Our new website and blog

After several months of planning and development, we were pleased to unveil the new-look Centre for Ecology & Hydrology website earlier this month (July 2015). The new site provides easy access to information about our scientific projects, data, citizen science activities and news.

The new website also incorporates the CEH blog, so for future posts you will need to visit http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/blogs

Paulette Burns, Media Coordinator

Ladybirds spotted on Springwatch Unsprung

Two of our CEH colleagues were live on the Red Button and web this week, appearing with Nick Baker on the Unsprung element of the popular BBC Springwatch series. On Wednesday, Dr Steve Thackeray spoke about nature's calendar and climate change, which he investigates as part of the shifting seasons phenology project he leads. Earlier in the week, Dr Helen Roy chatted about biological recording, citizen science and, of course, ladybirds! Read more about Helen's day on the Springwatch set in her blog post below.

BBC Springwatch provided an exquisite insight into the life history of the 2-spot ladybird, Adalia bipunctata, on Monday night (25 May). The short film was inspiringly beautiful. The detailed perspectives on the secret lives of these familiar beetles were accurately and quite brilliantly portrayed.

The life history of the 2-spot ladybird featured on Springwatch 2014.
Photo: Richard Comont

I had the privilege of providing some information on the ecology of ladybirds to the BBC Springwatch production team during the making of this film. The excitement and enthusiasm expressed by Vicky Webb (Producer) and Rob Morgan (Researcher) throughout the filming was fantastic. I remember Vicky calling after the hatching eggs had been filmed. She conveyed such delight at what is undoubtedly one of the (many) most aesthetic moments of the ladybird life cycle. Rob had spotted some exciting signs of parasitism and we enjoyed discussing the likely parasitic suspects. I was extremely excited just anticipating the broadcast of this film, which I knew would be in the first episode of Springwatch 2014. So imagine my excitement when I was invited to contribute to Springwatch Unsprung - and it was an amazing experience!

The buzz about the Springwatch Production “Village” of portacabins, trucks and marquees is incredible. The passion for natural history and science communication is so apparent. All day people are running around with cameras and sound equipment to convey the brilliance and diversity of all aspects of wildlife from the RSPB Minsmere Reserve. Conversations on booming bitterns, the delightful miniature suffocated clover, stalking stoats, glimpses of hawkmoths and, of course, the magical ladybirds provide an inspiring atmosphere.

The bittern hide - looking for some of the stars of Springwatch 2014 at RSPB Minsmere

During the day I was invited to contribute to Springwatch Extra with Euan McIlwraith and we enjoyed a magical afternoon talking about ladybirds, their predators and the ways in which ladybirds interact with many other species. The Minsmere woodland provided the perfect stage. I joined Brett Westwood for a short walk in which he revealed the delights of some tiny and obscure (and, in some cases, rare) plants exploiting the sandy soils on the reserve. It was great to find an 11-spot ladybird, Coccinella undecimpunctata, in amongst these hidden treasures (I have to confess it was Marcus Brent-Smith of webcam fame who actually, and quite literally, unearthed the ladybird).

In the evening I joined the Springwatch Unsprung team. Springwatch Unsprung gives the BBC audience an opportunity to contribute questions and comments on wildlife. It is broadcast immediately after Springwatch and is a fantastically lively show. For me Springwatch Unsprung provided the perfect opportunity to celebrate the legacy of ladybird recording in Britain in conversation with Nick Baker. The quiz, a regular feature on Springwatch Unsprung, was on ladybirds for the night and enabled some hints on identification to be conveyed. It was fantastic to be a small part of Springwatch and I am looking forward to another contribution from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology when Stephen Thackeray is released on Unsprung on Wednesday night.

I would like to thank Sheryl Bawden, Vicky Webb, Rob Morgan, Brett Westwood, Euan McIlwraith, Marcus Brent-Smith, Anna Place, Nick Baker, Anne Gallagher and many others (catering, security, make-up, film crew...) for such a fantastic opportunity and for ensuring I was so welcome.

Helen Roy

The Springwatch Unsprung episodes are available to view on iPlayer for 3 weeks:

Ladybirds (episode 1)

Phenology (episode 3)

Related links

Details of how to download the iRecord Ladybirds app for Android and iOS

UK Ladybird Survey

iRecord

When and how to use citizen science for environmental projects

Helen's staff page at CEH

Steve Thackeray's staff page at CEH

Shifting seasons and ecosystem consequences project

BBC Springwatch

Wee beasties star at Loch Leven Discovery Day

Midge larvae were among the tasty morsels on the menu at the recent Loch Leven Discovery Day, held on Sunday 15 June. Staff from CEH's Edinburgh site were there to join in the fun: they explained the Loch Leven food web to more than 400 visitors and helped local children pick out "wee beasties" from amongst the plants and gravels, and view them under the microscope.



Local children were able to view insects from Loch Leven under the microscope.
Photo: Laurence Carvalho



An exciting new feature this year was a live video feed from the nearby loch that showed several small fish making their screen debut. Overall, the day was a great success, with lots of interest being shown in CEH's work on the loch.

CEH staff were helped by a supporting cast of water boatmen, and of caddis, mayfly and beetle larvae, who all performed admirably to entertain the crowds. A particular highlight was a water mite voraciously eating the head of a midge larva, which enthralled local children whilst disgusting their parents!

Discovery Day is an annual event organised by Scottish Natural Heritage to entertain and educate the local community about the biodiversity living in and around Loch Leven.

Read more about CEH's work on Loch Leven on our website.

Laurence Carvalho

Thanks to Laurence Carvalho, Helen Woods and Bernard Dudley for their efforts on the day.

Scottish Natural Heritage

We're going on a Bug Hunt!

Two of our PhD students, Scott McKenzie and Helen Hicks, were out and about at Brownsover Community School near Rugby this week, where they organised and led a hugely successful Bug Day. Read Scott's account of the day below:

"Why do ladybirds have spots?"

I was stumped. It was all going so well! In the past, I'd fended away probing questions from top academics at international conferences regarding my own PhD. Previously that morning, I had explained why some caterpillars were brightly coloured but others just looked like sticks, but this one had me scuppered. I came up with a few possibilities, avoiding going into too much detail about Natural Selection. The seven-year-old ecological prodigy seemed satisfied with my response and we moved on. Phew! 

I was at Brownsover Community School and in front of me were 60 cross-legged six and seven-year-olds eager for information on the favourite bugs and beasties. Some months previously I had been asked to organise a “Bug Day” at the school near Rugby. With the recent cold weather I realised that undertaking such a venture could be quite a challenge, as not much insect life will be out-and-about. Regardless, I jumped in with both feet. I have worked with children before and it is incredibly rewarding to think (if slightly naively) that you are inspiring the next generation of ecologists – the perfect pick-me-up to the recent miserable weather! I set about organising an action-packed and fun-filled day for the children.

 

Children from Brownsover Community School look for
minibeasts around their school, armed with ID sheets
and pooters.

The morning session consisted of an interactive presentation that illustrated the diversity of insects all over the world, ranging from stag beetles to pond skaters and katydids to termites. The ID skills of many of the children were impressive to say the least, with one child correctly identifying a water scorpion! The same child informed the rest of the class that a woodlouse was not an insect and was more closely related to a lobster. Pupils and teachers alike looked at me expecting to say how wrong he was, but I nodded in agreement, impressed.

Pupils line up to empty their minibeast finds for the whole
class to admire.

A drawing task followed the barrage of questions the presentation had evoked. Using what they had just learnt about the diversity of insects, I asked them to draw their “Ultimate Bug”. I wanted them to tell me where it lived, what it ate and what special features they had. They could draw on all the attributes we had just been discussing; some had huge eyes on stalks and were covered in spines, others lived in water and ate fish (but still had huge wings!). One even had no eyes because it just lived in tunnels eating worms. Needless to say their imagination ran riot and they came up with some interesting and spectacular specimens. 

The next task was a classic “bug hunt”. With pooter and ID sheets in hand they set about stone-turning and leaf-litter-rummaging around the school grounds in search of some of the minibeasts they had seen during the morning. To encourage concentrated searching we had hidden a number of plastic bugs around the school in places where invertebrates might be concealed. If a pupil found one, they were rewarded with a wiggly worm (sweet). After 45 minutes we had amassed an impressive array of bugs and beasties, including 7-spot ladybirds and some impressive looking centipedes. By this time tummies were rumbling and lunch was upon us.

Here's one I made earlier...

The afternoon task was to make themselves a self-contained decomposer community from a 2-litre plastic bottle. In true Blue Peter style, I had taken in “one I had made earlier” (it is now adorning my desk in the CEH student room). The top of the bottle was cut off and filled with a handful of soil and some dead leaves and sticks. The children then added their own detritivorous invertebrates including woodlice and millipedes. I’ve always thought it is easy to enthuse kids about certain minibeasts: colourful butterflies and pretty ladybirds, for example. I think it’s much more difficult to get them excited about drab, dull things.  I had my work cut out, but I think I managed to win them over! Sooner or later they were handling woodlice as excitedly as if they were exotics in a zoo! 

Pupils create their very own decomposer mesocosm,
 with a little help from Helen Hicks.

Pupils inspecting a decomposer community
mesocosm, and realising how awesome
woodlice are!

Whilst some held woodlice, others were peering into water-filled trays containing various aquatic invertebrates we had collected the previous day. There were lots of “wriggly things” and also many things “that looked like some stones”, all of which were received well by the children. Also on this “hands-on” table were some stick insects I had acquired the week previous. Once one child had an insect clambering over their hand they encouraged other, more timid, children to do the same. After a short while the stick insects had made their way over the hands of most of the children (and some braver teachers) in the class. It was great seeing children impart their knowledge onto their peers. This was mainly in the form of “you have to be gentle with them as their legs might come off”. Thankfully, no stick insects succumbed to this fate and all the children were, indeed, gentle.

It was fast approaching the end of the school day and all that was left was to suggest a few things they could do around their own gardens and the school to help insects. This included planting wild flowers and butterfly-friendly plants and building somewhere nice and warm for bugs to overwinter. I had been genuinely impressed with the high levels of enthusiasm and attentiveness shown by all the pupils throughout the day and I rewarded the top entomologist with their own mini-microscope. 

Happy (and exhausted!) ecologists with
satisfied pupils.

It was an incredibly rewarding and satisfying day for all, if quite tiring! I really do think it emphasises the importance of speaking to children about ecology in a fun and informative way. It was an equally educational day for us and I have learnt much from the experience. I'm looking forward to similar opportunities in the future!  

Scott McKenzie and Helen Hicks

See more photos in our Flickr set

Slimy Science Creature Challenge at Cumbria Big Bang Fair 2012

Staff and students from CEH hosted a stand at a science careers fair in Carlisle last month, during which budding young scientists were able to take on the Slimy Science Creature Challenge!

In total, a team of six staff and students from CEH’s Lancaster site created a stand for this year’s “Cumbria Big Bang”, which was held at Carlisle racecourse on 16 and 17 October 2012. The event was organised by Cumbria STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Ltd as a careers fair for 11-18 year old students from local schools and FE colleges, with the primary objective of helping to inspire and enthuse the next generation of young people about these subjects.



Getting the CEH stand ready



The main focus of our stand was a prize-based competition, which involved participants rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck into an ecology related scientific challenge. Fifty fridge magnets with images of organisms from different trophic levels lay hidden in a large container of green goo (made from gellibaff, a harmless powder which holds 400 times its own weight in water). 


Contestants getting stuck into the slime.



Contestants had 60 seconds to delve into the slime to save as many creatures from the goo as possible.  In extra time, competitors had to correctly transfer the creatures to the right trophic level, i.e. decomposers, primary producers, secondary producers, secondary consumers and top predators. Frantic decision making often led the young scientists to build futuristic food chains, involving top predator pandas!

Our stand wasn't just about playing with slime. We took a microscope and showed the students the wide variety of soil animals that can be found in a compost heap such as a woodlouse, millipede, slug, various different worms and springtails. We also presented the kinds of jobs CEH does in Lancaster, including fieldwork, laboratory experiments, working with data, writing reports and presenting our science to the public. 

Everyone that took part was rewarded with a worm – the jelly variety! Those with the most correct answers made it onto our leader board, with four fantastic winners being awarded a pocket LED mini microscope each.

Our staff enjoyed the experience of meeting the students and hopefully the budding young scientists were encouraged too with what they learned about CEH and a career in science.

More photos from the event can be viewed on our Flickr photostream.

Written by Jacky Chaplow and Harriet Richardson.

Thanks also to the rest of the CEH team at the event: Elaine Potter, Judith Garforth, Andrew Sier and Claudia Moeckel.

Additional links

Cumbria STEM Ltd

CEH's Science Programmes

From drought to flood – An Olympian Summer for hydrological change

Just four months ago more than ‘half of Britain was in drought’ with the UK facing its most severe water shortage since 1976. The Environment Minister was urging households to cut back on the amount of water they used, some rivers in England were at their lowest April levels for 36 years, and your correspondent was quoted in the Guardian stating “This [the late April rain] is not the solution for the deep aquifers which have been at some of the lowest levels ever recorded. We are still looking at next winter rainfall to recharge these.”

As many of you will have noticed the driest March in the UK for 59 years was followed by the wettest April in 101 years. The accumulated rainfall since then has been remarkable. In the four months from the beginning of April to the end of July rainfall amounts were the highest on record (from 1910) by a considerable margin in almost all regions of Great Britain, and provisionally the highest in the England & Wales rainfall series from 1766. Groundwater resources have recovered to levels that expert hydrologists and geologists had thought wouldn’t occur until the end of a (hopefully wet) winter 2012-2013. All hosepipe bans in southern England have been lifted and although groundwater levels remain low in slowly-responding parts of the Chalk and the Permo-Triassic sandstone, our most recent monthly Hydrological Summary for the UK was able to confidently state “The transformation in water resource status since early April is without any close modern parallel.”

Back in early May I was also asked by John Vidal of the Guardian to comment on what may happen if the ‘monsoon’ like conditions in April continued. My words, reproduced in the next day’s paper, were, "If it carries on like this for another few months things may improve [from a hydrological point of view]. But by then we will all be totally fed up." My prophecy was partially correct, the rain did carry on, and things did improve, but as far as I can tell, we’re not all totally fed up, perhaps thanks to an amazingly successful Olympics! Oh well, I suppose two out of three isn’t bad!

The July 2012 Hydrological Summary for the UK

Barnaby Smith



April to July 2012 UK River flows






The Mike Majerus Memorial Lecture 2012

On the day she delivers the first Mike Majerus Memorial Lecture, Dr Helen Roy of CEH reflects on just why Mike was such an inspirational scientist

Wonderful life: the legacy of an inspirational evolutionary biologist

Today I have the honour of giving the first Mike Majerus Memorial Lecture at the Royal Entomological Society's Annual Meeting (Ento ’12), hosted by Anglia Ruskin University. 

Mike Majerus was an evolutionary ecologist with an enthusiasm for science communication and collaboration that was simply inspirational.

I met Mike in his beloved field station at Cambridge University during the early days of my PhD studies and can vividly remember my excitement.  He had just published the New Naturalist Ladybirds – a book that had captivated me throughout the Christmas holidays.  Surrounded by ladybirds, aphids and students, with ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ playing in the background, Mike was in utopia.

Mike was inspirational to so many people because of his knowledge, enthusiasm and passion for working with others.  His ethos of collaboration resulted in a rich and productive research career – a wonderful life, not only for Mike, but also for those who had the opportunity to work with him.  He encouraged everyone to communicate their research as widely as possible and he epitomised this through the invigorating way he chose to convey his excitement in the natural world. 

Mike Majerus (right) describing ladybirds in winter for
BBC Radio 4's Saving Species programme.

Putting together the memorial lecture in his name has given me the opportunity to reflect on the many lessons that I learnt from Mike.  It follows on from a week in which I have attended a two-day meeting convened by the Convention on Biological Diversity to develop a global partnership addressing the threats of invasive non-native species. 

The context of the partnership demands effective communication and a spirit of collaboration in which all parties share information and work together - just the philosophy that Mike so eloquently advocated. 

Helen Roy

Additional information

The first Mike Majerus Memorial Lecture is delivered on Wednesday 18 July 2012 as part of the Royal Entomological Society's Ento '12 meeting (18-20 July). See the full programme [PDF, 2.26mb]

View slides from Helen's presentation [PDF, 1.96mb]

Dr Helen Roy's staff page at CEH

Nearly 2000 non-native species established in Great Britain (CEH News)