Drag the Waters

Today I decided to embrace the wetness and fortunately the ice near the spillway on the main pond was getting a bit thin after some thawing. I did have to give it a nudge in places and in other places it was still pretty thick. Anyway, it was thin enough for me to go after my target species, which was Asellus aquaticus (Water slater). I also hoped to nab a pond snail, which I have in the past. That was not to be this time. I might not have dug enough into the mud.

Luckily the edge waters managed to produce a good many water bugs though - happy days! Wasn't even a Notonecta, which I'll get in spades in a bottle trap in the spillway later. Wrong time of their lifecycle, maybe, I meant to snap a pic of Tom Huxley's "Water Bugs of Fife & Kinross" for this blog but apparently I didn't. I'll add it later. It's a fantastic book backed by much fieldwork and, I understand, also accompanied by an immaculately curated collection at NMS, which I must see at some point in a future, better, less pox-ridden world. 

Anyway, it was a fun time and the year invertebrate total reached 120. That's way more than I was actually expecting. I must have been predicting on a gloomy day or something.

It seems that everywhere there are new species for the reserve and the first bug I worked on - the only "larger" one - turned out to be the very-common-but-still-unlisted Corixa punctata.. One of the smaller ones was a male Sigara dorsalis, already known from the reserve as well as from my garden moth trap.

Water Hoglouse

C.punctata

On two previous slow years (2017, 2018 - what on earth could I have been doing, I wonder?) year additions were 55 and 63 respectively. That's across all taxa. This year, so far, there have been 39 additions to the list already. It'll take some going to match the best year for additions (2019, 418 spp., 1KS campaign), but another 300 will see the reserve list go to 2500. I'd be well pleased with that.

(stop press: a search through several Sigara reveal some male S.falleni, a common species new to me with their distinctive palae picking them out from the crowd)

pala