Forsinard Beasties

Hi folks, today I can only provide pictorial evidence of my endeavours for Friday's work, as today while catching fish in a seine net I managed to drop my own and someone else's camera into the loch. Ahem. So it's drying out for a couple of days. Anyway on Friday I was based at the Keepers cottage shed (which is quite a large shed) sorting through the colonisation traps that we brought in from Clar loch last week. It involves unrolling the little rectangles of astroturf that have been in the loch for 6 weeks, sloshing them about in a shallow sorting tray, then picking through the murk to find any inverts, and plonking them in a nice little tube of alcohol where they can die happily drunk. I think it's been my favourite activity so far, and one that I'm really comfortable with having carried out a few kick sample surveys myself in the Kelvin. Plus I got to listen to my music while I was working :)

Sorting inverts to Opeth

The rolled up astroturf provides a great little shelter for all sorts of beasties to make their homes in to escape from predators. Among the rafts of caddisfly larvae there were also water fleas, diptera larvae (more commonly known as bloodworms), the odd small leech, one gammerus (freshwater shrimp), mites and some teeny tiny black beetles. Some required a little persuasion to get between the ends of my forceps and into the tube!

Caddis case with a glorious surrounding lawn!

Among all the usual suspects there was a large flying insect which seemed happy rowing along in the water, but myself and my housemates had some difficulty trying to identify. However, rather than being some amazing bog beast new to science it turned out to be a half-hatched caddisfly...you live and learn!

The beast of Clar loch

On Monday I was back in the woods doing dipwell surveys again and I'll be doing the same tomorrow and Friday, hopefully avoiding getting stuck or losing a welly in the boggy pools this time!

Today was quite exciting as the team were getting some training from Colin Bean at SNH in how to carrying out fish surveys in the loch using gill and seine netting. The aim is to catch, mark (by snipping off a little bit of the fish's adipose fin) and then release so that the RSPB can get an idea of the fish populations of the lochs. This is to assess how much impact the fish might have on the food web of invertebrates and the Common Scoters. We had a couple of non-starters with the netting at first but then we hit the jackpot, and hopefully once my camera has dried out I'll tell you all about it next time.