Tarifa, Spain!

I haven't written a blog post for a million years, once again. This always happens because work gets so busy! I'm in Surrey now (new school term, new county seems to be a developing habit of mine... although I intend to stop that from now onwards), working at the Field Studies Council. 7 years on from a school trip to Juniper Hall, and I'm here teaching the students I once was!

I am entirely behind on all the topics I wanted to cover over the past month and a half, so I am going to start from the most recent set of pictures I have and work back (or up, or down, or sort-of around) that in the next few posts.
Or I might completely ignore that and take another hiatus, followed by another random post. Who even knows.

Geography stuff, so you don't have to spend the post googling places

Last week I was in Spain, travelling around Andalucia for a holiday before properly starting my new job. Andalucia is fantastic for birds; as the shortest gap from Europe to Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar attract thousands of raptors in September. Which was great for me, as we were heading down that direction for the later part of our holiday. After a quick facebook scour of the best sites to go to see the migration, I was told Tarifa was the place to go for "8000 honey buzzards"*.

Image from birdlife.at

*Which I promptly ended up calling honey badgers for the entire holiday.

Don't look it in the eyes

8000 honey buzzards sounded pretty great, so we plugged Tarifa into the SatNav and off we went!
I had actually seen a honey buzzard on the holiday already, near El Caminito del Rey (an awesome place to visit, although difficult to get booked onto with all the publicity when it opened). However, one honey buzzard cannot compare with 8000, so it was pretty exciting to be heading down the coast. We'd seen a lot of other raptors in the week we'd been in Andalucia already; the province is loaded with griffon vultures, and eagles weren't an uncommon sight in the mountainous regions around Grazalema. We spotted a golden eagle from one of the mountains (deemed "standard", by the eager-to-see-8000-honey-badgers boyfriend), and a few booted eagles, handsome birds with dark fingered wings, and pale bodies and inner feathers.

It was about an hour's drive from where we were staying to Tarifa, which is a really great spot for kite surfing. Apparently, difficult to find the prime birding spots though, as a lot of the countryside immediately outside of Tarifa is barred to cars due to being MOD land, or just plain inaccessable. Driving along the main motorway, we came across a viewpoint with a pretty good view of the straits though, Africa in the distance.

It was obviously not the spot people used for birdwatching though, with the quick turnover of tourists taking selfies with the view, and a distinct lack of binoculars and telescopes. With all my excitement to get going and catch the morning migration, I hadn't actually looked up the spot everyone went to, just flicking through a couple of pictures and hoping that it would be obvious once we got there. We turned back towards Tarifa and started to look for a different route possibly into the countryside outside of Tarifa through the town itself, rather than getting stuck on the motorway all the way to Algeciras.
Before we hit Tarifa though, ding ding ding! Spotting a coach on one side of the road, we made a quick U-turn up to a random building literally in the middle of nowhere (hello, chewed-up dirt track), and saw the expected hoard of telescopes and twitchers to go with them. The spot! It was definitely the right place...

Unfortunately it was a really windy day, so we didn't have that much luck spotting anything. The few raptors we did see whizzed past after only a few seconds, some of the smaller ones buffeted literally sideways by the strong winds. There were some nice booted eagles and a couple of cattle egrets, but definitely nowhere near as many birds as we had hoped.

No matter, even though the conditions weren't great, it was good to know that we had gotten to Tarifa. If I'm ever in the area again, we know where to head to see the migration!

Ant-Man; Now with more ants

You can read part one (Myremecology-Man) here. I'd recommend it, you'd probably understand a little bit better what I'm writing about today!

A quick recap;

• I went to see Ant-Man, it was pretty good, but there were a few niggly bits that caught me regarding the ants' behaviour.
• They concentrated on 4 species; fire ants, bullet ants, crazy ants and carpenter ants. Today is crazy ant and carpenter ant time.
• There was too much Hank Pym. Boo, hiss.

Today's specialty is part two; cool critters called C cognomens*.

Hey look, a .gif with both species of the day. Fancy!

*I had to thesaurus that. Cognomen means 'nicknames". 

Crazy ants

First up, we have the crazy ants. Before you ask, yes, they are actually a thing, and yes, they are called crazy ants. Obviously catering to an American audience, Marvel picked the four species most people would know of; although the UK probably laughs at this one, as they do sound like they're made up. Nylanderia fulva doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily though. 

Crazy ants are called crazy because they act very erratically when disturbed, freaking out all over the place. The ones in the film are probably Rasberry crazy ants (I am not making this up, I swear); other species within this family are Yellow crazy ants and Longhorn crazy ants. 

Close encounters of the ant kind

The anatomy looks pretty much dead-on for the crazy ants if you compare with the film's screencaps, which is really nice to see. They're the smallest ants of the film, and very yellow in comparison to the others; the only ones that could get mixed up are the fire ants, although they're a bit more orangey. 

Image from Youngzine.org

As you can see, they have very long legs in comparison to the others species, and are covered in short hairs across the entire body, especially the lower legs. A credit goes to the Marvel team here, as they really did study these ants and get even these small details down; you can see in the following screencap those distinctive hairs along the tarsus of the central leg.

Aw, he's adorable!

To continue on the lines of the almost-absurd nature of crazy ants, they're labelled as the ones that 'control electricity' in Ant-Man. And amazingly, it's actually true. Well, to an extent. Crazy ants don't control electricity or conduct it like they say they do, but there is a massive problem with crazy ants shorting out electrical equipment. For some insane reason they like to try and colonise the spaces inside electricals (such as plug sockets and air conditioning units), swarming inside the tiny spaces. They don't create nests, instead moving around and colonising small spaces as they go. When they all try and cram into a tiny space like the inside of a plug socket, the contact between the bodies causes the plug to short circuit between electrical contacts. It also kills all the ants. They release an alarm pheremone (probably mixed with a burning smell...) which attracts more ants, which then swarm even more, and fill up your standby computer with a lot of very antsy (see what I did there?) insects.

Not what you want to see when you're booting up for a day of Tumblr

Basically, they're pretty metal invaders. Take a moment to breathe now and thank your lucky stars they've not made it to the UK.

Carpenter Ants

Finally, we have the species that should probably be labelled as the most popular species in Ant-Man. Carpenter ants are the big guys, 'ideal for ground and air transport'. They're in the same genus as the Honeypot ant, one of the grossest (and therefore, are really fascinating) ants ever. A quick diversion; these guys gorge some workers with food, so their abdomens swell up into massive food stores (a condition called plerergate), and they can feed the rest of the colony. Ew.

They look kinda like water balloons ready to pop

Not much use to Ant-Man though. The carpenter ants that we do see, we meet one star of the show. Anthony, the loyal steed of our hero.

Yee-haw!

This bro is Anthony. Or, to be more accurately, this lady is Anthony. Or it might be Antony, I'm not entirely sure. Either way, Scott Lang calls her a boy the entire time, and she certainly is not. Anthony is actually most likely to be a queen ant; in an ant colony, there are three types of ant;

1. Worker ants; these are all female (who knew, Ant-Man is actually a female dominated film, despite there being like only one human female character) and have a range of jobs.
2. Male ants; these do have wings, but their sole purpose is to fertilize the female. Then they cop it. Males are fairly useless in the massive colony world.
3. Queen ants; these girls are bigger than worker ants and males, have wings, and are the centre of the nest- they're egg layers, mass-producing new workers. That doesn't mean they 'control' the other ants though.

Every year, when you see the masses of ants swarming all over the ground, with winged ones in their midst; that's the day that virgin queens fly. Bees work in a very similar way; the queen picks her day, leaves the nest to fly, and all the males follow her in a big chase to be the one to mate with her. 

Where are we all going again?

So you could question why all the ants follow Scott in all those neat flying scenes. He's obviously gone some of that sweet queen-in-heat pheremone stashed in his suit somewhere.

Everybody loves Anthony though, which is something you never would have expected. Ants? Ew. Ants are gross. Not when you give them a name and treat them a little bit like a giant ugly puppy! So much so, Anthony has gone big- and even managed to get a toy made of herself. Now there's a privilege restricted to pretty much every other superheroine.

Buy me like 10 for my birthday.

Okay, I think I'm done. Phew, you can stop thinking about ants now. Unless you're about to go see the film, in which case, GLHF. Have a comic before you go!

Myremecology-Man; science of Ant-Man

Probably not the story of blog post you'd expect to see from my blog, given how outdoorsy it normally is, but there you go. Yesterday I went to see Ant-Man in the cinema, and was actually quite impressed, not only with the plot, but with the accuracy of the ants. Yes, if you go see a film called Ant-Man, there are going to be ants.

A few mild spoilers to follow here and there, but mostly to do with ant behaviour.

A cleverly disguised spoiler bar

So, as Hank Pym (officially one of my most disliked characters*) states, there are 4 different ant species used in the film. Let's get our lineup...

1. Fire ants, the builders.
2. Bullet ants, Paraponera clavata, the ones with the nasty sting.
3. Crazy ants -the boyfriend laughed and didn't believe they were a thing until I started correcting the science to him afterwards- the electric ones.
4. Carpenter ants, the flying ones.

Quite a nice mixture, and certainly all familiar to an American audience; less so to a British one, but bullet and fire ants aren't unrecognizable. There was actually quite a lot of ant action to be had throughout the film, which was a nice surprise. I thought there would be a lot more general superhero action, rather than actual cool ant stuff.

*So much so I almost didn't go and see it, but was convinced by the trailers that he wouldn't have much part in it. I was wrong. Why couldn't there be Janet in there instead?

I'm going to break this one down into two parts; fire ants and bullet ants today, and then crazy ants and carpenter ants another day. Probably I'll do a further post on other miscellaneous stuff I want to mention too, like pheromones, after that, but who knows.

Fire ants

These guys were described as being great at building. The fact that they, like bullet ants, have a killer bite wasn't recognized,  but I think they were trying to simplify for those who didn't know ants (ie, the rest of the cinema) to one major fact per species.

They put the fire ants' building ability to good use though- the one I appreciated most was when they built a raft to float down a water tunnel on. This is one of the coolest protective abilities of fire ants; in nature, they have been recorded making giant rafts out of their own bodies when nests are flooded, allowing the colony to float away with the queen in the middle, and survive extreme flood events. They are able to build bridges as well, so that was cool to see, although it was quite a sooped-up, extra fast build and reform they did in the film.

Get me out of here! I'm standing on a pile of ants!

They were nice and small in comparison to the other species shown, which was happily right! Their colouring came up nicely as well, so they were easily recognizable against the more often seen carpenter ants.

Their nests aren't exactly like the ones in the picture above; they're much more triangular in shape. Because fire ants are a bit of a pest in the States, they're freely exterminated. Some people like to make art out of their nests though, which really shows off the architecture they create underground...

Not the nicest way to go

Bullet ants

Paraponera clavata, the name mangled all of too many times for my ears to cope. It probably was only about twice though, so perhaps I should give credit for trying... and the film writers actually including a latin name for one of the species. These guys were rightly labelled as the 'really painful' ones.

Oh man, and these guys bite. On the Schmidt Insect Pain Index they sit happily at the very top end. The Schmidt Index runs from 0-4, 0 being something unable to feel, to 4, which is agony. Lovely. Unfortunately Marvel got a bit confused here and labelled bullet ants as 1, but never mind.

Otherwise known as, the bad insect pets scale

These guys really can cause as much pain as was shown in the film, and Scott was pretty wise to really want to step on any of them. Really not a good species to annoy. Not only is their sting absolute agony, the pain lasts for up to 24 hours, so you are really feeling it long-term if you get on the bad side of one of these beasties. Luckily, they're pretty huge, some workers getting up to 1.2 inches long, so you're not likely to miss one if it's running around. 

They can get literally this big

In one tribe in the Amazon, the initiation to become an adult is to stick your hand in a glove full of bullet ants. No thanks. 

That's all for now, although I will eventually get down to writing a part two. For now, go watch the film so I can reference more stuff in the future!

A small update...

Work has been such a crazy ride over the past few months, I've had absolutely no time at all to write a blog post since March, apparently. But now it's starting to come to a bit of a quieter period, what with the summer starting for schools, so I actually have some time to do things like this! Commence incoming backlog of posts, probably in a bit of a weird order as I try and cram four months of posts into probably four weeks.

A selection of pictures of work... honestly!

I've been living on the Dorset coast again since February, working as a field studies tutor- which means I'm outdoors all the time (bliss!) There's loads of wildlife around and really awesome geography, so there'll be a bit of a mixture of blog posts coming up eventually. I shan't spoil it though, mostly because I am not sure what order I'm going to write them in...

Little Sea and Studland

It's been quiet on Dendrocopos lately because I've been really busy with lots of exciting new life changes! In short, I've just quit my old admin job, started a new field studies job, passed my driving test, and done lots of travelling up and down the country. Now I'm based down in Dorset, teaching geography in Purbeck for the next 6 months.

Studland

The most exciting adventure of this week (so far, it's only tuesday) has been a trip to Studland and Little Sea with my parents. Studland is a peninsula created over 300 years from blown sand, forming distinct dune systems with ridges and slumps. Without going into too much geological detail (mostly because I am not an expert on it!) Studland is made up from deposits of sand, silt and gravel from the sea, which has built up over years and years of deposition. Heathland has grown over the area today, creating a unique environment perfect for studying blown sand formations.

Image from Southampton Geology

I'm pretty familiar with Studland as it was my main research site for my dissertation! I spent about 3 months looking at wood ant nests (very closely, getting covered in ants a lot)... which is what half of this post is about! It was quite a warm day today, which meant that some of my favourite residents of Studland were active- which actually was quite surprising for me, as although the sun was out, I didn't think it would be quite warm enough for the insane numbers of Formica rufa we saw about their nests.

Ant swarms! This actually makes sense for the time of year- it's the warmest it's been for a couple of weeks today, so they've all come out to swarm and make new nests. Interestingly, on the first active nest we found, there were only ants in a select few places on the actual nest material, clustered mainly in a south easterly direction, where the sun was at that point in time! You can sort of see this in the picture above, with air holes as well where ventilation of the nest was taking place due to the massive numbers of ants clustered in one part.

Glorious microfauna

Moving on from this first nest, which was a teeming mass (to put it lightly), we moved on to one of the hides on Studland to have a quick look around to see what birds were on the lake. On the walk down to the hide, we came across this monster of a nest- not only is the nest the very dark mass of ants (literally, that's just ants!), but to the right as well, the huge flattish pine needle area. You can actually only see half of it, and there were trails all over the place as well- I'm balancing on the log there because it was the only place I could stand for more than a second and not get absolutely coated all over my legs with interested foragers and upset soldiers!

The best animals to pet

Eventually we moved on from this spectacle to take a wander down to the hide. It's tucked quite away from the road, so not many people really know about it, which makes it a pretty nice spot. There isn't a whole lot to see a lot of the time, unless you sit there for ages with a pair of strong binoculars, but there is a diary that people write their sightings in, so if you're lucky you can see marsh harrier and some nice ducks like pintail and little grebe (or dabchick). We saw a couple of great crested grebe and a couple of cormorants- and then hit the jackpot.

One of the lesser known residents of Little Sea are otters. We've been going out to this hide for the past 18 months or so (basically since we first heard about it being a good spot to otter watch), and have never seen even a tail, only the records in the aforementioned diary that there had been sightings. The last one was January 30th, so we didn't really think we'd spot one. But then, just as we were about to pack up and head off, black ripples in the water! Not just one otter, but a whole family of them swimming across the lake!

 The picture's not fantastic, but there they are! Will definitely have to be heading back again in the future to see if we can spot them again, and actually remember to take binoculars next time...

The Monsal Trail

The third walk we did in the Peak District was the Monsal Trail in Chee Dale. This was actually supposed to be our first walk, but due to snow forecasts on the 26th (which came true!), we decided driving the dodgy Cat & Fiddle road probably wasn't a good idea on that day. Also, it had rained a fair bit on Christmas Day, which might have put a spanner in our plans. When we did head over to Buxton, even though we took the new Cat & Fiddle road, it was pretty scary driving through just white snow on every side- and that was without doing the super-dangerous old road. I have a couple of pictures from the drive back; they've got a bit of window glare on, as we didn't really want to stop when there was nowhere off the road, and certainly we weren't when the hills had some pretty huge snowclouds coming in.

On the way there though, it was gloriously bright and clear, and we could see all the way back to Macclesfield. Ben pointed out where we had been the day before; Shutlingsloe really did earn its name the Mini-Mountain, by far the steepest-sided hill on the horizon. I was amazed, because we hadn't been able to see anything at all the previous day. A flock of grouse whizzed over the fields in front of us, shrieking as they settled down beyond sight of the road.

On the way back, the clouds were so thick we couldn't even see the Cat & Fiddle pub on the side of the road until we were driving past it!

The Monsal Trail runs through Chee Dale, Miller's Dale and Cressbrook, following the river Wye. The most exciting part of the walk, that meant we had to pick a good day to walk on, is the stepping stones that makes up the path at a couple of points along the riverside- they're fairly high above the waterline in the summer, but in the winter when there's a lot of rain, the trail can become impassable as the river level picks up. We parked at Blackwell Mill, which was super-icy (enough to cause a couple of cars to wheelspin horribly when they tried to get out, although they didn't really have the right technique on complete ice), and walked down to the river. Immediately we found we were going to have a bit of difficulty with the trail...




















But we persevered, whether through foolishness or adventure. If the trail becomes completely impassable, there are regular crossings of the river under the old dismantled railway, so it's easy to double back and get up onto high ground to continue your walk. With our first obstacle passed though, we decided that would be only the last resort, and we were definitely going to get as far as possible along the river! Also, we forgot our map, so just following the river was the easiest thing to do.

There are multiple old viaducts along the river walk

Anyway, we set out along it, not really paying attention to how far we were going, just making sure we kinda knew we weren't going to get stuck anywhere (permanently). The snow made it difficult to see the muddy spots, and ice made some bits where water had dripped down onto the path slippery, but we made it! Following the path (which both sets of our parents would have deemed 'too unsafe' to continue along a long time previously), we finally found the first set of stepping stones!

They were almost underwater and there was nobody else around- so nobody else to embarass ourselves in front of in case we fell in, right?- we slowly made our way across to some excitement. Then, further along, another set! These, I got one foot a bit wet with as one or two were definitely underwater, but not enough for us to get dissuaded.

There were only a handful of other people walking, which meant my bird count was through the roof. Long-tailed tits, blue tits, great tits and coal tits filled the trees, with their companion calls one of the loudest noises, next to the sound of the river. Robins and blackbirds also made their appearances, the robins especially Christmassy against the snow. Saving the most exciting until last though, we spotted maybe five or six Dippers along the river, taking off with a blur of white and black!

Super undercutting of the gorge

The path didn't get any easier the further we went along- if anything, it was more difficult as the gorge tightened and we were forced right alongside the river up on a slope at some points. It's a limestone gorge; lime kilns can still be seen alongside the old railway line today. The sides of the river are steep and difficult to walk at points- this is not a light walk! You can read more about the geology and biology of the area here. Anyway, we managed to get along alright, then we came across this rather large obstacle...

We knew we could get across because a couple had come across with their dogs only a little bit before, and we had come much too far to turn around now. So, very slowly, we crossed the network of fallen branches and logs that now made up the 'path', until... yes!

If you can't work it out, this was the other side

Feeling victorious after this, the rest of the path was 'easy', and we emerged out at Miller's Dale station, not nearly as far as we were expected to get in the amount of time that we had been walking, but pleased none the less. The view from the old viaduct was great, and the old railway tracks made a super-quick and easy walk back.

The old Miller's Dale viaduct

The railway closed in 1967, although the main buildings from the station remain; it served as an important transport connection for Buxton to London and Manchester. There was even a Post Office on the platform! It's not there any more though. Walking back towards Blackwell Mill, you can follow the railway line the whole way, which is a much straighter and flatter route than the riverside walk. The few tunnels sped up our progress even more, because it meant not having to trek through a foot of snow!

It only took us about 1/2 hour to walk back along the train line, what had taken us 2 1/2 hours to get to following the river gorge. And, we managed to get out of the car park in one piece!