Finally... Spring.

It's been busy here. I've been losing the plot a bit. But today is the Spring Equinox and this gives me hope.

Last weekend my sister and I got out in the drizzle to a woodland in Somerset. We were out looking for snails. Yes, we do this for fun in our spare time.

And we found many snails and their empty shells. Specifically, lots of Copse snail shells (Arianta arbustorum) and many live Door snails of some sort or other (very tall and pointy) climbing up and down the tree trunks. If you haven't started your collection yet, but you want to collect lots of different species and get a good mark - I think snails is a good choice.

Speckly shelled Copse snail CC image by Kristian Pikner

We also saw a lot of mosses and liverworts. I love mosses and liverworts (I might have mentioned this before). The keys are not easy. It's going to hurt your head a bit more than snails. But if you like staring down a microscope at the interesting and varied shapes of leaves, all bright green and lovely - then consider giving mosses a go. They're certainly easy enough to find, so you won't have to worry about having enough species to submit.

Plagiomnium undulatum. Reminiscent of miniature seaweed. In a wood. CC Bernd Haynold.

Another thing we saw much of was lichen. There were some excellent examples of Graphis scripta. It's supposed to look like writing. Presumably writing etched by tiny little tree elves or something. Lichen is around all year and it doesn't run away from you. If you fancy getting into something a bit weird, lichen could be for you.

Graphis scripta with its long 'lirellate' fruiting bodies. CC Ed Uebel.

There were also trees in the wood of course, and a rather unusual cross between pollarding and coppicing that produced so-called Stoggles. If you're collecting twigs, then if you find yourself in such a habitat, it'd be worth sketching and writing about in your notebook. I'm expecting delivery soon of a new winter twigs book by Bernd Schulz. It's supposed to be released in April so perhaps it'll even arrive before your hand-in date.

This may not be the world's most inspiring post. But the turn of the year is a sign that I will be getting back outside and recollecting my sanity, and that you now have the opportunity to get out there and practise your naturalist / taxonomic collector's skills. There's still time for you to produce something really good. Try to make it as good as you can and you will get a good mark (plus the satisfaction of learning something interesting). Onward and upward.

Photograph your specimens through the microscope

I sometimes think of myself as a bit of a Luddite eschewing modern technology (a student laughed at me on a field trip last year for actually using a paper map... I like to think he was sorry when his phone ran out of battery). But when it works I do like it really.

Today I finally got a microscope camera to talk to a computer. I won't bore you with the details because the important thing is that it now works and you can now come and use it. Getting the lighting right seems to be a fine art but I'm getting there. You can zoom in to the important features of your specimens, snap a photo, and then print it out and stick it in your notebook. I used it to identify two freshwater snails and I was very pleased.

They both came from a local pond lined with stone blocks (which apparently used to be where the local gentry washed their carriages - who knows). It didn't look like a very promising environment - it's pretty stagnant with more mud than water! But this actually made it a different sort of habitat to the usual ponds we visit - and so it turned up a species I'd not seen before.

You can see this species is very tightly coiled. It's only about 6mm across, and has 5+ whorls.

But also, it's very thin through - only about 1mm. I managed to hold the shell so you can see its aperture (which is pretty round).

So with these relatively few facts and a look at Collins 'Lakes, Rivers, Streams and Ponds', I identified it as Anisus leucostoma -  the White-lipped ramshorn snail. It doesn't care if the pond it's in dries up a bit: it can resist drought by staying in the mud. There's a similar looking species (Anisus vortex) but it's found in running water (and has an oval aperture) - so can be safely discounted I reckon.

For freshwater and terrestrial species I very much like the drawn illustrations in Janus's 'The Young Specialist Looks at Molluscs' (overlook the daft title) - it shows the shells from different angles (you can get a secondhand copy for about £5, or you're welcome to look at mine). The names can be out of date but that's relatively easily sorted (I might make a list to share).

The other species (in fact the only other thing alive it seemed) was a dextral snail (meaning its aperture is on the right if you hold it upright towards you). You can see the aperture is huge compared to the rest of the shell - it's about 3/4 the height. There's a little dichotomous key to Lymnaea (pond snails) in 'LRSP' - if you follow that (and look at the angle at the top of the aperture) you'll conclude this species is Radix peregra, the romantically-named Wandering snail.

I'm sure with a bit more experience with the lighting (and a bit of fiddling with Photoshop) you could make your photos even clearer. These snails were wet and I probably should have dried them to help with reflections and focusing. But I hope this encourages you that tiny things can be photographed fairly clearly. (You can also have a go down the microscope with your phone, with a steady hand).

Also on the subject of snails, did you know that because their shells are so persistent, they're used by archaeologists and people interested in past climates to work out what environments used to be like? You can see here that freshwater snails have been grouped according to their taste in habitat, so if they're uncovered hundreds of years later you can infer what it must have been like where they were living. My Ramshorn snail is in the (quite rudely titled) 'slum' category. One man's slum is another man's perfectly adequate muddy pond, thankyou. Also, 'catholic' doesn't refer to the snails' religious beliefs, but that they have wide-ranging habitat tastes.

 from Brown (2001) with updated names

So if you're collecting snails - or anything - the moral of the story is to look in a variety of habitats, and then you will find a wider range of species.

Another option for fern-finders

From F G Heath's 'Fern Portfolio' (1885)

 I don't have enough self-discipline when it comes to buying books. I bought the aforementioned 'Arable Bryophytes' and I just found myself pressing the BUY button on a book about ferns. But this (as I like to justify to myself) is ok if I actually read and use them.

A book I bought a while back and admittedly haven't used enough is "The Vegetative Key to the British Flora" by John Poland and Eric Clement (2009). Vegetative implies plants with leaves but without flowers... and let's face it, if you can wait until something flowers, identifying it can be a lot more straightforward.

But today something in my mind twigged the book might contain plants that never flower - like ferns. Its key uses some features of ferns that Merryweather's book does not, like the number of vascular bundles you can see if you chop the stipe in half - they say it's 'often the quickest and most reliable shortcut to the identification of a genus.' I like quick and reliable shortcuts.

What's more, it includes a range of species that aren't native, like the Ostrich fern and the Kangaroo fern, which might conceivably turn up in more domesticated spots and confuse you (those aren't in Merryweather either, I don't think).

Submarginal hydathodes: they're little pores round the edge of the leaf, quite cute. CC image RBGE.

So if you're doing ferns, let me know and I can share the key with you, and we can have a look together if you like (to decrease danger of hyperventilating over some of the technical (though nice to pronounce) terminology like pinnatisect, clathrate scales and submarginal hydathodes).

Incidentally, I really like the illustrations in FG Heath's book (picture above) because they are generally clear and he shows both sides of the blades so the sori can be seen. It would be good if you could display your specimens the same way. He specifically says he wanted to show them life-size, so that's meant some artful curling-round of the stipes (another thing you could do). Admittedly he sometimes crams lots of species on one page (not advised) but that's probably because colour plates were and are expensive. You can splash out on one page per species.

The curious looking Moonwort. CC Jason Hollinger.

The Victorians loved their ferns - after this period it seems people went a bit mad on all the freaky varieties they found, and competitively grew these in their gardens. But I prefer your standard native ferns. Not only do they have that repeating visual thing that I love, but because of the dank mysterious places they usually grow, they often have a bit of a strange reputation. There are ones with great names like Moonwort (Botrychium lunare), Adder's-tongue (Ophioglossum spp.) and Spleenwort (Asplenium spp.)

Moonwort can unshoe horses. Well, apparently. Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th century herbalist, said:

Moonwort is a herb which (they say) will open locks, and unshoe such horses as tread upon it: This some laugh to scorn, and those no small fools neither; but country people, that I know, call it Unshoe the Horse. Besides I have heard commanders say, that on White Down in Devonshire, near Tiverton, there were found thirty horse shoes, pulled off from the feet of the Earl of Essex's horses, being there drawn up in a body, many of them being but newly shod, and no reason known, which caused much admiration.

To be scientific I think some questioning of the standards of the farrier involved might have been appropriate. What a strange idea though. But kind of Romantic and weird. Perhaps the shapes of the leaves echo the shape of horseshoes (or a key?), and the unfurling frond above does look a bit tentacle-like and grabby.

"Back again?" "Yeah, I stood on some Moonwort." Painting by E R Smythe, 1899.

A tree identification app

My sister is a very loyal reader of this blog and frequently sends encouraging remarks. At least I know I'm not talking entirely to myself. She has found you an app for identifying trees, created by the Woodland Trust. I just had a little go on it and it allows you to search by features of twigs, buds, leaves, bark, flowers or fruits, or any combination (the latter can be rather helpful). It narrows down the options until there is one left, or a small number of species to check - it's basically like a dichotomous key and if you wrote down the options given, I think you could get away with using it as evidence for such in your notebook.

And because it allows you to use information about buds and bark, it should work for winter trees. It also gives interesting information about preferred habitats, uses, cultural symbolism, and 'threats' (like diseases and pests).

What's more it's free. It's certainly worth a go, and if you can't get a definitive answer (there aren't truly detailed pictures of the buds) it will probably help you narrow down your options to a few species which you could then check in a book. Winter trees are generally a bit more difficult than their summery leafy counterparts; it's kind of unavoidable I'm afraid, when they don't have leaves, or fruits, or flowers. But if you want to borrow these books to help you then you're most welcome.

Above is a leaf from a Wild service tree (Sorbus torminalis) - I found it on the field trip to Lower Woods last week. It's an unusual species which is generally only found in ancient woodlands, and the leaf is very distinctive. Its fruits are known as 'chequers' - which is where the name of the Prime Minister's country pad originates. The fruits have to be 'bletted' before they're edible (that basically means they have to be over-ripe and a bit rotten) - apparently they are sticky and taste a bit like tangy raisins.

The service-berry partakes of the quality of the Medlar, both in green and in ripe state. It is gathered in branches and put into or hung on a cleft stick of about a yard long which becomes a mass of berries. In this state the fruit is sold by the country people and then hung up in a garden to receive the damp air of night which causes it to undergo a kind of putrefactive fermentation and in this soft state it is eaten and has a more agreeable acid than Medlar.
From Henry Phillips' Pomarium Brittanicum (1822). 

They look like tiny apples when cut open - Atomic Shrimp's webpage tells you all about collecting eating them. He has lots of other interesting pages about foraging wild food.

CC image by Adrian S Pye.

Old and new technology

Something I made in enamel. Perhaps it shows some biological / technological crossover?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was an Art Student. Now you may know some and think theirs is an easy life, all that getting out of bed late and splashing paint about. But actually it's fraught with existential angst. Not only do you have to produce some work which is held up to some seemingly unknowable criteria of worthiness but you also have to examine the reasons why you're doing it. Such constant self-examination is not required from Science Students. I frequently found myself tied up in a paralysed knot, which now seems ridiculous. By the end, my recurring trains of thought had sort of coalesced into something about how we all use a lot of technology today but understand virtually nothing about how it really works. That we use it but we couldn't repair it and we've willingly let ourselves become sort of powerless and helpless (although someone tapping away on their new i-phone may not agree).

They do pay me for some sort of technical proficiency, and I like to know how things work and get very frustrated when modern technology works against me. You may call it control freakery. But everyone needs a bit of control in their life. It's stressful not to have any. Some people achieve this by keeping everything neat and tidy (visitors to my desk will see that's not my approach). But for me, part of the control is Knowing Things.

And so, finally, I reach my taxonomic-collection-related point. I like knowing what trees and plants and animals I'm looking at when I'm out and about in the world. I like to know the features that define them as different species and I like to know the cultural connections they sometimes have. For example, above are some little rolls of birch bark.

Would you believe it, but they're ten thousand years old - somebody in the British Mesolithic rolled them up and forgot about them. Birch is full of resins that make it a great firelighter so it's very likely these objects were precisely that. It's also possible that the resin was destined to be melted and used as a glue to stick tiny flint blades into arrowheads or something similar. But I just find it reassuring that come the technological apocalypse (subject of a hundred films) knowing birch has these properties could help me brew up a soothing cup of tea.

In the same case at the British Museum I saw this, a bracket fungus:

Likewise, it comes from the Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire, and likewise it's a species which is excellent for starting a fire. You use the layer above the pores, which can be fluffed up into a material that will take a tiny spark - the material seems to be known as amadou and Paul Kirtley explains here how to prepare it. You may have heard of Ötzi; he lived in the Alps about 5,300 years ago and his body became preserved in a glacier. He had some prepared amadou amongst his belongings.

So, this sort of thing - whilst rather peripheral to what you've been asked to do for the assignment - might lend an added layer of interest to your researches, and who knows, might enable you to survive in the event of global meltdown. I'm kidding, everything's going to be fine. But just in case. And perhaps if you do have any existential angst it can help to anchor you to reality.

CC Jason Hollinger; CC Martin Cooper; CC Doug Bowman; CC Jason Hollinger. 

While on the subject of bracket fungi, another repeating pattern in my career as Art Student was repeating patterns. This morning, looking at Student K's bracket fungi under the microscope, I was drawn to the different shapes of the pores in the different species. They're so tiny that they're really not obvious until they're magnified. And they can be diagnostic of the species you're trying to identify. So do feel free to bring your fungi in to examine microscopically (you can then put them in the freezer for the freeze-drier) - or you could also consider getting your own hand lens.

I love liverworts

I think myself very lucky to live in the country. Yes, it may have a few downsides (few places will deliver you a takeaway, it costs a fortune to get a taxi from town, and popping out for a loaf of bread requires an expedition) but the benefits to my mental well-being outweigh these things massively. I really appreciate having the natural world on my doorstep and being able to go for an impromptu walk to put things into perspective. If you're feeling aggravated about something, it gives you many other things to concentrate on, and you realise that neither you nor the sources of your stress are the centre of the universe.

I went for a walk yesterday. Naturally I took a pot (never be without your pot). I had mosses and liverworts in mind. There are lots of mosses that grow on the drystone walls around where I live, but I had a different habitat in mind: the stubble-filled fields. And I was delighted to find my quarry: a Riccia liverwort.

Just look at it, it's so sweet. Ok, so you're probably thinking I'm really losing the plot now. But see how small and delightfully formed it is. Who would even suspect such a strange and neatly branching plant growing in a field at all.

Lots of liverworts look a bit like mosses - they're called 'leafy liverworts'. But Riccia is a 'thallose liverwort' - it doesn't have leaves but a thallus (a flattish sheet of cells). You might be familiar with the thallose Marchantia if you've ever looked at liverworts before. But I appreciate that most people haven't looked at liverworts before and are barely (if at all) aware of their existence. Oh how they're missing out.

I have found a very good explanation of everything liverworty on the pages of the Australian National Botanic Gardens. They even mention Riccias on this page so you can read all about how they grow and reproduce. As you might suspect from their appearance in the field, they are experts at opportunistically growing on freshly exposed soil when conditions get a bit wetter.

Those ANBG pages are also an excellent introduction to the other bryophytes: mosses and hornworts (although of course their examples are largely antipodean). If liverworts are relatively unknown (to normal people) compared to mosses, then hornworts are super obscure. A couple of years ago I went on an FSC bryophytes course and we spent one afternoon literally crawling around a field (luckily we were well away from a road where anyone could see us) - and I was super chuffed to find a hornwort. There were also many Riccias which is why I thought to check my local field yesterday. In fact there's a whole book about Arable Bryophytes written by Ron Porley (I feel a purchase coming on).

If you're thinking of choosing mosses and liverworts (and I do recommend them if you like looking at the detail of lovely and tiny things) then a nice Riccia would be a good addition to your collection. Because they like to leap in when arable fields are cut, this is the ideal time of year to look. But there are many reasonably easily identified large mosses you can find in more urban areas too.

A pre-1850 Gould microscope (CC Wellcome Images)

A useful aside: Student K just popped in with her mushrooms and we viewed a couple through a dissecting microscope. Much oohing was heard over the super details revealed. Dave then showed us how our microscope camera can Bluetooth an image to your phone. You can also get a decent image by holding your phone over the eyepiece. So don't forget this as an option for illustrating your notebook - feel free to bring in your specimens of all kinds.

Your new skills can help make a difference

A lot of moths visiting a trap in Brunei, 1982. CC image Accassidy.

The other afternoon I was listening to Inside Science on Radio 4, and they had a piece about 'moth snowstorms'. That is, people were remembering when they would drive along in the countryside at night, and moths would be flying in from all angles into their headlights, and they'd have to start their windscreen wipers. It's certainly not something I've experienced in my lifetime. In fact it seems quite a mad idea, even though it must have been unremarkable not so long ago. Something that did ring a bell was motorcyclists saying they used to have to stop regularly and clean their visors of squashed flies. I can remember (in the 90s) saying to my dad that my friend's car was covered in gummy dead insects, and him complaining that it must have meant we were driving too fast. Some people suggest cars might be more aerodynamic these days, which might account for why gummy insects don't seem to be a problem. But that doesn't explain the visor thing - there'd still be insects on visors.

My point is, we seem to be losing insects, fast. Data from amateur entomologists' malaise traps suggest a loss of 75% in the last 25 years. I don't need to tell you that sounds pretty terrifying, when insects are a fundamental part of the food chain and pollinate a lot of plants (including our food plants). It was astoundingly refreshing to hear that the alleged environment minster, Michael Gove, has actually come round to the idea that neonicotinoid pesticides need stricter controls. One can only hope it's not shutting the door after the horse has bolted. You'd imagine spraying pesticides all over fields can't have helped matters, in addition to problems caused by other modern farming methods. So perhaps stopping spraying them might help restore some of the invertebrate populations.

A malaise trap. CC image Ceuthophilus. Nothing to do with uneasy-feeling malaise (though that may be for the insects), but actually invented by the Swedish Mr. Malaise in the 1930s.

Whilst this sounds like environmental doom and gloom (which yes, it probably is) - you have chosen this degree course so presumably want to try to make the world a better place. You can be part of the antidote to your own gloom. By developing your identification skills and submitting records to recording schemes and records centres, you can help make some difference. Your data can feed into a big picture which can persuade the powers that be to actually do something. This might not be a straightforward process because it involves politics. But having the scientific evidence has to be of critical importance, surely.

You might think "ah, what difference can I make? :( " But there really aren't that many people out there who have good identification skills. Particularly if you focus on something even slightly obscure. If you chose to go to a local habitat and record what you find, it's possible that nobody would have done that for ten, twenty years (or even ever). You might find something Really Interesting, and conceivably that could help get the site a modicum of protection one day. And even if you don't, it all becomes part of valuable data about today, and can be compared with what happens in future, and if records exist, with what was present in the past. (iRecord is an easy way to submit a record of anything you find, but if you prefer the support of a specialist scheme, the Biological Records Centre has a comprehensive list of contacts.)

Student A's lovely lichen find. CC image Jason Hollinger (California)

The other day, one of the third years popped in to see me. She chose lichens for her collection last year and got really into them. She'd been out lichen-hunting recently. When she got home and looked in her 'Dobson' guide, one of them seemed to be something unusual. The only species that seemed to match was a distinctive orange-grey lichen with little eyelashy spines around the fruiting bodies. But Dobson said it had only been seen in very few areas and was now thought extinct in this country. She had a tiny sample and we both squinted at it down the microscope. Nothing else seemed to match. I said I thought she should speak to David Hill, my esteemed lichen tutor from my course.

It turns out she was right with her identification and he was "super excited". Isn't that amazing! So this is proof that you too can find and report something excellent. She's brought something back from apparent extinction. I guess the poor lichen was never quite extinct in the first place (though it's evidently very rare) - but the point is, how many people are looking at lichens, and how many people have the skill to identify them? Not many. So your developing skills can make an impact. You can be one of an elite group that is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about lichens, beetles, mosses, or whatever it is that grabs you. We can only conserve things when we know they exist. You will be able to contribute to the body of knowledge of what's out there. Be encouraged.

There are links to over 200 recording schemes at the NBN Gateway.