French Crayfish

The children enjoyed drawing the crayfish. When you see them from the river bank they sit statically on the mud or in the weeds and move slowly and carefully with their pincers raised. Then as you approach they suddenly shoot off as though electrified, with a flip of their powerful tails, and disappear down burrows.

Bees bees bees

I'm still learning about bee keeping and it was great to help 'Bee Bob' work through the hives. The apiary is still recovering from the loss of many colonies in the cold snap last spring but several hives are strong and doing really well. Spent 2 great hours opening up hives in my bee suit and learning to work through the frames calmly so as not to disturb the bees. Learnt a great deal. Each hive has a different character but most of the bees seemed quite calm as we lifted out frames and there wasn't much need for the smoker. Great to be able to see the newly laid eggs and the workers busying themselves over the surfaces of the frames laying down honey. The eggs are laid in circles on the frames, with capped cells surrounding the newer cells, with bees being born and laid in rotation by the queen, with the colony forming a ball within the hive structure, sliced through by the frames so that you can see the expanding mass as you leaf through each layer. The honey laden frames were remarkably heavy and lifting one out I was able to see the larger queen moving amongst the smaller workers. It was all incredibly interesting and am keen to keep learning with the intention to manage my own hives and hopefully to get a hive onto the college campus also.

The Jersey Tiger - Euplagia quadripunctaria

I've seen quite a lot of these in recent weeks and am always captivated by them, although this one had a slightly deformed wing and appeared a little worse for wear. Day flying and large these tiger moths are rather exotic and unexpected when you see them. The body is beautifully orange and the simple curve of the dramatically striped wings gives the moth a rather clean, vulcan bomber'esque, profile. Sat doing some sketching with Alexander in the garden and he did a terrific little painting.

Merths

Peppered Moth

Had a fabulous night of moth-trapping with the South Yare Wildlife Group over the weekend. 3 traps overnight yielded over 50 species identified with many more micro moths and just sheer huge numbers. As I've commented before moth names are wonderful, some extraordinary gothic others just weird. I wonder who named them - were they named through folk tradition or was there a specific exercise in naming them by some Victorian Naturalist?? Favourites include 'Hebrew Character', 'Canary-shouldered Thorn' and 'Ruby Tiger'.

Black Arches

Large Emerald

Poplar Hawk Moth

Creatures from the 'Essex' Deep

Shrimping every day for a week gives you a clear sense of the location, the fauna and the ability to reflect on previous year's catches and to talk each day to members of the public and interested children. We haven't seen a hermit crab for a couple of years and the only one we caught this week was when I put out the lobster pot over night on the Thursday, also clearly the best way to catch a lot of healthy large shore crabs. I was surprised that a hermit crab ventured out over the seabed and managed to climb into the lobster pot, perhaps they're more active at night ? Also some years there are few pipe fish, prawns or flat fish but this year we caught a lot of all of these. There were 5 or 6 pipe fish in an hour's shrimping consistently over the first 3 days and then they seemed to disappear later in the week, whereas the juvenile flat fish were caught more frequently as the week went on and Angus caught loads on the last day. If you consider each long breakwater to be a sort of reef, with the last 8 sections remaining underwater at all states of the tide, then the catch might vary simply because we fish the same site day after day. The prawns re-stock day after day but favour the left hand breakwater over the right, possibly because the woodwork overhangs and creates a habitat for them. The flatfish were caught on the open sand at low tide, where the sand shrimps are caught, and as with so many of the creatures they were clearly immature and I wonder if the low shallow warm sea around the Essex coast acts as a sort of nursery for fry, with the low sandy visability perhaps also protecting them from larger predators. No sign of weaver fish this week but lively 5 bearded rockling, dab, plaice, pipe-fish and a wonderfully characterful 'Shanny' with it's frog-like face and jumpy manner.

The highlight of the week was a clump of cuttlefish eggs which we kept hold of all week, having found a clump so now able to recognise the water filled bladders distinguishing them from the air filled floats of the sea weeds. Two baby cuttlefish hatched on the second morning and then, with two changes of water each day, the majority of the brood hatched on the last day. The baby cuttlefish were born almost white and quite still but within hours they were darker, more active and already demonstrating that they could produce ink and change colour at will. So perfectly formed and otherworldly as they used their jet propulsion to hover about the jar but almost impossible to photograph and film, as quite unpredictable and each only about 1cm in length. I tried to record the different species more carefully this year and photographed them alongside a 2p piece to get a sense of scale before releasing them back into the sea and packing up the containers and nets for another year.

 

Shrimping at Frinton on Sea

Diving in Falmouth - Giant Jellyfish

3 great days of diving out of Falmouth with very few other dive boats about, such a change to 10 years ago when a sunny slack tide on the Lizard pinnacles could attract 10 ribs, vying to share shot lines. Dived on the Manacles, East Narrows and Whelps reefs. The water was a bit murky as we were there following the stormy Easterlies and the swell had lifted the silt but we had good viz' on most of the dives, apart from the Helford Estuary where we abandoned the dive as we couldn't see our own feet let alone each other. There was lots of life on the wrecks of the Peterson and the Hera with pollack, many Cuckoo wrasse (Labrus mixtus), Ballan wrasse (Labrus bergylta), conger and shoals of fry. Evidence of spiny starfish (Marthasterias glacialis) feasting on mussels and many of the cuckoo wrasse appeared to be on the turn, between male and female and sporting a cross of gender markings. The dive we did in the East narrows on the first afternoon was interesting as we drifted along the huge and ecologically important Maerl beds, a sort of ground living small fragmented tumbling coral which covers the seabed for a number of miles, each piece grows at 1mm a year and they collectively create important biodiversity-rich habitats. Amongst the Maerl (Coralline algae) I saw some hermit crabs staggering along overloaded with enormous attached plumose anemones and also a micro spider crab riding on a large John Dory fish. I had to come up early and leave the others as they were drifting along the seabed at 20m and I was low on air after the earlier 2 dives, this was unfortunate as they then saw two thornback rays.

 One of the highlights of the trip was seeing two of the huge 'Dustbin Lid' jellyfish (Rhizostoma octopus) that have been in the press recently. They drifted under the boat while we waited for two divers to surface and I was able to get a few shots over the side but wasn't fast enough to get my fins on and get in. These jellyfish, up to a meter in width, have largely disappeared in recent days and we discussed why, perhaps they die off after mating or have all been eaten by the attendant leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea). We sadly didn't see any turtles, but perhaps as evidence of predation we found a single limb of one of these giant jellyfish lying discarded on the wreck of the Peterson and it was surprisingly firm, like a silicon cast, and heavy to hold, stunning creatures.