Gherkins, lemons and lobsters: the best rock pooling I've ever had!

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Wednesday 29 March 2017 18:12

Last night was the biggest low tide of the year and a few of us (Evan Jones, Tony Davis and Oli Froom) decided to go and have a look at the Pound at Holywell, Eastbourne as in January we found a sea slug there and I was taken by how rich and easy to work it was. It was amazing! I don't even know where to start. Maybe with the star of the show above. It's not too hard to guess what it is but I just love this photo taken by Oli.

Every rock we turned over seemed to have a Shanny or a Rock Goby under, like this stunning male. We did see one Tompot Blenny but I didn't even get around to photographing that one.

We saw all manner of weird and wonderful worms including bootstrap worms which I have never seen before. Then Evan turned a rock over and I couldn't believe what I was looking at!

We believe this huge (15 cm) 'thing' is a Sea Gherkin Pawsonia saxicola. It's way east of its known distribution but we don't think there is anything else it can be. It retracted when we put it in the tray rather than unfurling its tentacles. Quite disgusting. I love it!

Then Evan struck gold again with as you've guest it, my first ever Lobster!!!

Tony had more luck picking it up than me as it nipped me straight away much to his amusement. Here it is next to a Squat Lobster. This is an unbelievable beautiful animal.

And the Squat Lobster too. 

And Oli's tail shot again as it's so great!

Under the same rock as the Lobster, Evan turned up a Yellow-plumed Sea-slug Berthella plumula!!! Another new one for me and quite uncommon.

Then Evan...wait a minute, if you're thinking, why are the other three of you not turning anything up, you'd be kinda right. Evan was a total machine and we were left in wonder at his finds to the point that he had turned up the next mega before we had finished photographing the last. Such as these mating Sea Lemons Archidoris pseudoargus, yet another type of sea slug!!!

We reached the point at which the Pound was draining out to sea through a series of weirs. We are in the kelp zone here, a zone only revealed at very low tides.

Actually I didn't need to find anything as I had an 'Evan on a stick' as can be seen in the photo below.

Then Evan on a stick found yet another exciting species, this Snapping Prawn! Sadly missing its claws.

It was quite simply the most mind-blowingly awesome rock-pooling I've ever had! A massive thank you to Evan for finding...EVERYTHING! So much so that I rushed down to Seaford Head before my meeting in the morning to get another fix but it wasn't anywhere near as good. These Dahlia Anemones though were stunning!

On an even keel

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Saturday 25 March 2017 15:51

What a keel! So not even a triple 50th birthday party last night could stop me from getting out in the field this morning. I joined Huw Morgan and his work party again at the Deneway in Brighton. I added 35 species to the reserve including this Sowerby's Keeled Slug. I also saw Iberian Threeband Slug. Both these species were new to the whole reserve network. We are currently on 9834 species across the 32 sites! Only 166 to go. Pretty sure it will happen this year now.

Also picked up the spider Amaurobius ferox.

100 species an hour

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Sunday 19 March 2017 12:12

Yesterday Dave Green and I tested out the recording forms I put together for the 1000 species challenge. It was an AMAZING day and we got a 100 species from the car before we even got to Levin Down. The recording forms worked well but this test run was a great way to see what works and what doesn't. Keeping a running count is harder than you would think though. Sieving moss (above) and beating Juniper yesterday was extremely productive, unlike the suction sampler.

We managed about 250 species in the first 2 hours 30 minutes. Not bad for an overcast windy day in March! I had two lifers, we go lots of species new to the site and one species new to the reserve network found by Penny! Now on the day, it's just gonna be Dave and I recording but it's so much fun doing this there is no way we could have all the fun on our own. Some interesting facts, our first raptor was at species 85 and that was Red Kite! We didn't see or hear a Dunnock all day nor a single migrating Meadow Pipit but that might be down to the breeze. The first species was Cuckooflower and the last was Pied Wagtail. 

We are pretty sure this species is Cordyceps gracilis, a rare parasitic fungus that we have seen at Mill Hill years ago. Have a look here for the post I did at the time. Yesterday there were two of them. There were also LOADS of Platyrhinus resinosus. 14 on clump of Cramp-balls! I've only ever seen three before! Thanks to Penny and Dave for the photos. I found this new to West Sussex (and only the 2nd Sussex record) at Levin last year. It's clearly done very well up there. Look out for it in the area.

The final score was 294 species comprised of:

Vascular plants 126
Bryophytes       13
Lichens             2
Birds                 39
Mammals          5
Beetle                26
Centipede          2
Millipede           5
Crustacean         5
Springtail           1
Earwig               2
Tick                    1
Hymenoptera     9
Moths                2
Bugs                  11
Flies                   4
Molluscs            16
Spiders               19

So, aiming for a 1000 species in a 24 hour period isn't looking quite so daunting now!

What's that coming over the hill?

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Thursday 16 March 2017 10:28

This post is mostly about the value of casual recording. On Monday and Tuesday this week I need to walk around our three chalk-grassland sites Southerham, Malling Down and Ditchling Beacon on a compartment by compartment basis to check on our winter grazing. Now I've also been a fan of casual recording on top of the more structure monitoring and surveillance but since I put the spreadsheet together, it's really made me realise how little we know about our sites. So where ever yo are, if you always record the most interesting species of the day, you'll likely be recording something significant.

On Monday I walked up Southerham and the first beetle I encountered was new to the reserve, the common dung beetle Aphodius fimetarius flying around a cow pat. Not much happened then until I got to Bible Bottom where I saw my first Wheatear of the year on top of an isolated Hawthorn. I lifted my binoculars to this larger and paler than usual Wheatear to see it was a Great Grey Shrike! The first for the reserve and my first self found one. Amazingly we now have records of Great Grey Shrike at 10 out of the 32 sites. That's the same as Curlew, Med. Gull, Teal and Woodlark and more than Golden Plover. We only have records of Lesser Black-backed Gull at 11 sites!

Then on Tuesday I was walking up the Coombe at Malling Down when I saw a huge ungainly spider walking awkwardly towards me over a ridge. I was amazed to see it was a male Purse-web Spider Atypus affinis on a spring vacation from its subterranean lair! What a treat, I've only seen this spider twice before but in quite different circumstances so this was really exciting! We haven't had a record of this before at Malling and it's the first record on a reserve since 1968 at Iping and Stedham!

Here is another shot from the side. The Coolpix isn't doing too well these days since I dropped it in a rock pool. I'm planning on getting a new camera next month though and it's NOT going to be another Coolpix!!! Anyway, love this shot as you really can see how odd this spider. Even the male's abdomen has like a weird armoured cap on top. Huge pits in the cephalothorax too. Whatever will turn up next?

And the field season starts with a bang!

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Sunday 12 March 2017 21:00

So yesterday was the first proper day out in the field in 2017 and what an awesome day it was! Andy Phillips organised a BAS day to our Old Lodge reserve Our Mission; to find Thanataus formicinus, a spider not seen in Britain since 1969. We didn't find it but it didn't matter as we found loads of other cool stuff and I soon forgot I was even looking for it. What was great for me about this day is it's the first day out in the field on one of SxWT's reserves since I created the spreadsheet. It's changed the way I do natural history!

So far we added 14 species to the site list (but expect this to go up as the other's identifications come in). Even better though, three of these species were new to my own list and two of these were entirely new to any Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve. So here is a breakdown of those 14 species and some notes on them. What's even more remarkable is that Chris Bentley and I did a very detailed invertebrate survey on the site in 2013, just shows you can never cover a site enough.

Aculeates (both of these are common and shows the site is quite under-recorded for aculeates)
Andrena bicolor
Andrena nitida

Beetles
Aphodius sphacelatus (common as muck - literally being a dung beetle)
Anisotoma orbicularis (new for me and the site)
Acalles ptinoides (Nb - I've only seen this once at Iping in 2012. This time it was in the suction sampler)
Stenus kiesenwetteri (IUCN VULNERABLE. New to me. Old Lodge and any Trust reserve. The highlight of the trip...so far. Again it was in the suction sampler but spotted in the tray by Laurie Jackson)

Psyllids
Livia junci (AKA Mr Weird - a very odd looking psyllid)

Ticks
Ixodes ricinus which was everywhere.

Bugs
Stygnocoris sabulosus

Millipedes
Blaniulus guttulatus (sieved from Spahgnum)

Spiders
Nesticus cellulanus (first time I've seen this away from caves)
Pholcomma gibbum (that's the photo above taken by Evan Jones - I've only seen it once before at Selwyn's Wood)
Ozyptila atomaria (an adult female in the suction sampler below)

Hypselistes jacksoni (a new one for me and any SxWT reserve. I thought that this was going to be a Hypomma but I soon realised it had a pair of eyes on top of the butt on its head that Hypomma bituberculatum doesn't have. It's clearly uncommon with a north western distribution. This fits with Old Lodge being higher and colder, it's a bit more like an upland moor than the West Sussex heaths.

This is Salticus cingulatus, a nice jumping spider not new to the site but the first time I've photographed it. A big thanks to everyone for an awesome day in the field.

...it was my ear and it came off when I fell out of a tree

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Friday 10 March 2017 12:46

It's been a while since I posted one of my 12 year old bird diary entries and this is a corker. I have been looking forward to this one (hence skipping out the Snow Goose entry which was a bit boring really). So, it's 24th November 1990 and I'm fond of copying pictures from the Reader's Digest bird book. However, I think was my finest hour...

Very windy and cold with snow and hail now and then. We split up with Mr Berry at Park hall and went looking for the long eared owls. Then we saw a man with a strange cross bread dog (half dog, half bap), we asked him and he said that he had just saw one (in half) roosting in a tree and he marked a circle in the floor (AKA as ground Little Graeme) around the tree, we saw the bird but it was a bad view. We could make out the ear tufts.

So far so good and not that weird. Then we went looking for mushrooms...

              Then we whent to Shugborough for an hour, looked at some books had our dinner, there was some good books on fungi (I distinctly remember looking at the first edition of Roger Phillips and being amazed), and there was a disc on the computer called 'camping', which I was sent to hospital for drinking contaminated water. 

What?!?! This makes no sense to me, clearly there is a missing sentence and punch-line here. I have never been sent to hospital for drinking contaminated water. There is a slim chance Ewart will be able to shed some light on this but I think we might have to just accept that for what it is. Nonsense!

We saw some fungus, mycenas, parousel mushrooms and Jew's ear (that's Jelly Ear in the civilised age) fungus, which is very damp and soft and looks like someones ear (who knew?!). I pretended to Mr Berry that it was my ear and it came of when I fell out of a tree. Ha ha, I bet I thought he'd fall for it, I was totally convinced it looked identical to a human ear. The power of suggestion to a 12 year old!

Next up a Sociable Plover for an antisocial 12 year old...

Only 196 species to 10,000!

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Wednesday 8 March 2017 10:09

I had ten minutes before a meeting yesterday to try and find some interesting wildlife at Woods Mill and I managed two species new to the reserve network! Well, nearly. First up is Alder Tongue, a fungus that grows out of Alder cones. I have looked for this in the past but yesterday I simply reached up and pulled the nearest cones down and it was on the first twig I looked at! Obviously, this is more impressive when the cones are green. I will have to go back. Barry has since confirmed he had it last year at Castle Water but he hasn't put the record in yet so, technically it was still a first for the reserve network!

Then this fly. Not quite new as I have seen it here before but somehow didn't manage to get the record in! This is Phytomyza hellebori, a fly that mines the leaves of hellebore, this being Stinking Hellebore. It's just around the back of the workshop at Woods Mill. It just goes to show, even when you don't have much time you can still find significant records. The reserve network species list is now on at least 9804 species. Only 196 to the 10,000 mark!

Nature Blog Network