The Lyons Share

Did you know, Tina Turner is a keen lichenologist? So taken was she when she first recorded Golden-eye Lichen Teloschistes chrysophthalmus that she wrote the following song to celebrate its beauty, which was later used as a Bond theme tune! They even named a duck after it too! I imagine, like me, you always thought the Bond movie was named after the duck but it was, in fact, the lichen. You may recognise the particular shade of orange below on Pierce Brosnan's face, that's no coincidence. 

OK, none of the above is true but this is. I've wanted to see the Golden-eye Lichen for years, so was very pleased when Simon Davey mentioned that one had been found at Devil's Dyke. Then I had a message from Veronica Atalanta on Twitter with the gen. It didn't take too long to find it. I was totally wrong with the search image though, I was looking for something yellow, like the ubiquitous Xanthoria parietina but the Golden-eye Lichen is very much orange in comparison. I took this image below to show the difference between the colours of the two species, so it should be easier to get your eye in at a distance. It looks a bit like an orange Venus Flytrap!

Here are some more close ups. It's such a strange looking thing.

Last weekend I went to an area I don't go often; Western Road in Brighton, the main high street where all the big shops are. I wasn't expecting to find a species that hadn't been recorded in East Sussex for 50 years though. I nearly tripped over this massive centipede on the pavement, it caught my eye initially as a hairy caterpillar but I soon realised it was a dead Lithobius centipede. I was actually on my way to the beach to see if Storm Erik had washed anything up and to exercise my back, so I had lots of pots on me. I have never seen the much commoner Lithobius forficatus in the middle of town like this, so I  had a feeling it was something good and it was clearly very big.

I keyed it out and it was fairly obviously the nationally scarce Lithobius pilicornis. It's our biggest Lithobius and can reach over 35 mm (this was 32 mm). Many thanks to Steve Gregory for confirming. Here are the details that show it's this species with short projections on segments 7 and 9 (the small sections sitting between the larger ones below) and more importantly, key spines in the right place on the hind coxae.

And here is the BMIG page for the beast. The last record for East Sussex was at Rye some 50 years ago! I have seen it once before in South Wales with Christian Owen. So, the moral of the story is, don't go anywhere without a pot!

Have you ever taken a 400 mile trip for a flea? Well me neither. Snow Flea Boreus hyemalis is actually a mecopteran, basically a small, wingless, winter-adult scorpionfly. Less than a week ago I got a message from Tony Davis saying simply "How's your back?" I knew this meant he had another crazy mission for us and I had the weekend free, definitely a great opportunity for some escapism...all the way to the Wyre Forest. We were just into Shropshire, just a few kilometres from my home county of Staffordshire but a part of the world I know very little about. The names of the towns and villages there completely alien to me. The last time I went to the Wyre Forest I was at school, |Steve Copper took us there to look for Drab Looper moths.

It took 25 minutes to find the first Snow Flea, the female above. We then went on to find a further six in a total of two hours of searching (two females and five males in all). Tony had the gen pretty much perfect. Here is how the first female appeared to the naked eye at first.

And here is the male, with the strange vestigal wings and unusually-shaped first abdominal segments. I think their 'beak' looks quite like that of a Cormorant.

And some footage of him. I had no idea that they can jump quite substantial distances. I didn't manage to capture it (they behaved very well for me, not so much for Tony) but pretty obvious where the English name comes from after seeing this. A big thanks to Tony for arranging this and driving most of the way, never thought I would see these bizarre and fascinating insects. Now, I wonder if I can find them in Sussex...

Last summer I was fortunate to find three of these in a sweep net. This wasn't in Sussex though. Gargara genistae (above) is a local species that feeds on Broom, there is only one Sussex record. It was found in Rewell Wood in 1982 (I don't think it's been recorded in East Sussex) by Wilberforce Jones and E. C. M. Haes. Actually there was a second lifer in the net, the Broom Leaf Beetle Gonioctena olivacea. Anther local species but not a particularly rare one (below). Broom just isn't that common in Sussex. When I say common, it's definitely widespread but if you want good populations of invertebrates that feed on a specific plant, you need lots of that plant in lots of places in the landscape. I rarely get to sweep Broom like this in Sussex. Flatropers has got a bit but it's isolated in woodland and rarely has anything on it.

Anyway back to the charming Gargara. It's one of only two tree hoppers we have. The other being the much commoner Centrotus cornutus. I think Gargara genistae is probably the closest insect in the UK to a cube in its proportions. Plea minutissima might give it a run for its money though. Is there anything else more cube-like out there?

Since I first compiled the spreadsheet around two years ago, we have increased the number of species recorded on the 32 reserves from 9790 to an incredible 10241 species, that's a 4.6% increase. This is an incredible achievement, especially when you look at the total number of new site records across all the 32 reserves. There have been in just two years, 4727 species recorded new to a particular site. We certainly would have recorded many of these without the spreadsheet but a large number of them are being driven by having this resource.

Above is the Six-spotted Pot Beetle Cryptocephalus sexpunctatus (nationally rare, Endangered, BAP) that Alice found at Flatropers in 2017 (Alice's photo too). We have not found another. It's one of the most significant discoveries we have made on our reserves in recent years, I am unbelievably gripped and despite two attempts we have not found another. Alice found this while doing some casual recording (we carried out a more comprehensive survey there in 2014). Analysing a site list like this using the pan-species listing approach gives as much weight to casual recording as it does  to standardised surveys. It pulls it all together in a way that a more rigid monitoring strategy alone might not.

Now I am not in anyway suggesting that structured monitoring is anything other than a wonderful and vital thing but this is another layer to site assessment that is often missed because it requires a bit of work to pull it together and a good knowledge of taxonomy and conservation status. I'd like species recording to stay at the very core of modern conservation.

Quite often you might not record the rarest species on a site during a survey because they are there at extremely low densities, might be present at different times of the year to when you are surveying and of course might not have even been there at all at the time. Only this week when working through some casual recording I did with the suction sampler at Seaford Head last May, I recorded Dipoena prona (nationally rare & Endangered), this is the first record in Sussex since 1900 and the first for the network, it's REALLY rare. I found Pardosa paludicola (nationally rare, Endangered)  during a standardised survey (at Butcherlands in 2017). Thanks to Evan Jones for the photo. However it was recorded, it exists on the spreadsheet as a single row. This is the beauty the pan-species listing approach. All species count with an accumulative list.

There have been some huge jumps in the individual site's species-lists. Ebernoe Common has jumped by 8.8% from 3711 species to 4037, mainly through an invertebrate survey that Mike Edwards and I did at Butcherlands there in 2017.  Rye Harbour has only jumped by 79 species to 4354. So watch out Rye Harbour, Ebernoe Common is gaining on you! There have been no changes in the rankings of the top ten.

With help from Mark Colvin and Martin Allison, we added Arched Earthstar to the reserve network list at Ebernoe in 2018. I think this is now Near Threatened.

All these reserves have had huge increases though:

Gillham Woods. 150% increase from 108 species to 270

Selwyns Wood.  46.2% increase from 498 to 728

Brickfield Meadow. 30.5% increase from 426 to 556

Graffham Common. 90.3% increase from 669 to 1273 (it's remarkable that this site has almost doubled!)
Waltham Brooks. 48.0% increase from 1062 to 1572

Leythorne Meadow. 46.7% increase from 261 to 383

Ditchling Beacon. 35.0% increase from 949 to 1281

Seaford Head. 22.4% incraese from 1358 to 1662

Withdean Woods. 91.2% from 34 to 65

Deneway 50.1% from 78 to 117

I appreciate some of these are smaller, less-designated and under-recorded sites, so these huge percentage increases are less relevant but where they are extremely significant are where the sites already have fairly large lists. The increases at Graffham Common, Waltham Brooks, Ditchling Beacon and Seaford Head are particularly significant.

I found immature Lichen Running-spiders Philodromus margaritatus (nationally rare, Near Threatened, BAP) at Graffham Common late in 2016 but didn't confirm by getting an adult until the following year. This was new to all SWT reserves.

The mean year of the last record has risen to 2007. It may well be that this is always around 12 years earlier than the time of analysis. I will test that theory this time next year. Interestingly the mode still stands at 2017 for all records but more species were recorded on our reserves in 2018 than any other year (given that the spreadsheet only shows the last year, this isn't technically correct - it only applies to the last year it was recorded on a site). A total of 2200 species were recorded last year or 21.5% of all the species we have ever recorded.

I have recently added in all the up to date conservation status for invertebrates. I had hoped this winter to get all the conservation statuses in but the lower plants and fungi were not as easy to get hold of so I haven't quite finished that. The conservation statuses are in though for invertebrates and wow, some interesting stats...

We have recorded 6513 species of invertebrate on our sites, an incredible 63.4% of all the species recorded. Of these, 1203 (18.5%) have some form of conservation status. This is a great metric to assess a site's quality for invertebrates. It's incredible to think that Rye Harbour has had 3225 species of invertebrate recorded on it. It would be our second most species-rich reserve even if it had nothing else there than invertebrates! It's the proportions of species with conservation status that are most interesting though. Rye Harbour has 15.1% but this isn't followed by Ebernoe, Ebernoe is actually 11th if you compare it this way. In fact it is Iping and Stedham Commons with 14.0% of its 2954 invertebrate species having status status.

In fact, Woods Mill has had more invertebrates recorded on it that Iping, with 1646 species. Yet only 5.5% of these have status. Reflecting the very different nature of these sites. There is lots of woodland on Wealden clay but very little heathland in Sussex (reflecting the national picture) and early successional habitat, such as that at Rye Harbour and Iping Common, is at a premium. Therefore the species that occur there are often by their very nature, rare or scarce. Ebernoe has some spectacular old-growth woodland (late successional) which is also a rare habitat but the closing over the habitat here has diluted the species list with ever increasingly commoner woodland invertebrates. However by haloing some veteran trees and creating new species-rich grassland at Ebernoe (Butcherlands), we are addressing this imbalance.

So here are the top ten reserves ranked by the number of invertebrates recorded there.

And here is the top ten reserves ranked by the proportion of those species that have conservation status. This is a great way of removing as much recorder bias as possible and becomes more powerful the more species you record. Please note, only sites with more than 250 species have been included in both these analyses. This is ALL invertebrates.

Old Lodge is ranked in 21st place with only 5.8% of the 1054 species having conservation status, much lower than the West Sussex heath sites. This is a direct reflection of the site being cooler and higher. It has a lot of species that are scarce in Sussex, but widespread in the north west. These themselves not being afforded conservation status. It would undoubtedly score high on the proportion of species on the Sussex Rare Species Inventory but I am yet to look at this. Graffham Common sits on the Greensand Ridge in West Sussex and is ranked 5th! Not bad for an old conifer plantation that isn't even a SSSI!

For a bit of fun I had a look at which county, East or West Sussex, had the most species overall. It was quite close. East Sussex wins with 7716 and West with 7406. 

What next? I have been talking to some wildlife trusts about helping them put their lists together and next week I will be talking to a national wildlife trust event about monitoring at the landscape scale level and I will be presenting this spreadsheet, analyses and the benefits. Make no mistake, this IS landscape conservation. Here, the landscape is defined as the Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve network. Landscape scale conservation can be about detailed species recording AND large scale trends and patterns, the two are not mutually exclusive. By comparing between sites, you can look at the 'unique' species, proportion of species with conservation status, proportion of regionally scarce species, how sites compliment each other, spacial analyses, introduced species, ubiquitous species and much more. It's a great way to be informed about your sites.

The introduced Asparagus Beetle was added to the reserve network in 2018 by sweeping heather at Iping Common. As you do.

You could do this with any network of sites at any scale, the modular nature affording both internal and external comparisons. As long as you have some assessment of quality (here I am using conservation status of invertebrates) you can start to make some valid comparisons. It just takes a bit of grunt work to build and maintain the species lists and a constant effort of recording across all taxonomic groups. I have been blown away by how many people have contributed to this since the first draft was produced two years ago, it really is a lot more than just my efforts. Obviously the role of the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre is vital in this for storing and managing the data and Bob Foreman's input has been particularly appreciated. Without your local records centre, this kind of derivation of the data would be impossible.

Whilst moth-trapping at Ebernoe Common, Tony Davis recorded the Pondweed Leafhopper (DD, BAP) at light new to the network in 2017. And below the reserve volunteers at Selwyns Wood recorded Coral-root (nationally scarce) new to the network where it appeared after their ride management.

It's also really good for generating biological information for management plans. Here is an exert from a section I recently updated for the Old Lodge plan. We do this for all taxa, here I have just included spiders:

Visits to Old Lodge by Andy Philips, Graeme Lyons and Evan Jones were made in March 2017 and by Graeme Lyons in November 2018 to search for the rare spider Thanatus formicinus which was last seen in Sussex nearby in 1945. Although they were unsuccessful, a number of other rare species were found on these visits chiefly the money spiders Hypselistes jackosni and Notiscopus sarcinatus.

So to summarise, we have:

• A 5% increase in species on reserves in two years from 9790 to 10241.
• Nearly 5000 new site records in two years.
• At a glance analysis of conservation statuses across all invertebrate groups.
• Over 1200 species of invertebrate with conservation status now recorded.
• Easily editable data for producing biological sections for management plans.
• A new dimension to engage the already exceptionally engaged recording community on our reserves in Sussex.
• Endless interesting statistics, such as 3847 species have only been recorded at one site while only three have been recorded at all 32.

So why not pan-species list your wildlife trust, conservation charity, region or site? The results speak for themselves. 

Ground bugs are great, they are practically beetles. And this smart looking black one with a big orange blob on has been on my 'list of cool looking things I want to see' for some time. Behold, Aphanus rolandri! Now I took the above photo in the Brecks last year, the only time I have seen it. Meanwhile, Mike Edwards was doing a survey for us at West Dean Woods and picked it up there new to West Sussex within a few days of my record! Now what's interesting about this is how different the sites are, given that there are so few records in Sussex. There is a very old record from Seaford in 1949 and two from Brighton between 2006 and 2011 and that is it. It's a big and distinctive bug, I would expect it to come to me to verify via iRecord if it was more widespread but that hasn't happened.

Now the ones I saw in the Brecks were in a huge, hot, dry and old clearing on an abandoned airfield. The immediate vicinity was calcareous-like grassland due to the substrate put down for the runway. As this has been there since WW2, there is a great continuity to this glade. A mass of Wood Small-reed  (quite uncommon down in Sussex compared to East Anglia) was growing next to the old runway, mainly unmanaged and it was collapsing in on itself forming a very hot and dry litter layer. There were hundreds of nymphs and adults running around in this having a whale of a time.

You can read about it here on the British Bugs site.

At West Dean Woods, Mike told me they were plentiful and clearly well established there. Below is the site it was found on. A very recent and quite small clearing in fairly humid woodland. Even the recently cleared coppice coupes nearby are more like the Breckland site than this is but they lack any continuity of bare ground that even a very small glade like this can offer. It's fascinating, as these sites are so different, it makes you think why is it so scarce down here? Or are we actually just seeing the start of a colonisation event from a species that's actually not that fussy and just does well in warm sites? The impression I get is that it is genuinely scarce and whatever these two sites have in common is the answer but there doesn't seem to be much in common!

I was going to do my top ten of the year but got a bit daunted by doing doing it yet again, so I thought I would do something a bit different inspired by Andy Musgrove. So, to start with here is my number one natural history highlight of 2018. Quite simply stumbling across a Large Tortoiseshell at Woods Mill on the first warm day of spring on the 15th March. Right, that's out of the way. Here is some data...

I thought I would have a look at my breakdown of records in 2018. I entered 11,568 records. This breaks down into 2752 species. This is four species more than my first attempt at my list eight years ago at age 32!!! I can't believe that I saw AT LEAST as many species in the last 12 months as I did in the first 32 years of my life. It's not like I was messing about for a lot of that, I'd worked for the RSPB for seven years and Sussex Wildlife Trust for two years at that point, as well as a further 20 years of natural history recording for fun! So what does this mean? The answer: pan-species listing. This is the impact that this approach to wildlife recording has had on my life. So why not sign up to the website and get involved?

Here is my breakdown from 2018. Note that I will have seen a lot more species that I have not yet recorded (such as quadrat and moth-trapping data that takes a lot longer to find its way into Recorder). That's 1872 invertebrates. A total of 2752 species would put me in 56th place overall and  211 would be joint 9th place for arachnids. It took me years to get to 400 beetles so I am pretty pleased with 605.

I am itching to get out there recording again but it wont be for a few weeks at this rate. Let's hope 2019 is an even more amazing year!

What a year. As I edge closer to going part time freelance, I have never been busier and add in a relapse of my slipped disc at the end of the year, I'm really looking forward to a fresh start in 2019.  I'm totally gutted that yet again I did not have time to get down to the meet up. It sounds like a really well organised event by Sally and I wish I had got down there to Cornwall. Big changes in my life are planned in the next three months to make more time for stuff like this so if I don't make it down to one this year, I am truly doomed. 

Anyway, first up is what is going on in the rankings. I think it only fair to put in the top 20 now rather than the top 10 as it's gone from being quite static at this end of the rankings (between 2016 & 2017 there was no movement in the top ten) to being quite a dynamic place. So apologies for all the missing figures at this stage.

Mark has made the biggest progress in the top ten with an increase of 636 species! Followed by Richard with 397 and surprisingly me at 317. I don't really get chance to do any pan-listing away from work and freelance these days but it shows what you can rack up with a few jobs out of county. A job in Kent and a few jobs in Surrey were real highlights, as was a cracking survey in East Sussex in the Brede Valley.  But this is nothing compared to listers like Calum Urquhart and James McCulloch who are flying up the rankings!

The total maximum number of species has risen by 879 between the end of 2015 and the end of 2018. That's pretty impressive! Massive leaps in fungi and bryophytes by Malcom Storey and Paul Bowyer respectively. I continue to not be a top lister for anything. I think this is my new angle, the highest ranking lister not top for anything. Oh wait, I'm not even that. Nicola isn't top for anything either and she's ahead of me. That's pan-species listing though, sometimes I feel like 'too little butter spread over too much bread.' I can live with that though. I think butterflies could be my easy win if I went and got the rare breeding species.

The top ten sites are almost exactly the same but Dawlish Warren (at 3866) has knocked Sutton Fen (at 3708) off the tenth place. This part of the website still doesn't get as much use I would have hoped but I am just as much a problem as I have updated totals for Ebernoe Common but have not had chance to enter the data yet. There are 73 sites on the rankings now, up from 63 last year so I am glad that this is still growing.

I don't often post about earwigs. Mainly because there are so few species. I have just had a lifer from some samples I took in west Kent in September though. I have finally seen a Hop-garden Earwig! It's not been recorded in Sussex. It seems the best part of the world to see it is in Kent, Suffolk and Essex, so it's likely to turn up in north East Sussex if it ever will. The females look quite like Lesne's Earwig females but the males have quite different pincers to one another. Both species lack the visible hind-wings peeping out from under the fore-wings that is so obvious on a Common Earwig (which I don't have a photo of).  You could easily mistake either of them for an immature Common Earwig if you don't know what you're looking for. They look neater and a bit more translucent and less substantial than Common.

Here is the male Hop-garden.

And the male Lesne's Earwig.

I have 149 records in my database of earwigs. One for Hop-house and 13 for Lesne's, showing  that Common hugely dominates in the field. But I have seen a fourth species that has not made it into my database at it's in the log book at work for the Woods Mill moth trap. The tiny rove-beetle-like Lesser Earwig turned up a few years ago. This really is a midget, half the size of the other species. This one does have very obvious hind-wings protruding through. 

I absolutely LOVE the English names for fungi. They are so wonderfully creative, it's so hard to tell which were the ones that were made up in recent years and which have been here for generations because the modern names have been so well thought through. With other taxa, I am yet to see any species names created in bulk that work so well. The bryophytes for example are too long, logical and structured with too many hyphens and syllables. They are therefore not widely used (but I get they also perhaps don't lend themselves to such creative names lacking the plethora of shapes, colours and smells that fungi have). I often find myself drawn to finding a species of fungi just because it has an unusual name. It's this that's lacking in other taxa and I do hope that we learn from this. You're not just classifying species for identification when creating these lists of names, you're creating a piece of our national heritage. It should be fun as well as informative. I think it's usually too big a job for just one person to do and perhaps the national specialists are not always the right people to do it. Having a great imagination and an ability to take risks has clearly worked for fungi.

So when I saw a black Exidia fungus that didn't look quite right for Witches' Butter, I was pretty sure it was the less common Warlock's Butter Exidia plana.  A key that Clare Blencowe provided came up with the same answer (thanks Clare). It's been recorded there before but it's not common, with less than 20 county records. This was growing on a fallen Beech in the southern end of Ebernoe. Here is a close up.