Letting nature do the gardening for me

My ideal garden is one where animals do all the hard work and I just get to enjoy spending time in it.

Sadly, in the absence of any grazing livestock, I must spend some of my time wandering about with a mower or a brush-cutter trying to do what a cow would do. I'm aiming for a diversity of sward height: really short sward for the Autumn Lady's-tresses and other species that like it, tussocky sward for the voles and Harvest Mice, and everything in between. Hopefully, it also works out for a variety of plants and wild flowers.

I'm grateful to the animals that help make the grassland even more diverse by creating a bit of bare ground. Rabbits with their scraping:

Badgers digging for whatever it is they dig for:

Voles doing their bit by gardening around the entrances to their burrows:

Badgers trampling paths:

Moles pushing up mountains:

 

Humans digging holes. I created a patch of bare ground here three years ago to see what would happen (the answer was not much, though we did have Common Poppy in the garden for one year):

Yellow Meadow Ants Lasius flavus building their anthills:

This is my favourite anthill which is growing sideways. It points directly south-east, and illustrates the true purpose of the anthill which is to act as a solarium, catching the all-important early rays of the rising sun:

This is my favourite photo illustrating the importance of bare ground for invertebrates:

Patch-working pays off

After rock-pooling at Castle Cove with Iain on Friday evening, I was out in the garden all day Saturday to make the most of the fabulous weather and try to finish the winter gardening jobs that have been hard to get done during this most wet and miserable of winters.

Apart from a decent candidate for Siberian Chiffchaff that went (silently) through the garden at c.06:30 (always staying within 2 foot of the ground, interestingly), all the best finds were by Jo. She called me over to see a couple of ground beetles which turned out to be Harpalus dimidiatus!

Harpalus dimidiatus

 This is a species I have only ever seen on the Isle of Wight, first by torching the cliff edge at Culver Cliff where John Walters found it on 30th May 2004 and showed it to me the next night, and secondly in our garden where I've twice found dead ones in cobwebs on the back wall of the house. I'd assumed those ill-fated individuals had flown in from some of the nearby downland habitat, so it was fantastic to discover that they're actually living in our garden and hopefully enjoying all the bare ground and ruderal plants.

There was also a Crimean Keeled Slug under the same log, a second garden record of this species which has become established on the island in the three and a half years since we moved here.

Crimean Keeled Slug Tandonia cristata under the same log.

I went back down to Castle Cove on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Although I'm sure there's still plenty of scope for surprising discoveries at Castle Cove, it delivered nothing out of the ordinary on these two visits, and so I was forced to pay attention to the ordinary.

There is a nemertean worm under the boulders at Castle Cove that is really common, probably under most of the boulders I roll over. Until this weekend, I hadn't tried to identify it.

 They are extraordinarily long, extraordinarily elastic, and extraordinarily difficult to get into a tube without snapping them. Once under the microscope, they turned out to be quite featureless, with no eyes and no structural features other than a simple slit for a mouth.

 I first matched them to a species called Cephalothrix simula, which was discovered new to Britain in 2018 by David Fenwick at Godrevy Point (Cornwall), and has also been recorded by David from Looe and Saltash (Cornwall), Bovisand (Devon) and Poole (Dorset), and with an eDNA record from Southampton (Hampshire).

 Cephalothrix simula is a non-native species which has arrived from the Pacific Ocean, and is more memorably known as the Pacific Death Worm. It contains high levels of the lethal neurotoxin called Tetrodotoxin which is also found in Pufferfish. David tells me that the worms here are not as toxic as in their native Japan, so you'd have to eat 7 worms to receive a lethal dose, whereas eating just one in Japan could kill you. Luckily, I hadn't been tempted to eat any.

Anyway, David's view, and I'm sure he's right, is that the Castle Cove worms are actually a different Cephalothrix species, one that he has collected at Sennen Cove (Cornwall) and which remains un-named. It is certainly a species new to Britain and could very easily be a species new to science. Unfortunately, this is a difficult group to work on, requiring study of living specimens, DNA analysis and histological preparations, which at the moment means there is a growing backlog of un-named/ un-described marine nemerteans from British shores.

It's probably only the Pacific Death Worm that contains Tetrodotoxin, making other species safe to eat, though I'm strangely still not tempted.

I always like seeing White Tortoiseshell Limpets:

 ... and I was impressed with this Montagu's Crab Xantho hydrophilus, sporting a cobalt denticle on the left side of its carapace.

A crab with bluetooth 

This is the list of species I’ve recorded at Castle Cove so far: https://panspecieslisting.com/view-list.html?list_id=57210 
 

 

Back at Castle Cove

Spring tides have come round again, and I've been out rockpooling for the last two evenings in sunny, calm and beautiful conditions down at Castle Cove.

 

The stand out highlight was with Iain Outlaw this evening when we found these two gorgeous nudibranchs.

 

I'm happy that these are Amphorina farrani, which is known to occur in a translucent white form and a purple-black form. A new species for both of us. These two were together under the same rock, and I'll pop them back there on tomorrow's low tide.

 Solar-powered Sea-slug Elysia viridis

 Mystery organism. Suspected egg-sacs.

As well as lots of Grantia compressa and Clathrina cf. lacunosa, I realised there is a third species of tiny basket sponge under the boulders, which I've identified as Clathrina coriacea. Under the compound microscope, the sponge is composed entirely of triradiate spicules.

Garden highlights

Today I put in a shift from 9 to 5 in the garden, with warm sunshine throughout. Gardening is a natural history opportunity and I always have tubes, pooter, camera and notebook handy.

Today's natural history highlight has to be these little sticks of candy floss, growing from the surface of a very old King Alfred's Cake Daldinia concentrica on an old, well-rotten Ash log that was deeply buried under Ivy, until I came along with my secateurs.

I have named them as Arcyria denudata, on the basis that they're a good match to images on the Bucks Fungus Group website and they suggest it is fairly distinctive. I've never seen this before, but I've hardly looked at slime-moulds.

Given that I have only ever seen 3 shelled slugs on the mainland, the fact that I can routinely see them in the garden, and elsewhere around Ventnor, always feels pretty special. Here's two from under a log.

 

Despite the dorsal grooves remaining distinctly separate all the way to the junction of the shell (as shown on a different individual below), I've confirmed that the shelled slugs in our garden and at Ventnor Botanic Gardens are Testacella scutulum, with expert help from Ben Rowson.

 

Today's mystery is actually something I've observed a few times before, but today I have decided to try and work out what it is. Here are a few shots of micro-moth caterpillars curled around the tip of a short blade of grass. Or at least I have assumed them to be micro-moths just because of their small size, but I'm advised that they could be early instar macro-moth caterpillars. There were six of them doing this in a small area and they were quite static. I'd have understood if they were up basking in the sunshine but that patch of the meadow was in shade by this time. Someone will know immediately what they are! If that's you, please let me know.

 

Rockpooling at Castle Cove, Ventnor, Isle of Wight

I have come to realise, over a lifetime dedicated to identifying wildlife, that I love not being able to identify wildlife.

The intertidal zone is an extremely enjoyable place to visit in this regard. I am unable to identify the vast majority of the organisms that live there.

But on each visit, I familiarise myself again with the few that I can recognise, and chip away at identifying some of the rest. Here are some that I am still chipping away at. If you can tell me what they are, I'd be very grateful. Any pointers, suggestions or ideas gratefully received - please leave a comment.

Sand Smelt Atherina presbyter? 
I'm fairly sure of this, and I've been shown them here before by Theo Vickers. This was one of at least six in clear, shallow water over bare chalk in the lagoon. They were slightly attracted to the torchlight and stayed still for the camera.

Confirmed as Sand Smelt by Seth Gibson.

A mussel. 
Invariably, if I bring back a specimen to examine under the microscope, I discover some interesting bycatch in the tube with it. This tiny (3.3 mm) mussel was bycatch with a sprig of red seaweed. I expect at that size it is a long way from being mature and probably also a long way from being identifiable. But it has an attractively banded shell, and a scatter of perpendicular bristles on both valves which might be ID features. It's the first mussel I've seen at Castle Cove. Bean Mussel Modiolula phaseolina perhaps?

Mystery organism.
Whatever these are, they are fairly common, attached to red seaweeds. A globular ball of sand, firmly cemented to the seaweed, and small - this individual was 4.5 mm on its longest axis. It has two orifices (arrowed), which are just very short, simple tubes that protrude slightly when open, and contract inwards when closed. The coating of sand on its body is very firmly cemented in place and very hard to chip off, but the occupant seems to be just a featureless, colourless blob. I'm now thinking it is most likely a sea-squirt, perhaps a sea grape Molgula, a genus which includes some species that encrust themselves in sand, though they seem also to live partially buried in sand.

I would really like to know what these creatures are, and I'm sure I will find out sooner or later, but I'm also enjoying spending time at the frontiers of my own ignorance!

And without being able to identify everything, sometimes I am forced to simply enjoy observing the diversity of life in the rockpools.

Here's a couple more that I identified, for the first time in my life, after Thursday evening's rock-pooling session:

Pelagella castanea (was Goniodoris castanea) found feeding on some Botryllus schlosseri.

Bycatch: the foraminiferan Elphidium aculeatum (on the basis of a decent match at foraminifera.eu).

 

Welcome

Welcome to ‘Mark Telfer’s Blog’. It’s literally going to be a blog by Mark Telfer, and probably won’t have many punning, tabloid-style headlines!

I will blog about the wildlife that I find as a pan-species naturalist. I am based on the wonderful Isle of Wight but I get to travel throughout Britain and Ireland through my work as an entomological consultant, as well as in my own time.