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