The Lyons Share

This is Ero tuberculata, a nationally scarce species that is mostly a heathland specialist. The individuals at Graffham are quite bright orange compared to ones I have seen before, they are very well camouflaged against the old flowers of Bell Heather and this is indeed what I swept it from. Yesterday we hosted a BAS field meeting but the weather wasn't great. I added eight spiders to the site list but these were mostly common ones. I've just had Andy's determinations in too and it just takes the site to 139 species, which makes Graffham our third best site for spiders! This is remarkable given that it was mostly under conifers five years ago. Here are some more shots of my Ero.

Andy added three species new to the entire reserve network, this included the ichneumon wasp that parisitises the larvae of Pine weevil being Dolichomitus tuberculatus. Amazingly Tegenaria silvestris had never been recorded on an trust reserve (which is crazy as we cover the spiders in intimate detail and have recorded 382 species so far). The best one though (that I didn't see) was Rugathodes instabilis. And that pretty much wraps up my invertebrate survey at Graffham for the year.