Walking in a winter wonderland

I'm back up in the Cairngorms this week, working from the RSPB's Abernethy reserve. The scenery is stunning and the weather has been bracing.

Loch Garten was looking spectacular on arrival and we were met with snow showers and freezing temperatures. The weather meant the forest was looking postcard-ish and picturesque.

Time and the weather have meant almost no time for invert searching but a quick grub around some rotting pine branches revealed the weevil Rhyncolus ater and the spider Segestria senoculata.

Apart from that there have been a few Red squirrels, more Coal Tits than you can shake a stick at and a near miss with a capercaillie. Near miss, in that I nearly saw one. Nearly....

The man who loved tractors

Last weekend, the sun was shining and I had a yearning to be outside. My oldest son and I decided to go and have a looked at the water levels along the Ouse Washes and to take a walk along on the foot paths that follows this large fen drainage channel.

The water was high. According to one local we bumped into it was the highest it had been for over a decade.

There was plenty of flood debris at the edges but in all honesty it looked devoid of life having been there since before Christmas. I stuck a few hand fulls in a plastic bag and then carried on on the walk, enjoying the crisp air and sun on my face.

    

When I got home a poked around in the debris for 20 minutes only to find a single Helophorus species.  With no sign of anything else in there I decided to stick the stuff in my homemade extractor on the off chance that I'd missed a beetle.

This set up was recommended on the Beetles of Britain and Ireland Facebook page. It's basically a sieve on a bucket which I the cover with a piece of perspex. I left the whole thing outside and promptly forgot about it for 48 hours. 

When I remembered to check on the contents I found to my amazement 20-30 Helophorus beetles crawling around plus this amazing looking 3.5mm staph.

I knew it was an Oxytelinid and had assumed it was a Carpelimus. But the single long furrow in the middle of the pronotum IDs it as a Platystethus species.

A quick keying out swiftly took me to Platystethus nodifrons. The shape of the scutellum with the depressed sides clinching the final couplet. I think it's my new favourite staph. It looks like an armored monster. 

I couldn't quite believe all those beetles were still in the debris sample. Must try and use the extraction method more often. 

All this talk of extractors got me thinking about one of my favourite jokes during my 20s. See here for this pinnacle of human comedy.

Enjoy!

No flies on me

Like a few other people, I thoroughly enjoyed following this blog last year about one man's quest to see as many families of fly as possible. I found it a joy to read and much of the musings hit a chord.

So much so that I ended up joining the Dipterist's Forum to find out more about this ubiquitous group of insects. It seems like others have been similarly gripped resulting in a friendly bit of rivalry between 3 amazing naturalists.

Anyway, I joined for the amazing price of £8 and duly received my first copy of the Bulletin of the Dipterists Forum. I've only got round to perusing it today but it's a brilliant, glossy A4 publication absolutely choc-full of stuff.

If I'm honest with myself, I'm not sure I have enough time in my life currently for flies as well as beetles, but I may explore hoverflies a bit more and I may take a squizz at a few other things I see. But I can't see myself getting into diptera in a big way.

But it did get me thinking, there seems to be so much going on in the world of dipterists, why isn't the UK beetle fraternity as energised? Yes, there's the Coleopterist Journal and a relative quiet Yahoo group. The Facebook page is quite busy but there's so much more that could be done for beetle recording. More local groups. More field meetings. More fun!

Or maybe beetles just attract a different kind of naturalist?

A couple of easy aleochs

Easy and aleochs are not two words that often go together.

They are probably the most difficult beetle group to get to grips with. There are a lot of them and many of them looking infuriatingly similar, with only subtle physical differences. Either in the shape of the aedaegus or the way the hairs lie on the pronotum. Many species are rather small and so to see the finer details of palps or ligula (google it!) takes a better microscope than mine.

I've more often than not found myself swearing at a tiny beetle as I fail to even get the thing to genus. I'm starting to card and dissect males for later identification having first counted the number of tarsal segments on each limb (an important step in figuring them out).

So it was good to find and identify two new species with relative easy.

The first I found last week in a wood chip pile at the RSPB's Headquarters. It's a crazy looking thing that I initially thought was in the genus Falagria. Whilst I struggled to get any further someone kindly pointed out that it was in fact Myrmecocephalus concinnus. The little pointy bits at the base of the pronotum are the giveaway.

There isn't much info on t'internet about this species but it appears to have been introduced to the UK at some point in the early to mid-20th century. There aren't many records on NBN but I suspect that is more likely down to NBN not being up-to-date. However, and more interesting is that this is the first record from any RSPB reserve. But that's probably because most staff have better things to do than root around in piles of decaying plant material looking for beetles.

The second easy-ish aleoch was found last summer whilst out moth trapping at a Local Nature Reserve in the Cambridgeshire Fens. I say Nature reserve but it was more of a glorified dog toilet with very little nature-value. However, there was a small reed bed and a couple of ponds and the surrounding area is all intensive farmland, so always worth a look to see what's hanging on. This particular beetle was attracted to the light traps we were running.

It keyed relatively simply to the genus Chilopora but when I went to check my UK checklist I found that it had now been assigned to the genus Tetralaucopora. But which species? The key I used was for Swedish species and only one of the UK species was mentioned. So I did what I normally do and stuck it on the Beetles Facebook group and asked if anyone recognised it. I got an almost immediate response that it looked like the commoner species, longitarsus (there are only 2 species in the UK).

However as I had a male, I thought it worth checking to be doubly sure. This what I found.

Try as I might, I couldn't track down an image of the aedaegus of longitarsus to compare it to. That was until someone pointed me to this. Turns out that this species is also known as Parocyusa longitarsis! As if beetling wasn't complicated enough...

The good news is that my dissected beetle is a perfect match to the photo of a known specimen. So that's another aleoch notch on the metaphorical bed post.

Patience you must have...

...my young padowan.

So said Yoda, and in that one sentence he pretty much nailed the whole journey of looking at beetles.

The thing that I've been trying to get better at and have been spending a fair bit of time doing is dissecting small beetles. Beetles in the 1-3mm range. Small beetles. Tiny beetles.

And last night something almost magical happened. The Sericoderus that I found last week has been waiting for me to pluck up the courage to tackle it. So I did.

A 1.2mm Sericoderus

Holding it down gently, I used the binocular microscope and a couple of micropins to open the abdomen and fish out what at 20x looked like the bit i wanted. I then transferred it to a drop of water on a glass slide and took it to the compound microscope. I looked down, twiddled a few knobs and saw this...

A thing of beauty. A spermatheca, or in common parlance, ladybits. Matching it to the pics in the key I'm fairly certain that it's S. brevicornis due to the shape and length of the gland duct lobe. The diameter at it's widest point must only be about 0.2mm at most. The whole beetle was only 1.2mm!!

I feel my beetling skills may have just moved up a notch...

Dead Cat(ops) among the pigeons

Almost a year after everyone else, I finally got round to watching the much talked about Bros reunion documentary. It's well worth 87 minutes of your life if you haven't seen it yet and contains some absolutely stone-cold classic spinal tap-esque quotes. Anyway, the title of this post was inspired by the band and a particular beetle genus that I occasional encounter and frequently scratch my head at.

The genus Catops. 

These are small beetles in the family Leiodidae. They are associated with death and decay and can be found on carrion, rotting fungi and in mammal nests. One particular species is especially associated with mole nests. 

They're not (in my experience) an easy group to get to species. And nigh on impossible if it's a female. A dissected male you gives you a much better chance for a specific record. But even then things can be tricky.

This male flew into the window at work whilst I was on the phone. An impressive bit of one handed potting ensued to secure the beetle. Luckily it was a male and so I thought an ID was imminent but it's not quite that simple. Many of the aedeagi look terrifyingly similar

The appropriate page from Duff vol 1.

It 's all in the subtle shaping So faced with the following it becomes a bit tricky to take further.

 

I think it is Catops tristis but I really need to line it up against some known specimens to be sure. 

So it was with much moaning and gnashing of teeth that I potted a Catops on a recent tussocking outing. Once under the microscope a quick look at the aedaegus was all that was needed to realise I had something new for me. The parameres (bits at side) were quite robust and had little hooks on the end (ouch!). 

This time a quick look at the book was all that was needed to get this one to species. Catops morio.

The aedaegus is really distinctive for a Catops. Not something I thought I'd say...
A new beetle for me and another record to submit.

It's all a pile of....

... compost. Well in this case a mix of wood chip and leaf litter.

I spent 15 minutes at lunchtime at work today having a quick rummage in one of the decaying heaps of vegetation in the Lodge gardens. I got a few odd looks from folk as I squatted over a steaming mass of rot and casually sieved the larger bits out to reveal the beetle treasure beneath. It's amazing what you can find on a winter's day in a short time.

Best of the bunch was this Tachinus subterraneus. A lovely looking and distinctive staph,

This Rugilus erichsonii was the only one of it's kind I found. This species has an incredibly wide head (compared to the rest of it) plus a teeny-tiny neck that looks like it can't possibly support the head.

A single carabid found was this Syntomus foveatus. Not found one in winter before. I tend to pick these up in the spring on the sand paths of the heath at the Lodge.

The most numerous beetle was this Omalium species. I struggle with these and I'm still trying to get it down to a species.

There was also this Anthobium unicolor and 2 species of aleochs but they'll have to wait for a rainier day. Not bad for 15 minutes.

Two new beetle families

Not sure when this last happened, maybe not ever, but today I found beetles from two families that I haven't seen before .

I was doing a spot of gardening and after a couple of hours I got distracted by the compost heap and so went and got my sieves and tray and started going through the various patches of vegetation in varying states of decay.

There were quite a few beetles in there including 3 species of aleoch and at least 2 species of ptilid. I'll leave those for another day!

The first one to catch my eye was this 1.2mm tiny thing. It looks a bit like a cross between a ladybird and a miniature tortoise beetle. It is in fact one of the Corylophidae.

I couldn't initially find a key and so I went and got some help from the UK Beetles Facebook page. Turns out this is a species of Sericoderus. There are are only 2 possible UK species: S. lateralis and S. brevicornis. There is a key available on Mark Telfer's website to this pair. However, unless you have a male brevicornis then things become trickier. This turned out to be a female so it could be either and I'll need to dissect out the spermatheca but I'm predicting that I'll be left none the wiser after doing so as the differences are slight.

The second new beetle family was the Endomychidae. This rather hairy 1.6mm beetle is Mycetaea subterranea, aka the Hairy Cellar beetle. The pubescence and the pronotal margins make it a doddle to identify unlike the previous beetle.

I also had another new species of rove beetle. Despite getting the right group I struggled to key this one out. It turns out that it's Tachyporus nitidulus, and has distinctive maxillary palps where the last segments are tiny and cone-shaped. This was also a tiny beetle but bigger than the other two at 2.4mm.

Not bad for 30 minutes of sieving. If I can ID the ptilds and aleochs there will be some more new species too.

Can't stop listening to this song at the moment. Have had it on repeat in the car on the daily work drive recently. The stand out song on the latest Nick Cave and Bad Seeds album. I'm of to see them again in May and can't bloody well wait to hear this live. Powerful stuff.

First new beetles of the decade

I read several other people's natural history blogs as and when they post. Unfortunately it does seem to be a bit of a dying art with many folk's effort fading quickly after an initial burst of enthusiasm. However, there are 3 or 4 favourites that either amaze me by their astounding natural history knowledge or their ability to craft a thoughtful musing in lovely prose. Many manage to combine both.

Whilst reading Seth Gibson's latest shenanigans from the Isle of Skye I was reminded of the fact that I have some glaring gaps in my beetle list. Seth found his first beetle of the year in the form of Euophryum confine, an introduced New Zealand weevil that is pretty much ubiquitous down south in well rotted wood. His was new for the Hebrides. So a good record.

Funny thing was I hadn't seen one. Having started my beetle odyssey with carabids, the other families came thick and fast shortly after as I was turning up lots of things I wanted to identify. This means that despite having seen and identified fast approaching 500 species of beetle the list contains some gaps of species that are really common and most importantly really easy to identify, my list having been amassed with whatever crossed my path through my newbie beetling techniques.

Euophryum confine being a case in point. So there was only one thing for it...

Lunchtime at work on Friday I had one goal. It took me until my second log to turn up what looked like black grains of rice...

Euophryum confine confirmed. An easy start to 2020 beetling.

Whilst prodding about in dead wood a small staph darted for cover. I potted it and on examination it turned out to be Sepedophilus littoreus. A second new beetle for the year!

A horned globu-lifer!

Whilst out tussocking just before Christmas, a few of the beetles that I found were new ones for me.

One of the larger ones was this whopper of a staph. Just eyeballing it I was fairly confident that it was either an Ocypus or Tasgius and my money was on the latter, but a bit of keying was needed to get me to species level.

The Key by Derek Lott, lumps these two genera so the first thing given its coloring is to look at the pronotal punctures to see if there are two different sizes or whether they are all roughly the same.

There are all the same. Check.

Then I need to check the legs. Red or black? Black.

Next up is the ratio of the temples (bit behind the eyes) to eyes + whether the mandibles have an inner tooth . So the temples are about the same as the diameter of the eye and the mandibles don't have a central tooth on the inner margin.

A close up of the head and mandibles gives the impression, to my warped mind at least, of a horned devil.

Next, the specimen has a parallel sided pronotum, not a tapered one and the inner margins of the mandibles are sinuate (curvy) on the central bit.

This gets me to either Tasgius globulifer or T. winkleri. I was hoping for a male so I could dissect out the aedaegus for an easy ID but no such luck. However, in the species pair the shape of the female's last abdominal tergite (last upper section of the abdomen) is diagnostic. 

Mine ended in a sharp point meaning that this is a female T. globulifer and a new beetle for me!