The Lyons Share

 

This is an update to a post from a few days ago on Silver-spotted Skippers. I caught this marked individual and have just got the grid references and times. It was originally caught and marked by Callum Lawson at 4.10 pm on the 1st August at TQ4281010857 and recaught by me on the 3rd August at 3.10 pm at TQ4289410904. So it was caught 47 hours later (or 169200 seconds later). A simple bit of pythagorus should be able to calculate the horizontal distnace travelled (Malling has a very interesting topography so there would be a vertcial element to this but I didn't think to record it). So, the equation should be the square root of the sum of the differences between the x and y coordinates, squared. This comes out to 96.3 m. Assuming the mean error in the GPS is ± 5 m then the distance travelled can be assumed to be 96 ± 10 m. Cool! It's mean velocity in that time comes out at 0.00567 m/s. I think it must have walked! Obviously, it's actual distance and speed over this time would have been far greater but this type of analysis is a basic way to asses the distances that species move.