identifiable yet!" However, if you tune in later this year I may have reached an identity for you. 

In other news, I'm well over 400 species for the year so far. I'm hoping to smash 500 species by the end of the month, that would be pretty cool I feel. I've yet to leave the northern half of Skye this year, my life thus far comprises an area 30 miles top to bottom and considerably less than 20 miles across. I'm not planning to impose any silly rules upon myself regards staying on Skye throughout, I have far too many mainland plant targets in mind for that to ever happen.

I live beneath the red dot and have yet to leave the marked area this year 

Temperatures are due to reach the heady heights of 6°C this weekend, I may well fire up the light trap and see if I can nudge the odd moth or dipteran into the trap. Watch this space to find out!

Microscopic Life

I'm on a bit of a mission to add a minimum of one new species to my yearlist every day, purely to see how long I can keep it going for before I blank. Yesterday the weather was vile, sideways rain and not at all warm. But my stupid little mission forced me out in an effort to find that 'something new' for the day. I didn't go far. About quarter of a mile north of me is a boggy area with a couple of shallow Sphagnum pools hidden amongst stands of Soft-rush. I took three empty tubes and headed out into the weather, intent on collecting a water sample. The other two tubes were back up, just in case I found something else to collect. I sloshed north, scooped some water into a pot, eyeballed a pink Sphagnum, wondered if I could ID it, and popped a bit into a second pot. Then sloshed straight back indoors again.

I thoroughly enjoy pipetting a few drops of pondwater onto a microscope slide and then systematically scanning the contents through my microscope. I have a little Apex Practitioner microscope which is actually perfectly fine for much of the time. I do need to upgrade though, maybe the Apex Scholar would be a sensible option. I'd like to start measuring some of the smaller objects and an oil immersion lens would be very handy too. Plus a binocular rather than monocular model would be a lot more comfortable to use for extended periods of time. 

At the moment I simply hold my Olympus TG-7 to the eyepiece and take images that way. I turn the focus to manual on the camera, which stops it seeking something to focus on, then use the microscope's focus wheel to bring the image sharp in the camera. The depth of field in my microscope is incredibly narrow, sometimes I need to take several images at ever so slightly different focal lengths to capture a feature on the object I'm looking at. The auto-stacking mode of the TG-7 doesn't work in this configuration, a pity really as that's precisely what I need. It's a bit of a flaky technique, and the camera is handheld which will introduce movement, but it's the best I can do at the moment. Results are decidedly mediocre, as you can see for yourself. 

First up are a few desmids for you. These photosynthesising algae achieve their greatest numbers during the long days of summer, but a few individuals can still be found even now in midwinter. Desmid diversity seems very limited in my sample, I'm not sure if that's down to the site or due to the time of year. 

Micrasterias jenneri with a chain of Tabellaria behind it

Euastrum humerosum looking like a Gummy Bear standing to attention

Xanthidium armatum looking like a WWII naval mine

Netrium digitus the tiny floating cucumber

Desmids are single-celled algae, the paler area in the centre of the paired lobes is the cell nucleus. I still find it incredible that my cheap and chirpy microscope enables me to identify such tiny organisms with a high degree of confidence. 

Another group of single-celled algae that commonly occur in Sphagnum water samples are the diatoms. The identification of the vast majority of these is beyond the capabilities of my current microscope, but I can do a handful of them. One easy to recognise group are those of the genus Tabellaria, of which just four species occur in Britain. Should be easy? No, not really. 

Tabellaria flocculosa - the 'squarish-shaped' one

Tabellaria fenestrata - the dead cell at the bottom holds the clue!

Massive crop of image above

Tabellaria form chain-like colonies. Each individual in the chain exudes a type of glue from special pores in the frustule and links itself to its neighbour by a corner. In the image we can see several individuals that are joined at the corners, the glue can be seen as a blurry smudge between individuals. Note that the bottom individual is transparent, meaning it has died, and the glue holding it to its neighbour is starting to come undone. My thought is that the glue is produced whilst the diatom is alive and presumably deteriorates if not replenished? The dead individual can be seen to comprise three long segments. The middle segment has a tiny but distinct inward kink at either end, which allows us to name the species as Tabellaria fenestrata. The only one to form square-shapes is Tabellaria flocculosa, though it does sometimes extend to more of a rectangular shape. Identifying Tabellaria quadriseptata and Tabellaria hercynica are well beyond my capabilities for now.  

There were a few rotifers in the sample (I can't do those) and many exceedingly tiny whizzy things (can't do those either) plus a good number of testate amoeba liberally scattered throughout the sample. Most of these are too small for me to pick up the kind of detail necessary to run them to genus. But some of the larger or more bizarre ones are definitely doable. Here's a selection for you to squint at.

Galeripora (Arcella) discoides yep, it looks exactly like a doughnut

Centropyxis spinosa exhibiting a smaller aperture and more curved spines than C.aculeata

Planocarina carinata munching on some hapless small things

Despite the lateral bumps, this is also Planocarina carinata!

I love watching these amoebae, though a large degree of patience is required to catch one in action. The almost transparent pseudopodia move very slowly, reaching out from within the test and oozing outwards in the search for something to digest. Judging by the amount of food items visible inside many of the tests, they are highly efficient hunters. Or maybe they just take a very long time to digest anything.  

Very occasionally a 'huge' copepod will flash through the field of view, a startling thing indeed after an hour of slowly panning around a field of essentially stationary objects. What I don't find very often are tardigrades, possibly a good thing because I'm not able to identify them to species, but they're fun to watch as they slowly swim nowhere. 

 Hyalotheca dissiliens encased in a near transparent tube of thick mucilage

I still have plenty of water left in the tube, doubtless I'll pop a few more drops beneath the microscope over the next day or so. The pink Sphagnum that I grabbed as an afterthought turned out to be Sphagnum rubellum, determined by the shape and length of the stem leaves and microscopically by the elongated and tightly packed cells in the basal corners of the stem leaves. It's been fairly recently split out as a full species after having previously been known as a form of S.capillifolium. Nick Hodgetts showed me capillifolium a few years back (he wrote the Sphagnum book, I take his word when he tells me what Sphagnum I'm looking at!) but Sphagnum rubellum itself is a lifer for me. 

So, a rainy day and a fifteen minute escapade into it has given me quite a few new species for my yearlist and, most surprisingly, four lifers for my PSL! Happy days indeed.

Rare Millipede

Yesterday I wrote this: 

I've yet to find a centipede for the year, but I'm slowly working my way through the millipedes with this being the 6th species found so far. Nationally, there are many species of myriapod that I've yet to see, so it's definitely worth my while taking the time to key more of these through until I become more familiar with them.

Tonight I did my usual headtorch safari around part of the hotel garden and suddenly realised I'd never checked beneath the twenty or so boulders that are embedded in soil near the base of some trees. I heaved a few over, they really are quite well embedded, and spotted a small black staphylinid and a small white millipede. They both went into a pot and the first one to be checked was the millipede. 

It was entirely white and around 6mm long. I noticed that the first abdominal segment failed to overlap the head and very almost bunged it away as being a juvenile Chordeuma (immature and hence not identifiable to species, but presumably C.proximum as per yesterday's examples). And then I noticed the complicated-looking gonopods with a couple of hooks on them. Hang on...so it must be a fully grown male millipede. A very small, all white male millipede at that. Blimey, and to think I almost discarded it! I opened up the millipede key and began. A closer look revealed rounded bumps or humps on the 'shoulders' of the body segments, I've never seen that before. Partway through the key to 'snake' millipedes, it dropped out as a 'flat-back' millipede. Oh right! I was very definitely in new territory with this individual. 

This is the only meaningful image I took of the entire animal. Length is 6mm

The ocelli were essentially invisible, though the key told me they were there. I adjusted the angle until finally I think I saw two, possibly three ocelli. Not at all easy. Initially I would have said it was a blind species, but the two choices given were a brownish animal with at least 10 ocelli arranged in a triangle and usually over 9mm in length, or a creamy white/amber coloured animal, less than 9mm and a single line of up to six ocelli.  

The next part of the key asked if the ocelli were distinct and arranged in a line of 4-6, or were there up to 3 ocelli arranged in a line and very difficult to see. Er yeah, I'll go with the latter option! The key then advised that two difficult-to-key species drop out here and that novices should seek the help of an expert. So I messaged Mark Telfer, asking if he had any pics of the gonopods for the two species other than the illustrations shown in the key (I'd already looked and failed to find images online). 

In the meantime I continued with the key. Essentially I had to dissect out the gonopods and align them in a certain position, allowing me to see if there were one or two pairs of projections at the front edge. The key went on to say that individuals of both species display variation in the form of the gonopods, and that even experts may find them difficult to distinguish from one another. Well I'd come this far, I wasn't being quailed by the wording in the final couplet of the key. 

Probably the best of a bad bunch of images that I managed

It is very difficult to reproduce in an image what your eyes see when you look down the barrel of a microscope. Partly because things resolve a lot easier using binocular vision, partly because you lose the 3D effect in an image and partly because the eye separates the various small parts as being individual pieces, whereas the camera just takes an image of whatever is in focus. It's frustrating, so you will just have to take my word that, at certain orientations, the various parts of the gonopods lined up and matched pretty closely the diagram for Brachychaeteuma bagnalli and didn't really resemble Brachychaetaeteuma bradeae very well at all, these being the two options given. 

Penultimate stage of specimen preparation

I successfully dissected out the gonopods (well, I basically destroyed the body segments all around them until all that remained were the gonopods and a fragment of the body segment housing them) and then orientated them until I could see them from directly in front as well as from above. The pair of large, hooked 'arms' were pretty obvious from most angles, but the pair of lateral extensions were surprisingly tricky to see until the orientation was just right. Then they were easy to see. I had the camera ready to take a picture, when a gust of wind came through the window and blew everything away. It's still gusting now, so much for the calm conditions of earlier. The gonopods, at a guess, measure about a third of a mm in diameter. I looked, trust me I looked, but I just couldn't find them. 

Happy with my identification of Brachychaeteuma bagnalli, I checked BMIG and the Blower (1985) key, which had better illustrations than the key I was using, and then added the species to my PSL. It was only at that point that I realised that Steve Gregory, the myriapod god himself, is the only other lister to have recorded the species! Oh gosh, Mark Telfer hasn't seen it and there I was asking him for images of it. That's pretty shocking, I do hope I haven't offended him. 

Anyway, that's seven species of millipede for the year so far. Still no centipedes, but they'll come soon enough I'm sure. My yearlist has crept up incrementally in the last 24 hours to 274 species (a noisy Barn Owl being the latest, about 20 minutes ago) compared to Ghostie's 115 species. My car is in the garage tomorrow, having the rear shockers replaced. Unbelievably, the rear box on the exhaust fell off today. I've notified the garage, but there's no way they'll have the part for tomorrow. Probably be another five week wait. Hopefully they can weld a collar on, or something, until a new one arrives and they can fit me in. I'm going to just wander the streets while I wait, see if I can't scrape up another 26 species to make it a nice round 300 in a week.  

A Feet Up Kind of Day

I've had a very relaxing day today. I wandered around the garden for a while, found a few more bits n' bobs for my yearlist, several of which were full on Patch Ticks, then I sat upstairs and did a spot of sea-watching from the sofa. With a coffee. I haven't seen a single person today, it's been lovely.

This is the life!

Yesterday's gull-fest has disappeared, a mere 20-30 Kittiwakes sheltering in the loch, plus singletons of Razorbill, Red-throated Diver, Black-throated Diver and the first Little Grebe that I've seen here. The grebe was diving just offshore and came up with a small, elongated fish. I'm tempted to guess at 15-spined Stickleback but sadly the images on my camera just aren't good enough to say. Maybe I'll catch one in a net instead. 

Impossible to say. I only know it was a fish by the way it was wriggling!

The garden wander turned up very little; a handful more plants, some bryophytes from a rotten log, a couple of millipedes and a snail from under logs, two lichens and a couple of expected bird species. I'm very much looking forward to the snow disappearing and the ground thawing out so that I can look for a few more plants and inverts. The light trap has stayed off lately, pointless even thinking about it until the air temperature is above zero and the winds drop off.

I found a Chordeuma millipede under a stone yesterday. It was a female, which means it's not possible to distinguish which of the two British species it belongs to (unless you barcode it, I suppose). Barcoding aside, an examination of a male's gonopods is required to see which species you have. Today I found some more, two were male and so were duly popped into a pot, as was a smaller species which turned out to be the very common Proteroiulus fuscus. I had to despatch the two Chordeuma millipedes in order to check the precise shape and ornamentation of various appendages of the gonopods. Here's an image of the relevant part, which is smoothly curved and not pointed and triangular

My image above and the feature marked on the key's illustration below

The key is quite a few years old now, Chordeuma proximum is known from various parts of western Scotland, including the Inner Hebrides where I am. I've yet to find a centipede for the year, but I'm slowly working my way through the millipedes with this being the 6th species found so far. Nationally, there are many species of myriapod that I've yet to see, so it's definitely worth my while taking the time to key more of these through until I become more familiar with them. 

Right, back to having fun-times with the bryophytes... Several of the larger trees here have mats of Hypnum cascading down them. The likely options are Hypnum cupressiforme and Hypnum andoi. I couldn't see any capsules, meaning I had to have a look at the shape of the cells both mid-leaf and at the basal angles. Technically, the shape of the leaf is also useful but potentially a bit ambiguous. So I stuck to checking cell shape. 

Ignore the black circle - it's an air bubble

The darker, squared-off section is the basal corner of a leaf. Behind it are the long mid-leaf cells of a second leaf. As you can see, the cells in the basal angle are blocky-looking, a bit irregularly shaped and almost touch each other. And the very narrow mid-leaf cells are sinuous and run close to each other. Comparing to the illustrations in my keys, these conform to Hypnum cupressiforme and not H.andoi. It's an incredibly common moss on tree trunks, so it's no surprise at all to have it confirmed as cupressiforme. 

Riccardia palmata - wave your hands in the air like you just don't care

I've been very casually noting any plants I find in flower this month. I didn't do a New Year's Plant Hunt as run by the BSBI, though I have done so before. Thus far I've seen Gorse, Daisy, Groundsel and a single Lesser Celandine in flower. All yellow flowers. I've noticed this preponderance for yellow before, maybe because the earliest pollinators to fly in the year are typically the Diptera, and they are strongly attracted to yellow. As are bumblebees, which also fly earlier than most other pollinators. Anyway, pics of each below.

I've just noticed what appears to be a patch of Aphanes next to the Daisy, I didn't see that at the time. That's a yeartick, whichever one it is! My yearlist stands at 268 species, 127 of these being on Patch. I'll try to make time each day this week to get out for at least an hour or so, even if it's only headtorch safaris around the hotel grounds. I'm half-expecting and half-dreading flushing a Woodcock beneath the trees. Woodcock would be a full on Patch tick as well as a yeartick, but I don't want to blunder around accidentally flushing birds while the weather is so crap for them. They've enough issues to deal with at the moment without me booting them up. 

Tomorrow I'll finally have to crack on and do some painting. It's been great taking the last four days off (though I normally have the weekends off anyway), but if I want to earn some money I'll need to put the hours in. Hey ho, it was good while it lasted!