27.10.18 - Leicester Botanical Garden

On a fairly inclement day I decided not to venture far afield but just pop down the road to the Leicester Botanical Garden. This site has surprisingly (to me) high biodiversity and not overlooking my local patch turned out to be a very good decision. I started by looking under fallen leaves, something which has been very productive in recent weeks. Surprisingly, all the leaves lying on grass turned out to be springtail-free, but when I started looking at leaves lying on a clay soil border I hit the jackpot. Dicyrtomina saundersi was abundant:



but interestingly, I also found several Jordanathrix nr superba. This is significant as this is only the second locatiion I have found this species at, so now we have two dots on the map!




At that point it rained hard, so we retreated to the tropical greenhouse (where we found some interesting spiders, but that's a whole other story). Beating Ivy yielded abundant Entomobrya intermedia, but also something very interesting (new species alert!), which I plan to write about in future after the record has been confirmed.