UK Nature Blog

Meet the Species

Bristol Natural History Consortium has been running a Meet the Species initiative, as part of Discovering Places, the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Campaign to inspire the UK to discover their local environment. As part of this they've been publishing guest blog posts over the last week or so, as it draws to a close. There are two contributions from UKNatureBlog that were included today, on Zebra spiders and the Common Woodlouse (mostly drawn from content previously published here).

Yellow slug

This is a Yellow slug crawling through a wormery that I saw at the London Green Fair recently. I mistakenly called it a Leopard slug at the time, not being particularly familiar with slug species and assuming that this spotted thing must be one. But now I know better having looked it up.

However if you've never seen a video of Leopard slugs mating, I suggest you do so right now - but not if you're eating or otherwise easily repulsed. It's truly bizarre.

Finally the rains come!

It's been nearly two straight months with hardly a drop of rain in the South East - certainly here in Hertfordshire at UKNB HQ. But after many promising forecasts that came to nothing, finally we had a good downpour today, complete with sound and light effects.

Which made me wonder, where do all the slugs and snails go when it's so dry for so long? I suppose there was still some dew in the night, and the snails can hide in their shells for a while.

Freshwater mussel

I spotted this quite large freshwater mussel in the shallow waters at the edge of a lake in Norfolk. Beneath the gunk it looks like it's probably quite a rich mixture of yellow/green/brown and I suspect it's a member of the Unionidae family as they look very similar. I don't see them very often, though apparently they're very common, especially in canals, though I remember finding a very large shell (perhaps 15cm) at the edge of a lake as a boy.

Update: thanks to Matt/Matthew who comments that it could be a Painter's Mussel (Unio pictorum) and I think he's absolutely right. Apparently the Painter's Mussel is so called because it made a perfect receptable for artists' paint!

Pretty common woodlouse

If you've never looked at a woodlouse up close you might not notice how interesting and pretty they can be! I was particularly drawn to this one (admittedly a strange phrase given the subject) as it looked more colourful and patterned than the usual woodlice that I see, which are just a uniform grey. It also seemed to run about three times faster than woodlice I'm familiar with.

As usual with these things I feverishly looked it up, expecting to find that I had unveiled an exotic invader or even a whole new species, only to find that it is the "common woodlouse". So how come I haven't noticed these patterned ones before? I think the usual ones that sneak across the carpet must be the common rough or common shiny woodlice.

Surveying Norfolk (and other) wildlife

Norfolk Wildlife Trust have a great website with resources to help in surveying many different kinds of wildlife, from ponds to fungi. The forms are designed to be sent back to report on wildlife in Norfolk, but there's so much great information and guidance that they should be of interest to anybody.

Nature withdrawal symptoms and woodlice

It's always harder for a working person to get their fix of nature as the nights draw in and the weather turns foul. A lot of the more obvious animal life may also be retiring for the year, meaning there's less to see anyway. Dull days with grey skies can make photography that much harder, especially with long telephoto lenses that struggle to gather enough light for a fast shutter speed. What is a nature lover to do?

Well in my experience if you just stay indoors some of the nature will come to you. Woodlice in particular seem to be deciding that the warmth of the house is preferable to the cold outdoors at the moment and I find odd ones pretty much anywhere in the house, usually trundling speedily away from the front door where I think they're coming in. Next time, instead of throwing them back outside again I'll break out the macro lens and invite them to model for me!

Wet and wild

Autumn is upon us it seems and for most that means less time outdoors enjoying nature. Which is a shame. But at least it presents a prime opportunity to pay more attention to snails, large and small that swarm across the wet surfaces of the garden. They actually move surprisingly quickly if you watch them - certainly fast enough to cause a bit of motion blur when trying to photograph them on a grey day.

Homing snails?

The BBC reports on the possibility that garden snails have a homing instinct and will return whence they came. So perhaps chucking them over the fence into the neighbour's garden is not enough! This idea comes from a 69 year old gardener who noticed them returning to eat her veg even when she removed them up to 10 metres away. A mass experiment is being arranged via Radio 4 to test the theory.

Personally I suspect that the snails don't home in specifically, but that they wander randomly over a large (e.g. 10 metre) range and hence will tend to find your petunias again eventually. But that's very different to the suggestion that they might make a beeline back to their start point.

It's just bucketed it down here and there are a crazy number of snails cruising across my garden path. Perhaps they're all sprinting back home after the lengthy dry spell?

Snail through glass

I spotted a snail moving up the patio window after a rain shower so I took the opportunity to photograph it from beneath. This shows the mouth parts and two pairs of tentacles. The bigger, out of focus ones on top bear the eyes, and the ones at the bottom are just for feeling the way. If you look at the foot against the glass you can just see the undulating waves of movement running up along the sides.

As with most things, there are hidden fascinations waiting to be discovered, and I recommend this diagram of the anatomy of a snail, as well as this detailed discourse on the tentacles and eyes of snails.