Mice mice, baby!

Last month I volunteered, along with some other awesome folk, to help out a fantastic PhD student (with Edinburgh University) with her field study on wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) in Callendar Wood near Falkirk. Amy Sweeny was looking at how nutrition affects the relationship between parasite infection risk, the immune response of the mice, and also their reproductive success in the wild. To do this there were 4 experimental grids of traps set out in the forest, two of them were used as controls where no food was added and the other two were supplemented with high protein food pellets - lucky mice!

Toni, Chris and Amy in the field

Apodemus sylvaticus - The Wood Mouse

Humane Sherman traps were set overnight 3 times a week baited with bedding and food, and checked the next morning to see if we had caught any unwilling participants :) Along the way we met many of the varied characters of the wood, including the distinctly smelly but charismatic bank vole, the occasional shrew, frogs and even a wren! When we did catch a wood mouse we took the trap back to the field base where the mice were sexed, roughly aged, weighed, measured, microchipped and had a wee bit of blood taken to check for infection. They were also checked for fleas, mites and ticks which were removed, so many of the mice were released feeling a lot cleaner for their trouble. Some mice were randomly treated with anti-helminthic drugs which got rid of any parasitic nasties such as tapeworms that they might have had living in their gut.

If any of the captured mice were pregnant or showing signs of being so or lactating, they were gently released back into the wood to provide for the next generation :)

Bag of cuteness

Bank vole (smells like cereal and wee!)

Of course science isn't all flowers and rainbows as you may already know, and a sample of the mice in the study that had been recaptured at a later date were sacrificed in order to carry out dissections and find out more about the kind of parasites they carry and the effects of co-infection (infection with multiple different parasites). This study falls under the fairly recent term of 'wild immunology', where scientists try to find out how animal immune systems deal with threats in their natural wild environment. It is somewhat easy to look at the effects of just one disease or parasite under lab conditions with inbred mice that are genetically alike, but much more difficult with many unknowns in the wild because there is tremendous variation to consider which has a bearing on how well the animal fights these infections. Things such as age, life history, infection history (what diseases/infections they may have had in the past), habitat, reproductive history, and genetics are just a few of the variable that add to the complex nature of wild immunology! You can find out more information here.

I had a fantastically fun and educational time helping out with the study so many thanks to Amy and the team for the opportunity :)

St Kilda

We have just returned from an action packed trip through the Outer Hebrides and a weekend of wildlife photography in Knapdale and Tayvallich! We saw the sights such as the Calanais stones, Butt of Lewis, blackhouses and brochs, but our main focus was on beachcombing and wildlife spotting.

The beaches of the western isles look like they should be somewhere in the Caribbean, with vast expanses of golden sand and turquoise water. The weather definitely reminds you that you in Scotland though that's for sure, the wind never really died down at all which was great in a way as it kept the midges away. In terms of finding stuff washed up on the beach, our hauls were not as good as we expected them to be, but still pretty exciting. Oystercatchers were EVERYWHERE being fiercely protective of their territories, as were Lapwings making their weird wittery noises in the fields.

Most of my beachcombing finds were bones and skulls. I have a couple of cow vertebrae, fulmar skull, some unidentified incisors, a wading bird skull that I've still to ID and an otter skull! We were also lucky enough to go on a trip to St Kilda, an isolated island 41 miles west of Benbecula which is now a world heritage site. It is also home to a prehistoric breed of sheep know as Soay which because they are isolated on the island, have remained virtually unchanged for centuries! There have been genetic studies carried out on the population for the past 50 years and so it was very exciting to meet some of them. Shortly after we landed we also met the St Kilda Wren which is a subspecies of the wren found in the UK but slightly bigger in size. There is also an endemic St Kilda mouse but perhaps unsurprisingly we never bumped into one :)

St Kilda Wren

Soay lamb

Gannet colonies on the stac

After we had climbed a little way up the hill to look over the cliff, met with a pair of great skuas (on 'bonxies' as they are known in Scotland) and their fluffy chick, and explored the remains of the village in the bay, we had a quick tour around the stacs before we had to head home. The sea stacs around St Kilda are important breeding sites for gannets, puffins, fulmars and guillemots. The inhabitants of St Kilda used to row out to the stacs and scale the steep craggy cliffs to catch the birds for food, they were definitely a brave and hardy folk! It was amazing just how many there were covering and flying around the stacs, and I'd never seen so many puffins in my life, there are thought to be up to 136,000 pairs!

Great Skua in flight

One of the many puffins and guillemots

Gannet on the wing

The end of an era

Well folks, I've finally come to the end of my four years as an undergraduate and I am pleased to report that I come away with a 2:1 in Marine & Freshwater Biology! :D

'What's next?' I hear you ask...well I'm not completely sure at the moment. I've been looking for an applying to ecology junior type jobs and also some on connecting nature and kids education, however in the meantime I will be doing some volunteering to help studying the wild immunology of the wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus!

In other news I am heading off on a trip to the Outer Hebrides soon and hope to report back on any creepy crawlies I might find on my travels. Also check out National Insect Week (20th - 26th June) and see if you can get involved in any of the activities, and there's also Glasgow Science Festival (which I'll sadly miss!) with all kinds of events running from the 9th to 19th June!

Sorry, I don't have any puns this time

Again, I appear after months of radio silence! If you're a student or academic then you'll understand when I say 4th Year Honors Project...I've been pretty busy doing that as well as revising for exams at the end of April.

Last time we spoke I had just identified all the samples of freshwater invertebrates that I took from 3 streams on the Campsies. I did a little spot of data analysis and found what looked to be a relationship between where my species of interest (the Upland Mayfly) was found and the order of the stream it was found in. So we went back out in January to gather some more data (in the form of more kick samples) at a different location - on a tributary of the Culter, which was charmingly covered in a good layer of snow at the time :)

I've since tested this data but it's not really showing a similar pattern to the first lot, but that may be due a number of reasons, but not to worry! On the whole I'm finding the data analysis very confusing and find myself frequently doubting what I've done. It doesn't help that when I do a bit of internet research for help that it seems to constantly contradict what I've been taught in the past. There are so many statistical tests that you can carry out and so many that have certain assumptions that it's very easy to become overwhelmed and lose sight of what you are trying to do in the first place. I'm hoping to get a bit of guidance this week to put me at ease - or alternatively I'll have to do all my analysis again!

In other news, I managed to get back out CRIMPing again for the first time since November, mainly due to the weather over the winter, and general lack of free-time. The haul was pretty good but I did notice that there were a few freshwater hoglice and blackfly larvae, something that I've never come across in my samples since starting the monitoring program, however there were plenty of mayflies and stoneflies present indicating good water quality as usual.

Here's a photo of a nice big stonefly, one of two that we caught.



Well, into the breach once more dear friends, see you on the other side!

Amelet you finish...

So....long time no post eh? Well I've been a busy bunny during the summer and more recently at university, now that I'm in my final year honors projects have kicked off and I'm currently in the midst of my own!

I knew I wanted to focus on riverflies and I had a helpful nudge in the direction of studying Ameletus inopinatus, an upland species of mayfly usually found in small streams above 300m. The experiment underwent many permutations in the planning stage but I've since been out in the field (the Campsie Fells to be precise) to do my fieldwork. I'm going to be looking to see if stream order has an effect on the distribution of the species, and then also look at the relationship between Ameletus and its freshwater habitat-sharing buddies.

Obtaining my samples was a sweaty job which involved gallumphing up tussock and moss covered hills which were riddled with drainage ditches and jaggy thistles, all while wearing chest waders, a fleece and rainjacket, just in case! Oh yes and lets not forget carrying the net and sample tubs - thankfully I had some expert help and only disappeared into a hole a couple of times.

See that little burn on the left? That's what I was trying to kick sample in :)

 I collected 45 one minute kick samples in total, taken from 3 different streams and at various altitudes. Right now I'm settled into the lab work and steadily working through all the samples to pick out the inverts from all the moss and other guff I managed to catch in the net. Here's few snaps of the wee guys I'm discovered so far that inhabitt this seemingly bleak and empty habitat:

Nice juicy stonefly

Some microcaddis, or Hydrophilidae, their cases lok like seeds!

Caddisfly larva

Many of the inverts I find while sorting through the samples are barely a millimeter long, there are tiny limpets, snails, pea mussels and of course tiny riverfly larvae too. The next stage will be trying to identify and count the communities that I've managed to find, then it's onto the stats and trying to make sense of it all!

Bear hunting

Magnified tardigrade (from http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/481794/view)

Today I did something I've been meaning to do for years - hunt for tardigrades in the garden!
Tardigrades are arthropods of the class Tardigrada, they are often called 'water bears' or 'mosspigs', which is where the name of my blog comes from. They are usually 0.1 - 0.5 mm long and can be found living in the damp moss or lichen that grows on trees and walls.

Since Unky Steve was kind enough to bestow me with a classic binocular microscope recently, so I thought there was nothing better to take it for a test run on than a tardigrade hunt!

In the garden i took a couple of pinches of moss from the garden wall, the bottom of a tree, and a pinch of green lichen from the same tree, putting them into separate small plastic bags to be examined later. I transferred the samples to three petri dishes and filled them with water to submerge the moss.

Samples L - R: Lichen, Tree Moss, Wall Moss

After leaving them to soak for a bit I started my search in the lichen but unfortunately the was nothing much to be found. In the tree moss sample I found myself in bear country, with my first ever tardigrade waving at me after only a few seconds of searching :)

The little white thing with stumps in the centre of the photo is a tardigrade, I promise!

Here's a video of the little guy, probably best to make it full screen :)

Tardigrade next to the tip of a mounted needle

Moss pigs are extremely hardy creatures, you might have heard that some have been sent into space and have survived being outside in the radiation and vacuum of outer space. They can also withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero (-272.8) to above 100 degrees Celsius, and are able to survive extreme drying out, or dessication, by going into a period of suspended animation called cryptobiosis from which they can be reanimated just by adding water! It is thought that they evolved these amazing adaptations in the move from the oceans, where they originally evolved, onto land. It might be difficult to visualise just how tiny these guys are, so see below for a comparison with a mounted needle.

Mounted needle with my forefinger for scale.

The tiny jungle of moss also harbors many other organisms, including countless nematode worms, mites and rotifers. Rotifers are also called 'wheel animals', as they have a structure on their head called a corona, which has loads of tiny hairs (cilia) used to sweep food into the mouth. Certain species (out of over 2000) of these guys called Bdeloid rotifers can survive long periods of dessication similar to the tardigrades. They also have strange sex lives and are able to reproduce without males (parthogenesis) which enables them to survive less favourable environmental conditions.

A rotifer.

The view down my microscope: Nematode bottom left, rotifer top centre.

You can read all about the remarkable moss pig in greater detail at this BBC article, and delve into the weird world of rotifers here!

Everything is awesome

It's been a busy 10 days out on the Glasgow University Marine and Freshwater Biology field course based on Millport, Isle of Cumbrae! The trip kicked off with a 3 day Environmental Impact Assessment module led by the adorable Peter and Azra Meadows. The task involved working as a group to assess the current ecological status of the sea floor around Hunterston Power Station in light of a (historically accurate but pretend) proposal to build a new coal-fired power station on the site.

Map of our beam trawl transects and sediment grab points

Being 27 students strong, it was admittedly a bit tension-filled trying to make decisions on how we we go about sampling but we got there in the end :) Four sample sites were decided on with a beam trawl and a sediment grab planned for each, with groups going out on the R.V. Actinia to see how it's done. The skippers Duncan and Tom were brilliantly knowledgeable about the area and the sampling techniques and had some great stories to tell.

While one group was out on the boat, everyone else was involved in the processing of the catches and data collection. It was a marine biology conveyor belt with sorting, identifying, counting, sifting, and weighing all going on at once. Of course it isn't all cuddling crabs and stroking starfish (!), we had some serious stats and report writing to do, as well as fit in lectures and briefings on what was coming up the next day - saying we were tired just doesn't cut it!

Our beam trawl haul!

Peter and Azra kindly provided a glut of wine on the Friday night so we all had a chance to cut loose for a time before the report was due in and the zoologist hoarde arrived the next day!

The Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems course kicked into gear on Sunday morning, when we headed out to Farland Point to collect some rocky shore specimens, and Kames Bay in Millport itself to dig for sandy shore beasties. At the rocky shore we took representative species from each zone - the Sublittoral (below the water line), eulittoral (between the kelp of the sublittoral and the furthest reach of the barnacles, and the littoral fringe (above the barnacles to the black lichen). We found a few shore crabs, common mussles, chitons, isopods, amphipods and anemones, as well a lots of different types of alga or seaweed.

At the sandy beach the fauna was dominated by some of my favourites - polychaete worms! The largest among the ones we found were estuary ragworms, which undulate from side to side with the wave of movement coming from the tail to the head. This means their heads are constantly waggling from side to side - they look hilarious.

Nephyts caeca - a polychaete worm

 Monday saw us back out on the Actinia to collect some plankton samples and measure light availability below the surface of the water. On Tuesday we were briefed about a scientific video we had to make, testing our skills in presenting a scientific paper in a fun an engaging way - the results of our efforts were screened on Friday afternoon and I had no voice left from laughing so much. You can watch the masterpiece that is CSI: Millport below, let us know what you think!

We also had a chance to check out our plankton samples under the microscope. Plankton are tiny organisms, and can be photosynthetic plants (phytoplankton) or larval forms of sea life (zooplankton) that are carried by the ocean currents. We found diatoms with surfaces made of sillica, dinoflagellates, tiny polychaete worms and crustacean larvae wriggling around in a tiny drop of sea water, a world within a world.

Gammarid and polychaete worm larvae under the microscope

Squat lobster and a dragonet fish

Wednesday saw us in the lab for some microbiology work on two water samples to see if E. coli and other colliform bacteria would grow on agar plates. Our results were very different from previous years success as we hardly had any colonies growing overnight at all. I must admit that microbiology is probably wasted on me, I like my study subjects to be visible ;) In the afternoon though our groups choose different rockpools and we collected hermit crabs from a .25m quadrat, painting their shells with colourful nailpolish before releasing them back to their pool. We would return the next day to see if they went for a wander to see their neighbours or not. That afternoon we also did a 75 minute study on oyster catchers, watching one bird to see how much time it spent watching for predators and feeding. Thankfully the weather was great if a bit chilly and we were rewarded with a lovely sunset before we headed home for tea. Wednesday was also St Paddy's and after the fieldwork was done we headed to the pub to celebrate - what we didn't expect was the pub running out of Guinness minutes after we arrived!

Looks like I should have used some of the polish myself

On our penultimate day we went to check our rockpools and try to find our painted hermit crab pals. Our group found 2 out of 5 that had been painted and about 15 other unpainted crabs which had moved into the area. The two that we found had moved out of their shells - maybe they didn't like the lavender colour?!  We also conducted a quadrat hurling rocky shore survey where we flung the wire square over our heads and counted how many periwinkles, mussels and limpets were within the boundary. In the evening the tutors held a fun but competitive review quiz, complete with table wine. Our team came joint second with 31.5 points out of 40 which wasn't too shabby!

Friday came after what seemed like months of work, dry ham sandwiches, hangovers, copious cups of tea and no sleep. There was a last minute rush to finish some group videos and then experience the enjoyment of everyone's hard work in a dark and stuffy lecture theater while the moon covered the sun behind the clouds outside. I may have almost lost track of all the things we learned but I had an absolutely fantastic time which I will never forget!