31.12.18 - Market Bosworth Square Bashing

My New Year Resolution was to get more organized by covering non-recorded tetrads, and I finished the year by getting a jump start on this plan. Previously, there were no Collembola records at all from this area so I came home with two bags of leaf litter to see what I could find.

On a pile of Birch logs I could see plenty of springtails crawling around, but I couldn't see what they were until I got a few home, when they turned out to be a mixture of Entomobrya nivalis and Vertagopus arboreus:



After that I was sampling leaf litter, which turned up the inevitable Dicyrtomina saundersi, Orchesella cincta (yay, another tetrad benchmarked!), and a single Orchesella villosa juvenile. There were also lots of pale Lepidocyrtus. I spent a while looking for setae on the head to try to identify these by chaetotaxy, but being honest, I couldn't see any evidence of setae at all, let along intraocular ones. However, what I could see were scales on Ant1, meaning that these must be Lepidocyrtus lignorum: