Christmas CRIMP

When is the best time to go wading in a river? That's right, WINTER!

 

 

There's more life in here than meets the eye!

The last riverfly survey before Christmas was indeed a very chilly one. The river was a lot higher than usual due to the heavy rains recently but that didn't stop us from catching some cool beasties! I've caught a couple of brown trout parr on the odd occasion like the little guy below, however I've never had a stickleback land in my net, never mind two of them!

Brown Trout parr

Three-spined Stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus

Sticklebacks are common in UK rivers and ponds, usually reaching a length between 4-7cm and living for up to 3 years. They are unusual in that they do not have scales on their body like most fish, but instead have bony armour-like plates, as well as the characteristic spiny protrusions on their backs. Sticklebacks are normally schooling fish but during the breeding season in the spring the males become very territorial and develop a red patch under their belly to advertise their dominance over other males and to attract a female. The male also takes on parental care duties, building a nest using bits of weed, chasing rival males away, and ensuring that the eggs are well oxygenated once the female has laid them. Once the eggs have hatched he will capture any fry that try to escape by sucking them into his mouth and depositing them back in the nest. He will do this until the young are big or strong enough to escape him!

We also caught some familiar faces in the form of pea mussels, pond snails, and various leeches. Leeches can survive in a wide variety of freshwater bodies including those with low dissolved oxygen which may indicate polluted waters. However as we are also regularly finding large numbers of blue olive mayfly, flat bodied upwing, caddis and stonefly larvae which are all very sensitive to pollution, we can assume that this river is healthy for Christmas. Yay!

Leech, possibly Erpobdella sp. next to a flat bodied upwing larva

 

Burning Like Fire

My most recent taxidermy victim subject has been a young wild rabbit:

 This is the first rabbit I've tried my hand at and I'm quite pleased how it turned out, the only problems are with the nose and lips which need filled out a bit more, and that it's sitting on its bum where it should really be supported by the hind legs. Every day is a school day so these are things to remember for next time! It was great blow drying this critter with the hair dryer as it was so fluffy and soft.

As I don't have a dedicated space or workshop to do taxidermy, I need to make sure I complete the animal in one day, and this often leads to, ahem, frustration towards the final stages! Hopefully in the future I'll have a shed and a 'taxidermy only' freezer, so that I can put a specimen on hold to finish off another day, it would take away so much stress. I found a quote on the excellent website of professional taxidermist Mike Gadd -

I know you can get tired when working on a project for a while and frustration can set in towards the end so that you feel like screaming and throwing the thing across the room.  This is quite normal behavior for a taxidermist and in my early days with no books to help, I sentenced many a poor animal to flying without wings.

Never a truer word said, especially on a different particularly small and fiddly animal I've been working on this weekend. All will be revealed after the Christmas period :)

Looking out of the window...forever

CRIMPing my Style!

For the past three months I have been carrying out monthly riverfly surveys on behalf of the Kelvin Angling Association and in conjunction with Clyde River Foundation's CRIMP programme. I also had my 5 minutes of fame being featured in one of the CRF's blog posts! 
Last month's kick sample turned up a couple of surprises which I thought I'd share!

 The first was a stone loach (Barbatula barbatula) who found his way into the net. These guys are bottomfeeders in clean rivers (a good sign for the Allander!) and use their distinctive barbels that can be seen near the mouth to detect food. He's probably been snacking on some of the riverfly larvae I'm looking for.

 

The next surprise was in the form of a member of the leech family Hirudinae which I think is Glossosiphonia complanata. It has 6 tiny light detecting eyespots at the pointed end and feed of freshwater snails and midge larvae - a good thing for us ;) It has a sucker at the front and rear of the body and can hold onto the substrate with a fantastically strong grip, as I found out when I tried to wash him out of the tray back into the river, he just wouldn't budge.

 

 This brown mass consists of 43 Gammarus, or freshwater amphipod, these are indicators of clean oxygen rich water. They're very nippy in the water too, tricky to catch as they are so fast.

These are flat bodied upwing members of the Heptageniidae family of mayflies (approximately 30 individuals shown here). Their flattened shape helps them cling to rocks and avoid being washed downstream as they are not great swimmers. These guys are also good indicators of water quality, they can tolerate a little pollution but need oxygen rich water to survive. 

I'll be carrying out October's survey soon so stayed tuned to see if I find anything interesting :)

Back to school!

I wrote this blog a few weeks ago and have only got round to posting it now...that's how busy it's been!

Yes it's finally the end of my summer and I'm back at uni in my third year. We kicked things off with a full-on week residential field course at Loch Lomond featuring invertebrate sampling, electro-fishing and experimental design! I thought I'd share some photos of our caddisfly experiment, where we caught a fair few of the leptoceridae family (which normally construct their cases from plant matter) and challenged them to build cases from a variety of different substrates. We had a couple of naked caddis larvae in dishes with either plant bits, sand, gravel, or plastic and left them for a couple of hours to see what they would do!

Ruffe caught during invert sampling in Loch Lomond

Dragonfly nymph

Red velvet mite

The bonnie banks

Brown trout caught while electrofishing

An eel!

Our caddisfly experiment

What caddisfly cases usually look like.

Our resourceful caddisfly larvae building with plastic

Naked caddis larvae!

I have also been dissecting earthworms, periwinkle, limpets, shore crab and a squid in uni labs to aid the learning experience. It's been a busy time and I've had a fair amount of coursework to get through but hopefully this weekend I'll have a taxidermied rabbit to show you :)

Fossorial Voles II

On the Wednesday night of Site A trapping I received a message from Robyn saying that she had arrived to check the traps and found many of the metal Shermans stolen and others thrown around the site. Luckily we had previously clipped open the tube traps and left the Shermans unset so that there would have been no animals inside when this act of vandalism occurred. This is one of the many risks when conducting fieldwork in an urban area, some people do not have any respect for the work that is being done, or for some reason have an issue with the water voles in the area (who know why anyone wouldn't mind these lovely creatures in their neighborhood!). Signs were posted at the site explaining what was going on but a lot of the time we arrived to find them stolen or kicked over by kids. On the other hand if you do not post signs and inform the public, they may happen across the traps by accident and assume that something untoward was going on and interfere anyway.

Burrow with feeding signs at entrance

The reason for not setting the traps the night before was because trapping was a bit too successful! At the previous night check every trap had an animal and Robyn was understandably a bit overwhelmed - every animal has to be measured, weighed and microchipped with all the details taken down, no easy task when dog walkers are coming up to see what you are doing!

The second week the traps were moved to Site B, a different habitat, this time more of a sloping bank like you would expect of the voles but still nowhere near water. The bank is artificial disturbed soil, colonised by a variety of grasses such as Yorkshire Fog, Cocksfoot, Bent Grass and Holcus mollis. The site is opposite a row of houses with an area of grass in front that is cut by the council, dogs are walked there but it is generally a lot quieter than Site A. Perhaps surprisingly the population of water voles there seems to be a lot lower, this may be because of fox predation, where the foxes are not deterred by the amount of dogs and people passing through. Despite lower trapping numbers we managed to capture a couple of juveniles including this guy:

Black Juvenile Water Vole

Me preparing our youngster for body measurements

We also landed a large breeding female, who was probably the mum of one of these kids! I had the fantastic opportunity to handle a few animals, with proper precautions I add as these guys can be fiesty and give a hard bite if you are not careful. When I first read up about water voles I thought that the English population were brown in colour and the Scottish black coated, however during this week I found that there were some lovely brindle and brown coated animals here too.

One of the mums

The field signs were a lot harder to see compared with Site A, the runs were less visible and you had to lift up the tussocks of grass to see many of the tunnels and tumuli (mounds of earth dug out of burrows). Where at Site A there were latrines clearly visible at almost circular points around the periphery of the burrows, you would struggle to find one or two at Site B. The spread of the burrows and territories also seems to differ in that they are strung in a horizontal line, following the ridge of the earth.

There were also signs to be found under discarded wood and a mattress amongst the grass...

 

What's under the board?

I'm off on holiday for 3 weeks around Vancouver Island in Canada, hopefully when I return I'll have few photos of fauna to share!

Glasgow's Fossorial Water Voles

One of the survey sites in a urban park in Glasgow's East End, surprisingly stuffed with water voles!

Water voles. It's in the name right? They typically live near streams and rivers, burrowing into the bank, eating vegetation and having a bit of a swim. Well, not so for Glasgow's East End populations of fossorial water voles! Fossorial animals such as badgers and moles, are adapted to digging underground, but more recently Scottish water voles have been taking to this lifestyle.

Water voles are the largest of the British voles (between 200 - 350g) and usually dark brown in colour, although the Scottish ones are mostly all black. Despite their name they are not that well adapted to swimming as they do not have webbed feet or use their tail to steer themselves. They seem to get by with a doggy paddle well enough, especially when escaping from predators!

They are herbivorous animals, eating grasses and waterside plants, and during the winter; bulbs, roots and rhizomes are nibbled. They live in colonies and breeding females are very territorial, marking out their areas with latrine sites (toilets) where they leave piles of poop, rubbing their hind feet on their scent glands and stamping down the droppings and then leaving some more on top to advertise their presence. Obvious field signs include burrows in the ground, tube-like runs through long grass, feeding stations with little piles of cut vegetation, and of course the latrines.

Fossorial water voles are also known on islands in the Sound of Jura. Interestingly the Scottish and English populations of water voles are genetically different from each other, having resulted from two separate colonization events during the last period of glaciation.

Prototype watervole tube trap concealed along a vole run with some tempting apple.

Sherman trap

I am lucky enough to be helping out Robyn Stewart from Glasgow uni in collecting more information about Glasgow's fossorial water vole populations. She is hoping to get an idea of population numbers in different areas by using the mark and recapture method. The animals are trapped humanely with Sherman traps and plastic tube traps baited with yummy carrot and apple, and some snuggly hay to keep the animals warm. The traps are checked 3 times a day and any caught animals are measured, weighed, microchipped and sent on their way unharmed.

We caught a wee girl who was remarkably co-operative.

Yesterday we baited the traps but left them unset so that the voles could check them out and not feel threatened by them. When we checked them today about 92% of the traps had signs of vole activity inside them which bodes well for trapping success the rest of this week!

In a Pringles tube :)

Measured, micro-chipped and set back on her way

Water voles are protected in Scotland by law and deliberately or recklessly damaging or destroying water vole burrows and access or disturbing the animals while they are using them is an offence. If you observe anyone doing such a thing please contact the police or SNH

Riverfly Monitoring: Month 1!

Me kick sampling in the Allander today

Back in May I attended a River Invertebrate Monitoring Workshop hosted by Clyde River Foundation at Brannock High School. The Riverfly Partnership are the brains behind this citizen science  monitoring scheme which aims to protect the quality of rivers, and add to the understanding of invertebrate ecology. It is mostly aimed at anglers, as they spend a lot of their time on or in rivers (as you might expect!) and already have knowledge of the different families of flies and how changes in their numbers can be an indicator of changing water quality. When a survey is carried out, the data is submitted online and is forwarded onto the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). This is happening all over the country with the aim to act quickly when issues arise and hopefully deter incidental polluters.

By regularly monitoring sites for 8 key species, any declines can quickly be seen and act as an indicator of a pollution event on the river. As well as anglers, schools have also been taking part in riverfly surveys via CRF as part of their education and have been inputting results online along with other volunteers like me!

A striped ladybird joined us for lunch!

Today we found my site on the outskirts of Glasgow on the Allander water. It was a bit of an adventure trying to get down to the river itself but we found a decent spot and I strode out in my wellies with the pond net and kicked around for 3 minutes, zig-zagging across the water. We washed the net out into the large white tray and started poking around the murk with the turkey basters and teaspoons, transferring any wiggly mayflies, stoneflies, freshwater shrimps, caddisfly or olives to the sorting tray for counting. In the end we had:

• 1 cased Caddisfly
• 1 caseless Caddisfly
• 21 Blue Winged Olives
• 4 Flat bodied upwings
• 1 Olive
• 11 Stoneflies
• 2 Gammarus (Freshwater Shrimp)

It will be interesting to see the numbers next month, and for the rest of the year.
I apologise for the lack of pictures, we were too engrossed in the finding and sorting to remember to take more - next time I promise!

Freshwater mite (top) and a stonefly nymph (bottom)

London Museums

A jar of moles

 
Last weekend R and I went on an action packed weekend to London. On our last visit we were unable to visit the Grant Museum of Zoology and I completely forgot about the Natural History Museum at Tring, so that's where we spent some of our time on this trip!

The Grant Museum of Zoology was founded in 1828 by Robert Edmond Grant, the first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in England. He was from Edinburgh and is credited with establishing that sponges were animals and giving them the name Porifera. The collection contains around 67,000 specimens of taxidermy, wet preservations and skeletons packed into glorious wood and glass cabinets upon cabinets. It was once, and still is, used as a teaching collection - a haven of education and inspiration for the likes of me!

Beautiful glass nudibranch (sea slug) models made by the Blaschka family in the late 1800s

How often do you see fin whale foetuses?

Surrounded by slides!

Relatives and ancestors looking down

There are also a few examples of extinct species in the museum such as the Quagga skeleton (member of the zebra family), Dodo bones, Thylacine (Tasmanian wolf) and a giant deer skull with huge antlers.

We also spent a couple of hours at NHM Tring, the collection by Lionel Walter Rothschild (who has lent his name to hundreds of species!) opened to the public in 1892. The galleries are impressive large glass case displays providing corridors around a central atrium. Some have old wooden entomology cabinets, opening the wooden doors carefully to find out what beautiful inverts are lurking underneath!

Giant ground sloth skeleton

A variety of longhorn beetles

Saiga - a type of antelope

Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine

There is a an impressive taxidermy collection of domestic dogs

Including this tiny dude