Strange

It's not that long ago that, somehow, I'd never seen Fly Agaric. Whilst at Charnwood Lodge I found loads of fruiting bodies underneath the canopy of otherwise exposed trees ....

I also found an earthball in moss at the edge of a wooded area, which from the large diameter (c10mm) must be Scleroderma citrinum [Common Earthball].

I've had another play with some squeezed moss soup. I've managed to get some text and measurements from the camera software to merge onto the image, here's another testate amoeba with a 100micron line for scale.

I can't get the measurement data to transfer to the video clips yet though, so will probably need to dimension snaps to accompany them. Here's a rotifer of some sort (I think!) - look at the extent of the disturbance it's causing whilst 'hoovering' .... this is all happening within a merest veneer of soup under a cover-slip - it's ridiculous really.

Meanwhile, I have absolutely no idea what this weird thing is propelling itself around using cilia of some sort.

Believe it or not though, that's far from the strangest thing I've seen all day ...

I do like Isabella Rossellini, and I'm not at all surprised that sado-maschism excites her. There's a whole load of these on the 'Green Porno' Youtube channel, all equally weird yet informative.

Soup Dragons

Yesterday afternoon when I arrived at Charnwood Lodge, it was looking decidedly dodgy on the weather front. We'd had constant rain on Saturday so it was always going to be wet underfoot, and there was light drizzle when I left home so I expected to get properly wet.

As it happened, I ended up having a nice long walk across the moorland, around the small Colony Reservoir and around the base of Timberland Hill with no rain at all.

Timberland Hill is the area where Leicestershire's one and only Cream Coloured Courser was shot on 15th October 1827 - the fourth British record and well documented at the time, the specimen is still in the local museum. As you can see it is prime CCC habitat, with the moss and heather and bilberry and oak. There was no sign of the second for VC55 whilst I was there ....

As I wondered around these areas I collected leaves, bags of moss and poked my phone camera at a few fungi. I then headed into the wooded area known as Gisborne's Gorse and almost like flicking a switch the sun started to come out.

More leaves bagged, and I stopped around the old house where I found loads of the Rhododendron Leafhoppers featured yesterday.

The stroll back to the car was very pleasant, and I was thankful that I'd left a flask of hot coffee in the car. During the whole time wandering around I saw one person - Margaret McLoughlin as she departed just as I arrived. I also managed to avoid the free-roaming longhorn bovines which is always a bonus.

I've had a brief play with the microscope, squeezing some peaty water out from mosses. I have no idea what I'm looking at - it really is another world. Sadly I've not found anything that looks remotely like a Desmid as yet, but lots of 'testate' amoeba type things and possibly a 'naked' ameoba. Also some nematode type things wiggling about and lots of even smaller round green blobs zipping through the field of view. It is absolutely like looking back to the beginnings of life. It is a start, I've got a lot of practice before anything properly presentable comes out of it but here's a few early snaps and and vid-clip ....

A testate ameoba

A tiny banana

Another testate ameoba

Perhaps a 'naked' ameoba?

Same beast as above, except slightly out of focus ....

Magnificent Magnification

Seth recently posted about some microscopic algae squeezed from sphagnum - namely Desmids. I was vaguely aware of these, and other water-borne micro stuff, but they were way beyond the reach of my old stereo microscope. Seeing these, along with having found a number of micro fungi this year that really need proper scrutiny, I decided it was time to invest in a compound microscope. The entry-level standard seems to be the Apex Practitioner model. As it happens, that was not available on Amazon and in any case I reckoned spending a little more might do me well for a few more years. The Practitioner is monocular, and I at least wanted a binocular model so that I could take snaps without having to fanny about putting an adaptor on/off. A trinocular version with camera mount would be even better.

So, I wanted a binocular/trinocular model with a full mechanical stage to move the subject x/y, course/fine focussing, and a led light source with control. After browsing Amazon and the internet, and mulling it over for a couple of days, I decided to spend some money and placed an order last night. It arrived at just after 11am today ....

I ended up going for a model that should do me well for a few years, and I went for a bundled version that included a microscope camera. This is the Swift SW380T: certainly not the best model available, but certainly more than good enough for what I need and seems to be sturdy and well built enough to feel like value for money. It has 4x, 10x & 40x objectives (and a 100x oil objective that I probably won't use), along with 10x and 25x eyepieces. I reckon the 40x, 100x & 400x I'll get with the 10x eyepiece will more than do, with 250x & 1000x available if I change the eyepiece.

The added bonus that I wasn't expecting is that the camera came with a calibration slide and the software allows for measuring. The camera software also includes some stacking process, whether it works well enough I'll have to see.

Of course today has been the worst day weather-wise for months - continual rain with some very heavy spells, so I'm not going anywhere to collect samples to play with but it came with some typical sample slides that were good enough to get a feel for it. The mechanical movements are smooth and precise, and so far feels like just the job. With a bit more use I need to get the balance right between the light source control and the diaphragm on the condenser. Hopefully the weather tomorrow will be more inviting.

All Mitey Then!

Back on Friday evening I noted some galls on the copious basal leaves of Wood Avens in the garden.

It took very little on-line research to come up with the culprit, the gall-causing mite Cecidophyes nudus. Galls are quite often easy to identify - as a gall - especially as they're usually on a specific host. There is a very useful spreadsheet download here which lists gall-causers by the host plants. But once you delve into the gall itself, being sure that you have actually found an example of the gall-causer is more difficult - and if I'm completely honest it seems wholly unnecessary. The causer is usually some microscopic thing that you will not see without optics and high mag; it's almost superfluous as you inevitably identify the causer from the gall rather than the other way around. Still, I usually give it a go though the results are barely worth taking up blog space. But today I have bugger all else to post so here we go.

Whilst the upperside of the affected leaf shows bumpy raised bulges, a general shot of the underside of one bulges shows a dense matting of hairs. The underside of the unaffected parts of the leaf has similar hairs, sparsely distributed, so I am making a great assumption that the activity of the gall-mite causes the leaf to grow more hairs??

When I first looked at this, at relatively low x20 mag, there were a number of obvious pale green mites dashing around on the surface of the hairs ....

It would be easy to shout 'bingo' and leave it at that, but I was sure these mites were incidental (well, at least in so far as I didn't think they were the gall-causer). I searched a bit more using x200 mag on the USB crapstick, and found something else - perhaps a small dipteran larva?

As you can see, it wasn't doing much but at least it was within the hairs rather than scampering around on top of them. Doesn't look very mite-like though does it. I then searched a bit deeper and found what I was looking for. A much smaller and more elongated mite actively milling about on the leaf surface. Which was almost impossible to track of and keep in focus.

I feel sure that this is indeed the gall-causing mite Cecidophyes nudus. It does not feature very highly on my list of things what I have seen that I would really like to see again. And quite frankly, there is nothing mighty about this mite.

Hand Job

I'll get to the catchy blog title later ....

First up, and despite the very heavy shower the moth traps produced. Or at least I had the best total catch so far this year with 46 of 17sp. Best moth of the catch was this one ...

Pale Pinion

This is the ninth record for the garden, but the first since 2014 so good to see. Also NFY was this ..

Chinese Character

Late morning saw a bit of a glut of large raptors over the house, with at one point four Buzzards soaring together and then a little while later two Red Kites along with another Buzzard. I had faint hopes of something new, like Osprey or Marsh Harrier, but of course not. I managed to point the camera up at one of the Kites and got more terrible photos.

Now for the hand job. Later in the afternoon, whilst sitting out with a beer and a roast in the oven, I noticed a speck flying around near my face and managed to grab it. Bugger me it was a tiny beetle. I managed to secure it in a pot and spent the next 10 mins intently looking around the garden and managed the feat again with another small beetle. I managed to get passable shots of both through the microscope, and think I've got somewhere near an ID but could be miles out - these are best estimates, both within the Scolytinae:

Perhaps a Xyleborinus sp. Barely 2.5mm long
Post-script - Xyleborinus saxesenii per Max Barclay

Perhaps a Hylastes sp. - just under 3mm long

Meanwhile I've made a sort of trap in the garden, using a medium sized plant pot. I've filled it with grass cuttings, a bit of ripe banana, a bit of cat food and a dead shrew. The top is loosely covered over with terracotta pot pieces. I'll leave it for a couple of weeks and then give it a good sieve. in the meantime I'll probably make up another similar trap just in case it works (you never know).

Scope for Improvement

I decided to go ahead and get a useful bit of plastic that would hold my phone against optics, using either the microscope or telescope. I decided to spend a few extra quid and get this model which had an adjustable ring to ensure a concentric fit to the eyepiece (though the camera positioning to the 'aperture' is still a manual by-eye affair):

I was keen to give it a quick test today on both fronts. First-up I tried it on the telescope in possibly the worst test conditions - blustery, dull and light showers. Nothing much on the res but some distant Black-headed Gulls were suitable to try it out. These really were quite far off, but zooming the phone camera through the vignette and grabbing a bit of vid shows the potential for nice still brighter days. I would never get close enough to anything this distant with my camera, and whilst the image quality is not exactly stunning it's good enough.

The advantage of gabbing a bit of vid is that I can easily grab a still shot on the phone afterwards ...

Award-winning, no. Serviceable record shot, absolutely.

I might even be inclined to go birding occasionally.

This evening I had a quick go with it on my microscope. More practice needed, and probably more lighting, but you get the gist.

I wanted to see if cropping an original x1 image was better than zooming through the vignette (camera was set to 1:1 aspect):

x1 image, no cropping

 

x1 image, cropped

 x2 image, cropped

Focussing is a bit hit and miss, as using the microscope will always be a very narrow field, though should be fine when trying to capture a particular feature rather than the whole animal. The phone camera has pretty much cleared the vignette at x2 anyway, so I'll work on using that for now.

Anyway enough of that nonsense. After the success with my indoor spider, and had another look at one that I'd collected from sieving at Huncote Embankment last week. I eventually worked out that it appeared to be Neriene clathrata.

Note the now-obligatory spider-wrangling spoon.

Another epigyne checked (but before the new phone adaptor), another record submitted and accepted, another spidery first for me.

Microscopic Topic

Up until now I've got by with a binocular microscope. I've had it for a long while now, and it has no external branding - in fact it looks identical to this generic model that you can get for c£150ish.

I use it with 10x and 15x eyepieces, and the scope has an additional 2x / 4x on the objective lens. It has both incident and transmitted light sources. It is basic, but fine for me as up to now I've not got into dissecting anything that it already tiny. The only problem is not being able to get a photo using it.

To get over that I aquired a USB microscope to grab the odd image. Again it is basic, and has a low resolution image. It is a Veho VMS-001. The casing is some sort of weird 'soft-touch' plastic that over time has gone sticky and vulcanised. I've had to shroud it in cellotape. The collar for the stand also broke, so I have been using it handheld. It currently looks like this ....

So I wanted to get something new. Ideally I wanted something that I could get a photo through my binocular microscope. Whilst browsing Amazon (yes I know, the epitome of mass consumerism and capitalism) I found that there are now a range of USB cameras specifically intended to poke down the end of a microscope. Sounded ideal, and at £49.99 it seemed reasonable so I bought one. I got this one by Bresser.

It arrived next day, and with a few specimens still loitering from Thursday I had a chance to try it. Absolute wank. Couldn't get anything in focus, field of view (ironically) microscopic, unuseable. Back in box and returned to Amazon for full refund with no fuss.

I've then gone and bought this for £15 ....

I thought it would be just a newer version of what I had, just with higher mag and a higher resolution image. Well you get what you pay for, and this is also absolute shite.

So I'm back to square one. I think I'll just get one of these and try using my phone!

Ultimately I know I need to spend a fair whack on a more professional compound microscope with a proper photographic attachment, but whilst I'm working and juggling priorities it's just not worth the outlay for now.

In the meantime, using my cellotaped up crapstick, I got these images ...

This was tapped from gorse at Huncote Embankment on 13/02/2020. Using the Barkfly Recording Scheme key, it comes out as Trichopsocus brincki - which is apparently scarce, can found all year round 'in the south' and likely to be beaten from evergreens, like gorse. Sweet.