Spring - the nice and the nasty

 Spring has definitely arrived, with blossom and  leaves on the trees and spring bulbs and dandelions flowering.  The catkins opened up to shed their pollen:

The fritillaries in my garden are just finishing:

Their name of Snake's Head lily could be a reference to the chequered pattern, or maybe the shape of the seed head:

So that is some of the "nice" - so what  about the "nasty"? 

Let me tell you about New Zealand flatworms.... I have a thriving population in my garden, which I think arrived with some horse manure a couple of years ago.  I have been fighting a war of attrition against them, going out each day and collecting them from under stones, wood or compost bags left on the ground to attract them. They are nocturnal and rest up during the day in dark wet places. Last year I kept a tally of how many I removed and it was in the hundreds.  And those are just the ones I found! It sounds a lot - it is a lot- but imagine if you were collecting slugs, you would not be surprised at those numbers. I don't think I will ever eradicate them from the garden but at least I am limiting the damage they do.  They eat earthworms. And I want to keep my earthworms and the job they do to keep the soil healthy. Darwin found them worthy of study. You can download his work here

Flatworms are not the most attractive of creatures, being slimy and reminiscent of leeches in the way they move. They are remarkably resilient being able to survive for a year without food.  They mate and produce eggs with multiple little worms inside.  Being unattractive undoubtedly influences my reaction as I am quite happy to see a blackbird or robin eat my worms. However, if the flatworms continue to multiply unchecked, they would eradicate the earthworms from my garden. So I am on the hunt!

Flatworm at rest during the day (with a cutlery fork)

Armed with an old yogurt bucket and cutlery fork, I lift up stones, wood and plastic and collect the flatworms which are underneath. They like the dark and wet and leave a sticky mucus on the ground which helps to spot them. When I have collected a batch, I kill them quickly with boiling water. They die at temperatures above 30C, which is one way to sanitise any plants in pots that you bring into the garden.

A batch of flatworms awaiting dispatch.

I recently bought a UV torch as some lichens fluoresce at a wavelength of 365nm.  It was rather a surprise to see the reaction with a flatworm which glowed turquoise:

Flatworms under UV light

And finally, if you are not too squeamish, here is a video:

Something interesting in the woodpile!

 We had a delivery of a pile of miscellaneous sections of tree trunks for chopping up for the fire, some of which must have been sitting around for a while. On one pine section, a small round growth  about 1cm in diameter appeared with a white border and a beautiful maze like pattern in the centre.

More patches appeared. Our best guess was that this was a fungus with a sterile white border and a spore producing section in the middle.

The photos were taken with a mobile phone and the white circle around the photos is a cut down plastic cup which works really well to keep your phone steady at at a fixed distance while you focus. Not knowing much about fungi, a search on the internet suggested it might be Antrodia ramentacea Honeycomb Crust which seems to be quite uncommon with just 11 records in Scotland, so it would be good to get an ID. In fact, advice from the Facebook page of the British Mycological Society put us right - it was not  Honeycomb Crust but the more common Conifer Mazegill (Gloeophyllum sepiarum).  This is fairly typical of an inexperienced beginner jumping to the wrong (more rare option)!  Conifer Mazegill is a bracket fungus so seeing it in this form was a bit confusing. However, later small brown brackets did appear on the side of the log.

Top surface of bracket

Underside of bracket showing the gills

Conifer Mazegill is much more common, and there are 239 records in Scotland - though none for Newtonmore so maybe worth recording after all.  The information on what is recorded is freely available on the NBN Atlas, for all sorts of animals and plants, not just fungi.  This fungus produces brown rot in wood. However, it has also been investigated for inhibiting tumour growth in some forms of cancer.

Update: After an expert checked the photo, this is probably Lintneria trachyspora

The frog spawn arrives - and an interesting twig

Frog spawn has appeared today in my pond – quite hard to see in the photo because of the reflections of trees and sky, but  you can make out the tops of two clumps with plenty more under the surface.

Frog spawn in my pond

I walked round Loch Imrich today as well, and a small amount has appeared there too.

Frog spawn in Loch Imrich

While walking round the loch I picked up one of the many fallen twigs on the ground as it looked to have a good selection of lichens on it.  It was a section of a larch branch  about 25cm (10 inches) long and 15mm (1/2 inch) diameter and I counted 8 different lichens on it, all of which are fairly common locally. There was one species it did not have so I picked up the much thinner twig, at the top of the photo which has an example of it.

How do we know it is a larch twig? Well, apart from the fact that it was underneath some of the larch trees that surround the loch, it has the characteristic nobbles along it.  The roughness of the larch twigs encourages a good growth of lichens, presumably because the spores or fragments of lichen are easily caught and trapped in the bark.  Larch has an acid bark (like pines and birches) and lichens can be quite fussy about where they grow – some prefer acid bark and some prefer less acid bark like that on oaks and hawthorn. I have put some numbers on the photo and I’ll give a list of the different names of the lichens.

1.   1 An Usnea (Beard lichen) probably Usnea subfloridana which is the most common locally.

2.    2   Hypogymnia physodes which has inflated lobe tips so it feels quite bouncy when you press it.

3.    3 Platismatia glauca – quite big grey-blue “leaves” which stick up and are brown underneath.

4.     4 A bit more of 1 (Usnea) and 2(H.physodes)

5.     5 Tuckermanopsis chlorophylla – again more leaflike but smaller than 3 and a browny green colour.

6.      6 A Parmelia  - probably P. sulcata but a bit too young to be sure.

7.      7 Bryoria fuscescens – a horsehair lichen

8.       8Evernia prunastri – this one has been used for a perfume fixative.

9.      9 On the thin twig is a look alike for Evernia prunastri but is a darker colour and covered in tiny fingerlike projections(isidia) and is Pseudevernia furfuracea.

Yet more catkins - but where is the frog spawn?

 There is still no frog spawn in my pond, though there was at this time in previous years, so I thought I would check out Loch Imrich and the marshy spot up Glen Banchor where there is usually lots of spawn.  None seen at all...

Going through the car park opposite the Balavil Hotel, I spotted some red catkins on the ground. They were rather like floppy caterpillars, and had some very sticky leaf buds at the end which had a strong smell. They smelled slightly sweet yet also a bit unpleasant.

Catkins and sticky leaves

The tree they fell from is a Western Balsam Poplar (Populus trichocarpa) which is native to Western North America but has been planted at the corner of the Balavil car park. If you walk past it later in the spring when the leaves are out, you you will notice the sweetish smell.

Western Balsam Poplar

This variety of tree is "dioecious" which means that the trees are either male or female and produce either catkins (if male) or flowers (if female). This tree must be male as it produces catkins, so sadly there will be no seeds. The catkins are rather beautiful in close up, being made up of lots of separate packets of pollen. UPDATE- see end of post to see what happened the next day!

 The Larch also produces red growths, but this time it is the female flowers that have the flashy ruby colour, and when pollinated will produce the cones.

Female Larch flower

The red colour does not last, but is easy to spot before the leaves come out. The Larch is one of the few cone bearing trees that lose their leaves in the winter. The leaf buds in the spring look like little green shaving brushes.

The photo above shows the female flowers having lost their red colour and starting to resemble the cones they will become. The male flowers are underneath.

This twig has last year's cones at the top

Most of the tall trees around Loch Imrich are larches so now is a good time to take a walk around and see if you can find the red flowers before they lose their colour.

UPDATE. I did this post on Saturday evening and when I came down on Sunday morning, the poplar catkin was surrounded by a pile of powdery pollen! So back to the microscope to see what was happening... (though this is actually easier with a x10 hand lens as you get a better 3D view)

The centre of the catkin goes down the middle of the photo and sticking out at right angles on each side  is a green-yellow plate or platform. The red bundles are supsended below the platform on tiny white stalks.

Each of the red bundles (probably the correct term is anthers) then splits and releases its pollen, seen as yellow grains.  There is a lot of it, as even from my sample there was a little heap of yellow powder around the catkin. Why so much? Well, this tree relies on the wind, rather than insects, to carry the pollen grains far and wide in the hope of landing upon a female flower of the same species. Unfortunately, this pollen may be doomed as there are no female Western Balsam Poplar trees anywhere in Newtonmore. Indeed, the nearest trees are recorded in Kincraig and I don't know whether they are male or female. I did go and have a look but they are still bare.

The map is from the BSBI database and each red square shows where a Western Balsam Poplar has been recorded.

Recorded distribution of Western Balsam Poplar 

Signs of Spring

 We have been having some beautiful clear cold days recently and I went for a walk around Strone, which is a ridge above Newtonmore, with some great views.

Although there is not much in flower yet, the trees are showing signs of life with catkins. These are the male pollen producing flowers, and their pollen gets blown about by the wind to (hopefully) land on a female flower and fertilise it so the tree can produce seed.  There were plenty of Alders growing in the ditches, and they had catkins next to the old cones that produce the seeds. 

Alder catkins and last year's cones

 I realised that I had not really taken much notice of catkins before and although the Alder was easy to identify because of the cones, I did not know what this tree was at first, though it definitely had the brightest yellow catkins.

Thinking about it, I could rule out a few trees - not birch, as although it has catkins, they are not out yet and the bark and maroon new twigs are easy to recognise.  Not Rowan as that has flowers that are insect pollinated so it does not have catkins... In fact , it was Hazel - not a tree I see much of round here and this was in a small plantation. The female flowers are tiny with red stigmas sticking out so I will have to look more closely next time and get a photo.

There was also a willow which was badly damaged in the recent storms.

This had the grey furry pussy willow catkins but too high up to get a good photo, so I decided to try alongside Loch Imrich as there are several willows that grow on the banks. Willows are another group of trees that like water. I found no catkins but several large larches had blown over or snapped.

The blown over root plate of a larch, with my walking poles for scale.

Still in search of pussy willow, I went to The Gravels, some scrub land between two housing areas, as I knew there was a big willow there. Success!

The catkins start off with a lovely grey furry coat, hence pussy willow, but later they will turn yellow when the pollen bearing stamens burst out. Pussy willow is also known as Goat Willow or Salix caprea.

As an added bonus, I also found some Leucojum or Snowflakes which are a little like Snowdrops at first glance. They probably grew from someone dumping garden waste.

On a sadder note, there was another sign of Spring - two squashed frogs on their way to the Loch drawn by the urge to spawn...

I have not seen any frogspawn yet, but it can't be long before it appears.

Lichens x art

 Apart from my interest in lichens and botany, I am also a keen crafter, using textiles. While I have been "confined to barracks" because of my ankle injury, I have been occupying  myself with craft projects and sorting out my lichen collection - both photographs and samples (which are now all neatly stored in a shoebox in folded paper packets).

  I have been having fun with an internet site called Deepdreamgenerator  which  transforms your photographs by crossing them with the style of another picture.

Caloplaca ferruginea

I took one of my lichen pictures and used the styles they have online and generated these results:

I really liked the transformations and I think they could be inspirational when wanting to make art from lichens. I also tried using one of my own craft works as the "style". This is a rug I made for my grandson (using a technique called rug hooking).

.

This produced an interesting texture, a sort of rug hooked lichen: 

Here is one using a different lichen: 

a Parmelia 

I can feel some inspiration coming on for my next rug....

Dandelions and Apomixis – or no need for sex!

 

Apo –what? Read on and you will have a new word to add your vocabulary.  In a previous post I wrote a little about dandelions. It is fairly easy to name a plant as a dandelion but it is very tricky to identify the particular kind of dandelion or micro species. There are very few experts who can confirm an identification and act as referees. The main referee is the man called John Richards who wrote the definitive book on identifying UK dandelions.

One of my Christmas presents was a new book by John which is full of colour photographs should hopefully make it easier for us learners. 

The reason that dandelions are so hard to pin down is that there are hundreds of micro species with slightly different characteristics. These characteristics persist from generation to generation because dandelions can produce seed without being pollinated. This means that every seedling is a clone or identical genetic copy of its parent. The scientific name for being able to produce viable seed without pollination from another plant is called ..... apomixis.

Recent research using dandelions has discovered the gene that allows apomixis. They have called it PAR which is short for parthenogenesis which means virgin birth. Here is a quote explaining how it works:

Egg cell fooled
A group from Wageningen University & Research was also involved in the study and showed that the PAR gene is normally inactive in egg cells. The PAR gene normally only becomes active in the egg cell after fertilization, it then divides to create a plant embryo. In the egg cells of dandelion plants that form seeds via apomixis, the PAR gene proved to be switched ‘on’ prior to fertilization. In other words, these egg cells ‘think’ they are fertilized and start dividing without fertilization has taken place.

There is also a video here.

This bit of research might seem to have no practical application but in fact the ability to produce identical plants from seeds would be an agricultural goldmine. Gardeners among you know that buying F1 seed is expensive because each generation has to be produced by cross fertilising two different plants to produce the hybrid. If the hybrid plant was modified to contain the PAR gene then it could produce seeds that were identical to be original plant. Researchers have already managed it with sunflowers and lettuce However there are also drawbacks to having every plant identical as any diseases will attack all of them. All the bananas that we buy are actually the same genetically and there is a real risk of the worldwide population of the Cavendish banana being wiped out if a new disease takes hold.