A day in the life …
… of an entomological consultant. Yesterday was a pretty typical day, surveying a site which is proposed for development. I’m not able to reveal the location but it is a site with a mix of unmanaged grassland and secondary woodland. I spent a little over 6 hours in the field, concentrating my efforts on sweeping and beating. It almost goes without saying that I wore full waterproofs throughout though there was sunshine between the showers.
I worked yesterday evening and from early this morning to finish all the identification work and I’ve listed 102 species for the site. It is always my aim to record over 100 species from a day’s survey but I only just scraped over the line yesterday. I would expect more and I’m tending to agree with others who are saying that this is a poor spring for insects.
The list includes one Red Data Book species and five Nationally Scarce species, though, as is so often the case, some of these statuses are in need of revision for species which have become commoner and more widespread. But they are still useful species for assessing the conservation importance of the site.
I was really pleased to find the RDB hoverfly Rhingia rostrata: only the second one I’ve seen after Dave Gibbs showed me one last year. And there were two species which I got the camera out for. They’re just superb beasts and I don’t think I will ever get tired of seeing them!
Centrotus cornutus, a treehopper
Attelabus nitens, the Oak Leaf-roller
Coproporus immigrans is a recent arrival in Britain, specialising in woodchip piles, and I’d only seen it on two previous occasions before yesterday. Here it was in quite an old woodchip pile with&hellip ... read the rest
May-hem
It’s been well over a month since my last blog (back on April 12th) but my excuse is that it is May, the best month to be a naturalist in the field in Britain, and a busy time for an entomological consultant!
I have actually posted a few blogs in recent weeks about my progress towards recording 1000 species in my home 1-km square here in Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire. For those who don’t know, the participants in the “1000 1ksq challenge” are attempting a pan-species total of 1000 for a 1-km square of their choice between 1st Jan and 31st Dec 2013. Click here to see all my posts. It is amazing how much wildlife you can see if you go really broad and stay really local, and amazing just how successful you can now be as a truly pan-species naturalist using online identification resources.
One of my recent highlights was this weevil, Bradybatus fallax. Roger Booth found one resting on his car roof in Merton Park, Surrey on 13 August 2011 but I’ve not heard of any more being found since so this could be the second British individual. It is associated with Sycamore and other Acer species. I found one by beating trees, including sycamore, in Middlesex on 9 May 2013.
Bradybatus fallax: second for Britain.
Final results: Sandwich Bay Coleopterists’ Meeting 2012
I wrote a brief blog about this sunny and sociable weekend in Kent shortly after the event: here.
I have now finished my identifications from the Sandwich Bay Coleopterists’ Meeting (31st August to 2nd September 2012) and have also received records from Eric Philp, James McGill, Kevin Chuter, Martin Collier, Peter McMullen, Roger Booth, Simon Horsnall and Tony Allen. Between us we recorded 273 species of beetle (and 36 species of other invertebrates, including spiders, millipedes, dragonflies, bush-crickets, bugs, flies, bees, wasps, ants, moths and snails).
One of the highlights for me was the discovery of the phalacrid beetle Olibrus norvegicus new to Britain, as well as an intriguing featherwing-beetle specimen of the genus Ptenidium. Another major discovery was of the dung-beetle Euheptaulacus sus which was found by Roger Booth (from a light trap), Tony Allen (by evening sweeping) and James McGill. It is many decades since this dung-beetle was recorded from Kent.
Amongst the beetles were 7 Red Data Book, 1 Near Threatened and 36 Nationally Scarce species. In total, 16% of the beetles recorded during the meeting have conservation status, a figure which is consistent with top sites of national importance for invertebrate conservation.
A spreadsheet containing a species list and a worksheet of all records from the meeting can be downloaded here.
| To download the keys, left-click the link. This will take you to my Google Docs webpages where you can see an online preview of the document (in which the formatting and pagination isn’t great). From the File menu, select Download and Save the file to your computer to see it in its original form. |
The meeting did not formally start until Saturday morning (1st September) but most people travelled&hellip ... read the rest
My first alexiid!
It is a rare event nowadays for me to see a new beetle family but yesterday’s highlight was finding Sphaerosoma pilosum for the first time, the sole British member of family Alexiidae.
Sphaerosoma pilosum, Britain's only alexiid beetle.
I knocked it off a log with a white crustose polypore fungus, lying on the ground in calcareous woodland near Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire. I have now seen 96 of the 103 families of British beetles. Of the remaining seven families, six are represented by single British species that are either rare, very difficult to find, or Scottish. The seventh family is the Bostrichidae with five species on the British list and it is high time I bumped into one of them.
Another exciting find on the same outing was this Anommatus duodecimstriatus, found under bark on the underside of an Elder log pressed into the soil. This is one of Britain’s 13 species of blind beetle, previously featured on this blog after some turned up in my garden. It did two remarkable things, for a beetle. One, it just turned round and round on the spot rather than running away (maybe being blind has its disadvantages when someone disturbs your hiding place). And two, it clung on to the log despite me dropping it from waist height!
Anommatus duodecimstriatus, one of Britain's 12 blind beetles.
Recent attempts at fieldwork have felt pretty futile so it is good to have finally found some decent beetles. Looking forward to spring really getting going now!
A Ptenidium from Sandwich Bay
I am no great fan of the featherwing beetles (Ptiliidae) but they are growing on me and I’ve been trying hard to get to grips with the genus Ptenidium and others, though still largely ignoring the dreaded Acrotrichis. This blog is just to put on record an interesting specimen of Ptenidium which might be a species new to Britain:
A male Ptenidium from Sandwich Bay, East Kent from an Autokatcher sample on 31st August 2012. It is an unusual specimen of P. pusillum (or maybe an additional species of the pusillum-complex?). Click for large photo.
It is closest to P. pusillum (probably the commonest British species of the genus) but differs most strikingly in having much deeper and more extensive puncturation on the elytra. In addition, it has slightly more elongate elytra with less strongly rounded sides, elytral hairs a little shorter, pronotum sides a little more strongly rounded and with slightly broader side-margins, and the antennal clubs a little darker than the average pusillum. Michael Darby kindly examined it and agreed that it could be a species new to Britain, but what?
I sent my photo to Mikael Sörensson in Lund, Sweden who is an expert on European ptiliids and got an excellent response. In fact, Mikael’s reaction was that this looks the same as specimens of P. pusillum which he sees from Sweden and continental Europe. P. pusillum is apparently highly variable in body shape, colour of body and appendages, and also length of the pubescence. Mikael was struck by the somewhat darkened last two antennal segments of my specimen but has seen such colouration before in occasional specimens. So the conclusion is that “your specimen is a mere variant of P. pusillum“.
However, Mikael stressed that “because of the external variation, the taxon&hellip ... read the rest
Final results: Dungeness Coleopterists’ Meeting 2010
Fourteen coleopterists gathered at Dungeness on 28th and 29th August 2010. I posted an account of the meeting here shortly afterwards but have only recently finished identifying my own samples from the meeting, and collating records from others who were there. A spreadsheet including all our records and a species list can be downloaded here.
| To download the keys, left-click the link. This will take you to my Google Docs webpages where you can see an online preview of the document (in which the formatting and pagination isn’t great). From the File menu, select Download and Save the file to your computer to see it in its original form. |
This spreadsheet only includes records from myself, Roger Booth, Martin Collier, Andrew Duff and the late Eric Philp. (Apologies to James McGill who did submit his records but I lost them when I hit trouble with my old @carabids.fsnet.co.uk email address).
We recorded 187 species of beetle, and a scattering of invertebrates from other groups (woodlice, bugs, ants, etc.) to bring the total species list up to 212. Perhaps not an impressively long list but awash with rarities, as you’d expect from Dungeness. The list includes 37 Nationally Scarce or Near Threatened species and 4 Red Data Book species; collectively 19.3% of the species had conservation status. That’s about as good as it gets in terms of the proportion of rare and scarce invertebrates in Britain. My highest ever percentage from my invertebrate survey work was 22.8% – from Dungeness RSPB Reserve!
In my account of the meeting posted online just a month afterwards, I wrote:
”For Dungeness virgins there was much to see but for veterans, the pit margins were disappointing by the high&hellip ... read the rest
A first for Britain? No.
Compare the two Glocianus weevils in these images (click for large images). I didn’t think they could be the same species …
Glocianus punctiger. A male from Derbyshire, typical of British specimens.
Glocianus punctiger. An atypical male from Sutton Bingham Reservoir, Somerset.
… and I thought my Sutton Bingham Reservoir specimen had to be something new to Britain. But they are both specimens of Glocianus punctiger. That is the opinion of Italian weevil expert Enzo Colonnelli, and there is nobody with greater experience of these species across Europe.
I haven’t found Glocianus weevils very often, though more so in recent years as I’ve started to use my suction sampler more and more routinely. To date I have recorded Glocianus distinctus on 5 occasions (6 individuals), G. punctiger on 4 occasions (4 individuals) and have not yet found the other two British species: G. moelleri and G. pilosellus. I’ve been keying them out using Mike Morris’ RES Handbook (Morris, 2008) but also dissecting males as a matter of routine. The two males pictured here are the only two males of G. punctiger that I have found. I thought I’d been lucky and discovered a species new to Britain but actually I’d been unlucky and found a specimen with really unusual genitalia! Anyway, it seems worthwhile to bring this to other peoples’ attention, especially as this is an extreme degree of variation to find within one species. I will certainly be dissecting and retaining any other male punctiger I find, to learn more about the variability of aedeagal structure in British populations. And as Enzo has said: “variation is the engine of evolution”!
Glocianus punctiger feeds on dandelions Taraxacum, mainly the Section Ruderalia which is by far the commonest Section of this large&hellip ... read the rest
One of the most mysterious beetles on the British list!
A fellow coleopterist recently said that Ousipalia caesula “has to be one of the most mysterious beetles on the British list!” I was intrigued, to say the least. So what’s the mystery? Well, there is not a single mention of it in 21 volumes of the journal The Coleopterist. There are only about 14 dots on the NBN Gateway map, and you have to take some of those with a pinch of salt. There’s no evidence that Derek Lott ever found it; in fact I only know one coleopterist who has …
Or should I say, “one other coleopterist”. I’ve just used the OUMNH collections to confirm that some small, blackish-brown aleocharine staphylinids that I collected at Sandwich Bay, East Kent on 3rd July 2012 are Ousipalia caesula.
Ousipalia caesula: demystified
Ousipalia caesula spermatheca
It must be common here as I found 14 in a few minutes suction-sampling on the calcareous dune grassland just seaward of the road to the Prince’s Golf Club at TR360582. I was actually targeting Yarrow, as much as you can target one plant with a suction-sampler in such floristically diverse turf. The habitat fits with Marc Tronquet’s (2006) description for France: “on sandy ground, under lichens and in the flower spikes of Aira canescens“, except that Grey Hair-grass Corynephorus canescens (= Aira canescens) is absent from Kent and more prevalent on East Anglian dunes and a few spots in the Brecks (map here).
So Ousipalia caesula is probably no longer one of the most mysterious. We can’t say that it is a well understood species but it is only averagely mysterious: so many beetles are so poorly known! My guess with Ousipalia is that it&hellip ... read the rest
Jam tarts and wine gums
Until 25th January I had never identified a lichen for myself, and my experience of the group is based on being shown 4 species at Parham Park in May 2012, including the unforgettable Caloplaca flavorubescens. So on a quick walk round my snow-covered 1km square I decided to have a go at a lichen – something that looks easy and common, to get me started. I picked a twig covered in a familiar-looking yellow lichen and stuck it in my pocket.
As I’d hoped, the yellow lichen was easily identified using online keys as Xanthoria parietina: a very common lichen.
Xanthoria parietina
What I hadn’t bargained for was that, under the microscope there were clearly other lichens on the twig of a much less conspicuous nature. Using this key, I made the one with black “wine gum” fruits Lecidella elaeochroma and Simon Davey agrees.
Lecidella elaeochroma: "wine gum" fruits according to the key, though they remind me of tiny Pontefract cakes!
Slightly more difficult to identify was this species with “jam tart” fruits. With Simon’s help, I’ve got it to Lecanora chlarotera. I was pleased enough with three lichens on my random twig but then as a further bonus, Simon pointed out that the black dots in some of the tart fillings are caused by a parasitic (or lichenicolous) fungus by the name of Vouauxiella lichenicola. Just amazing!
Lecanora chlarotera: with "jam tart" fruits. It's a very insipid-looking jam tart, more like an undercooked bakewell.
There was a negative reaction to a drop of thin bleach.
Lecanora chlarotera under a drop of thin bleach.
No stone unturned
With much less of my time available for natural history since 24th December, I’m making the best of it by staying local and broadening my taxonomic horizons. In fact, today I have spent the whole day studying the wildlife of our back garden and didn’t even make it down to the far end until just before dark! But I have literally left no stone unturned. I have been spurred into action by Andy Musgrove’s “1000 1ksq challenge“: the challenge being to find 1000 species in your chosen 1km square during 2013. It’s a pan-species challenge: invertebrates, vertebrates, plants, fungi, the lot.
I’ve been seriously impressed at how many species people have already racked up for their squares, with Seth Gibson topping the table at the end of January with a mighty 248 species. I’ve also been seriously impressed at the way so many of the participants are taking a truly pan-species approach and boldly tackling Britain’s biodiversity in its entirety. So, the 1000 1ksq challenge has aroused my competitive spirit, and shamed me into trying to identify things that I normally ignore (like lichens, mosses, earthworms, springtails, etc.). Here are today’s results.
First a few photos, then my species lists for today.
My first attempt at identifying a springtail. Probably Pogonognathus flavescens.
Yellow Slug Limacus flavus
Deroceras invadens Reise, Hutchinson, Schunack & Schlitt, 2011. A new name for the species previously known in Britain as Deroceras panormitanum.
Tandonia sowerbyi
A terrestrial flatworm Microplana terrestris. This was a tick, but through administrative oversight: I'm pretty sure I've identified it before.
An overwintering Woundwort Shieldbug Eysarcoris
&hellip ... read the rest
