A quick visit to Woodvale after work to look for Bulbous Meadow-grass was successful. Couldn't find any in flower but it was distinctive enough. As I was photographing it I heard a Firecrest singing too which was nice. Woodvale is where I saw my first Firecrest perhaps 15 years ago. Considering how much time Jo spends in the field with me I was surprised to hear her say 'Is that a normal seagull, it looks pretty different'. My reply was 'No Jo, that's a Wood Pigeon'.
Earlier in the day I started the Woods Mill CBC and picked up a Green Sandpiper on the new stretch of river and a Little Egret as well as the male House Sparrow that has moved in recently. I spent the afternoon finishing off a map at Ditchling Beacon. I was checking out a water butt for any unlucky inverts that had landed in it when this beetle bounced off my face. It's a species of Helophorus and is actually an aquatic but it doesn't really look that well adapted to life in the water. There are quite a few species though so I will have to key it out later when I am not tired.
Whilst brushing my teeth this morning, I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked up to see this little jumping spider (it was only about 3 mm long) on my window. I keyed it out to genus and got an identification, which thanks to Andy Phillips, I can now say was correct! It's a female Pseudeuophrys lanigera. I thought I saw this in Woodvale a few months ago but I was not sure. It's great to get a tick from within your own flat! It's particulary fond of roof tops apparently, just like your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman. The second photo is the epigyne, the sexual organs of spiders are external and hence dissection is not required as it is with so many other difficult invertebrate groups. It's not easy though matching the epigyne to the illustrations in the book.
There were quite a few inverts on the wing today and I have to admit to a very embarrassing tick at Wild Park today, the Marmalade Hoverfly Episyrphus balteatus. This is one of the commonest hovers, I've just never got around to keying it out and recording it. I also added another naturalised plant species growing up there, Oregon-grape. That puts me on 3090! Now, I have just found a tiny black flea beetle sitting by the light switch that makes this spider look huge...
Mark Telfer was in town this weekend and we managed to get an hour of natural history in at Woodvale Crematorium in central Brighton. It was a freezing cold but beautiful day and Mark found three things in the cemetery that I had not seen and I was able to return the favour with some chalk-grassland mosses. The big surprise was this scarce fungi, Winter Stalkball Tulustoma brumale. I was showing Mark the spot where, in the autumn, Nick Hunt found the Rugged Oil Beetle Meloe rugosus and Mark spotted several of this unusual little fungus. Howard Matcham pointed out there are only five other records for this in Sussex!
Mark also found a specimen of the tiny but beautiful Ribbed Grass Snail Vallonia costata which was very easy to key out and this tiny woodlouse, Trichonishcus pygmaeus. This individual was under 2 mm long. A great end to the weekend and that puts me on 3070. Mark has also been kind enough to lend me a microscope so I can continue to identify the little things without getting a headache. Only 930 species to go!
Just as I finished work this afternoon I got a phone call from Nick Hunt saying he had found a FEMALE
Purse-web Spider Atypus affinis in Woodvale Crematorium. I have found the webs there and Nick has seen two males already but I really wanted to see a big female. I legged it back to Brighton as fast as I could and was there within 30 minutes. This spider is something else, look at the size of its jaws! This spider is the only species in the sub-order Orthognatha, the same order as tarantulas! The chelicerae (jaws) which are visible in these shots and
the video are arranged to move up and down (like a pick-axe it states in
Roberts) and I would hate to be on the wrong end of them.
It was quite a clumsy spider and seemed very sluggish as it fell over a few times The females are meant to spend most of their time in the webs underground so I was really surprised to see a female. at all The jaws are so large that the eyes are raised to see over them. What a beast and a really awesome end to the week. Only two species to go now...
This is one of the
Tegenaria species, or House Spiders, (there are 9 species in the genus on the British list according to the
British Archnological Society website) and I'm not able to identify them yet. I would need to take the specimen and look at his palps under the microscope. This one was stuck in another spiders web and looked very dead. So much so, that Nick made a girly yelp when it suddenly came to life when he went to retrieve the specimen! Ha ha. We were there to try and relocate the Purse-web Spider that Nick found there yesterday (and to exercise my back) but we couldn't find it. Bugger.
We saw quite a few spiders in the half hour we were there including these species. The top one is
Amaurobius similis and was found on a flint wall. It has distinctive palps. The middle photo is one of the missing-sector spiders
Zygiella x-notata and was hanging around on a grave. The bottom photo is
Drassodes cupreus and was happily sheltering on the edge of a crypt. You need to see this under the microscope to separate from another closely related species.
On the way out I saw what I thought was Bermuda Grass growing on some bare ground between gravestones. I took a specimen and it turned out to be the naturalised
Hairy Finger-grass.
Don't worry, this is not a proposal to make another TV follow up of another Shane Meadows movie. I have recently become fascinated by Purse-web Spiders Atypus affinis. I have still never seen one but yesterday I did find the web of one. I was told recently that the spiders are present in Woodvale Crematorium in central Brighton. The spiders need south facing slopes with dry bare ground and this habitat is provided at Woodvale, there is some nice chalk-grassland surviving there, it makes me wonder what my house was built on? What species once flew and crawled through the space that is now my home?
Anyway, I was told about this spider and it's fascinating life story and I would like to pass this on. It lives in a closed long silken tube (more like a sock than a purse) which is buried vertically in the ground with just the top (maybe 10 cm) sticking out. There can be as much as 50 cm underground, they are real grave diggers! It lives at the bottom but when a none suspecting invertebrates crawls over the exposed section, it runs up and attacks it with its HUGE jaws. It then drags it through the web, devours it and then goes back up and fixes the hole it made. It is the only species in the sub-order in the UK and is quite unlike anything else. I would love to see one but I don't know how, other than digging one up, which I wouldn't do as this would be destructive to the spider and might get you in trouble in a cemetery! They rarely leave the web so I'll just have to wait for a chance encounter. Anyway, second best is the photo of the web and knowing I was less than a metre from one! There are lots of pictures of them on Google and a video on
YouTube. It's amazing to think they take four years to mature.
Last night a friend of mine, Nick Hunt, posted a picture of an oil beetle that he had found in Woodvale Crematorium in Brighton. I became excited and asked if we had got time to go and look for it but as the gates were closed, I didn't fancy scrambling over a fence with a slipped disc. I had to wait till morning then. Nick then told me he had found it under an old piece of cloth and had put it back there. This made me think it was highly likely to still be there in the morning.
Last night I dug out Volume 14, Number 1, October 2002 edition of
British Wildlife which has a key to the oil beetles in. I was pretty sure by last night it was
Rugged Oil Beetle Meloe rugosus and low and behold it was still there this morning and that was what it keyed out to. Peter Hodge tells me the beetle is spreading but this may be the most westerly record in Sussex. They have a fascinating life history and are very bizarre looking things. A bit like a fat-ant but quite slow and ponderous with it. They are flightless but the larvae hitch a lift with bees before parasitising them in their burrows! A great find by Nick and it has certainly drawn my attention to Woodvale again. Here is the habitat of this rare animal, an old abandoned sleeve from a goth's shirt?!
Nick also found this smart blue carabid hanging around a gravestone, which I keyed out as the Prussian Plate-jaw Leistus spinibarbis, it's quite common but has some pretty cool feeding adaptations. It has a setal cage (a cage of hairs below its face for dropping over springtails, the only way out is via the expanded mandibles!). I might try that with my dinner, I could well use a pair of expanded mandibles. These features are just about visible in this photo.
I found a fungus on my way out that also might be of note and the county recorder has asked me to send some material off to Kew Gardens! Not bad for an hours natural history before work, thanks Nick!
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