09.02.19 - Sheepy Magna

As we set out into the teeth of Storm Erik I had my doubts about the wisdom of this trip, especially as I watched the lampposts at the junction rocking to and fro, but those neglected tetrads in the far west won't record themselves, so we headed for Sheepy Magna. We started with collecting in the village then headed a mile or so north to tick off another empty tetrad. Species present were: Dicyrtomina minuta, Dicyrtomina saundersi, Orchesella cincta, Pogonognathellus longicornis.

I spent some time sorting out the Isotomids. The first sample contained a number of Isotoma viridis. This specimen is a good example of why you can't identify Isotoma spp. by eye alone. The mottled appearance might suggest I. anglicana, but with only one manubrial tooth, it is clearly I. viridis:




The second sample contained a number of specimens without macrosetate but with a median dorsal stripe. After some puzzling these turned out to be Isotomurus spp. (based on the mucro):

Setae

Setae are commonly classified in 3 classes: microsetae, mesosetae and macrosetae. This is a relative concept, mesosetae of one species may be as large as macrosetae of another species and vice versa. With a bit of imagination you can see that the base of the setal shaft has the shape of the 'head' of a bone. The setal shaft can only move forward or backward in the socket not sideways, so setae can only sense movement in one plane (backward-forward plane, "mechanoreceptive sensilla"). In contrast, bothriotricha/Trichobothria can move in all directions (like a joystick of a game controller) and thus can sense the movement in all directions. Unfortunately these hairs are easily lost, but the sockets in which they are set remain and thus can be determined even in the baldest of springtails:

All About Orca

Processing and storage of biological records can be haphazard, there is no one agreed standard used by all. Watsonian Vice Country Recorders use an array of different solutions to keep their records, although these ultimately (should) feed though to the network of Local Environmental Records Centres. At least some of this data may (eventually) feed through to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). There is no overarching, agreed software solution and no data pipeline connecting them all. There are many reasons for this, lack of funding, historical inertia, issues around data quality, ownership and reuse, etc. In the 21st Century, this is frustrating. In VC55 (Leicestershire and Rutland) we are very lucky in having two dedicated and hardworking teams involved in biological recording, NatureSpot and the Leicestershire and Rutland Environmental Records Centre (LRERC). And it feels like we’re making progress. LRERC has moved to using the ORCA (On-line Record Centre Administration) software created by Tim May of Cofnod (North Wales Environmental Information Service). Verified records from individual recorders and from NatureSpot is stored and processed using this system. Since becoming VC55 County Co-ordinator for Collembola, I have been working with the LRERC staff to investigate how I can make best use of Orca. Very generously, they have allowed the use of the VC55 Collembola data as a test case to work out a few issues around Orca, and I have just had my first experience as an Orca user. Because of resource limitation (and data issues), LRERC Orca is not publically available and access is limited to County Recorders.

As I understand it, Orca is a front end to an SQL database written in Microsoft Visual Studio by Adtec Software Ltd. LRERC Orca now has a total of 560 verified Collembola records in the system, dating from 2010-2018. Unfortunately there is no automatic pipeline from verified NatureSpot records to Orca – the transfer currently involves a manual update process. Because of the pressure the LRERC staff are under, this can only be done periodically at present. Apart from wasting resources, this is rather frustrating for me – I've already added another 50 records in 2019 - a 9% increase in the database size with 7 new tetrads covered and two new species.

Before I had access to Orca, I had no record mapping tool available other than the NatureSpot Explore All Records interface (which does not cover all the records in Orca). Given the development of Orca I was unwilling to invest time and money in a standalone system such as MapMate as this feels like a backwards step (and too scared to plunge into QGIS), and so it was the Orca mapping tools I was most eager to investigate.
 
Current Orca VC55 Collembola map (map and data copyright of Leicestershire and Rutland Environmental Records Centre):

It is easy to generate maps like the one above in Orca simply by using the GUI tools in the Orca front end to filter to taxon or species level and then clicking “Map filtered records”. The good things from my perspective is that it is possible to overlay the VC55 boundary onto the interactive map, which is zoomable and can be interrogated by clicking on the dots. However, one thing the basic map display does not do is classic monad/tetrad/hectad mapping. Fortunately there is a solution to this in the form of an additional Orca module called eMapper.
 
Orca eMapper Collembola map (map and data copyright of Leicestershire and Rutland Environmental Records Centre):

The eMapper interface is a little more complicated than the basic map display, but it’s not hard to figure out using the graphical interface tools and a bit of experimentation. The maps produced are highly configurable and fully interactive.

eMapper zoomed in (map and data copyright of Leicestershire and Rutland Environmental Records Centre):

LRERC Collembola eMapper is set up as a static page which needs to be manually updated and does not reflect changes in the live database. This isn’t too much of an issue for me as at present we are only updating records annually. However, this isn’t so great when I’m planning my field work and square bashing trips, so I feel I need a separate system to help with my personal logistics. In addition, the eMapper display is very data rich, and for some purposes it’s easier to have a much simpler dataset, so what I’ve done at present is simply to take the Orca data and add it manually to a blank VC55 tetrad map by going into “classic MapMate emulation mode”. How easy it is to keep this up to date time will tell.
 
VC55 Collembola tetrad map:

Overall I’m delighted with Orca and very grateful to have access to it. It is a big advance for me in terms of the tools I have available for data management. My hopes for future developments include live dynamic data updates in both the database and eMapper, although this is some way off and not on the immediate horizon. Nevertheless, life with Orca means I never have to lie awake at night again worrying that QGIS is coming to get me.

Alcohol Hand Gel Mounts

This is in no way original, but I want to document use of alcohol hand gel as a temporary mounting method for springtails. Alcohol hand gel is readily available in supermarkets and chemists. There are many different brands but choose a colourless one containing 70% alcohol (which although not stated, I think is isopropanol?). You probably won't be able to find a brand without perfume, so you're going to smell nice (?) after using it! Buy the cheapest you can find (always a guiding principle). The full list of ingredients of the one I use is: alcohol (isopropanol?), water, glycerin, acrylates/alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, perfume, triethanolamine, aloe barbadensis extract, phenoxyethanol. There's a lot of other stuff in there in addition to the alcohol, but the extra gloop turns out to be useful. Put a springtail (or other small insect) on a clean microscope slide and put a drop of the gel on top, then a coverslip. The gel and the coverslip allows you to roll the specimen around to see the features you want - an advantage of the gel consistency. I am able to get very good resolution of specimens mounted in this way, including being able to resolve manubrial teeth and macrosetate insertion points, something I have not been able to resolve using other methods. I have also taken specimens from the gel and then cleared them or put them back into 70% alcohol for storage without any problems, so I would definitely recommend a bottle of hand gel in your springtail kit. I have tested whether sealing the edges of the mount with clear nail varnish can be used to make permanent or semi-permanent mounts. This seems to work for 24-48 hours but after that the specimen deteriorates and after a week at room temperature the gel has gone cloudy and the specimen is mush, so these are really temporary mounts. Examples:

Isotoma viridis in alcohol hand gel:


Click for larger image

Heteromurus nitidus in alcohol hand gel:


Click for larger image

02.02.19 - Noseley

Clockwise:
Entomobrya nicoleti
Dicyrtomina saundersi
Orchesella villosa
(Composite image)


After the coldest spell of the year we were keen to get out, so we went over to Noseley (another empty tetrad!) and, after donning many layers, trudged though the snow which had drifted almost 0.5cm deep in places! Joking aside, the cold had clearly affected the invertebrates, driving them down as far as they could get. The other thing that struck me was how dry the leaf litter was, even the stuff I was scooping up with snow on. I was not surprised by the limited haul of springtails, but nevertheless, no longer an empty tetrad.

26.01.19 - more squares in the Triangle

I dedicated January to collecting data for the infamous Lutterworth Triangle, and very productive it turned out to be, with 7 sites visited and 15 species recorded (blue squares, all Collembola records; red circles, January trips):



As a final flourish, we went down to Husband's Bosworth, and on the way back, stopped off at Shearsby:

Husband's Bosworth:
Dicyrtomina ornata
Dicyrtomina saundersi
Entomobrya intermedia
Entomobrya nicoleti
Isotoma anglicana
Isotoma viridis
Neanura muscorum
Orchesella cincta
Orchesella villosa
Pogonognathellus longicornis

Shearsby:
Dicyrtomina saundersi
Entomobrya nicoleti
Isotoma viridis
Orchesella villosa
Pogonognathellus longicornis