Science – Page 48 – David Bradley

Marsh Harriers courting on the wing

Much to Mrs Sciencebase’s annoyance, I was awake at 6:40am today…her day off. I made a pot of tea, fed the dog, we drank the tea (Mrs Sciencebase and myself, not me and the dog), I then dressed and dashed off to RSPB Ouse Fen before the morning rush hour in the hoping of catching sight of a Bittern or two.

Well, I arrived to see lots of Linnets, Goldfinches, and Reed Buntings about. Skylarks cavorting with the Meadow Pipits, the sound of a couple of Chiffchaff and maybe four or five Cetti’s Warblers calling (I saw at least three of them), a possible Bearded Reedling “pew”, and the occasional boom of a male Bittern, from a couple of places, so perhaps two or more.

However, the big feature of the morning though was the five or six Marsh Harriers (Circus aeruginosus) that were doing their aerial courtship dance.Â The smaller, more patterned males with their darker heads chase the bigger females with their pale heads through the air and with each approach dive down to reed level. It’s a spectacular sight, be interesting to know how many were successful and whether numbers will rise again on this reserve.

What is smaller than nano?

TL:DR – Nano means a billionth, a billionth of whatever unit you’re talking about, smaller than that and you are talking pico (a million-millionth), femto (a million-billionth), atto (a billion-billionth), zepto (a billion-trillionth), yocto (a trillion-trillionth). Recently added a thousand times smaller than yocto is ronto and a million times smaller than yocto is quecto.

Use the prefix “nano” and you make any unit a billion times smaller. A nanometre? That’s a billionth of a metre. A nanosecond? That’s a billionth of a second. Nanowatt? Billionth of a Watt. The list goes on, confounded only by that annoyance that is the kilogram, the SI unit of mass. A kilogram being a thousand grams, but a nanogram isn’t a billionth of a gram, it’s just a millionth, it’s a billionth of a kilogram.

Anyway, smaller than nano? Of course…here’s the full list of prefixes that define the thousandths and millionths and billionths of nano…pico (million-millionth), femto (million-billionth), atto (billion-billionth), zepto (billion-trillionth), yocto (trillion-trillionth).

Of course, you can go smaller, although you might not be able to measure the thing you’re measuring and there is quantum mechanics and the Planck limit to take into consideration.

Bigger than nano? Well, we have – kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta. Find out more in this Sciencebase blog post from September 1997.

In science and pretty much everywhere now, a billion is defined as 1,000,000,000. In British-English the word billion used to mean a million-million and a thousand-million was archaically known as a milliard.

Luring in the Emperor

I ordered a pheromone lure for the Emperor Moth from ALS today. It’s just arrived and now it’s hanging in one of those little laundry tab string bags, out in the garden, blowing in the breeze purportedly drawing in the male Saturnia pavonia…but nothing yet. It’s getting late in the day for this day-flying moth, so I might pack the lure away in a freezer bag in the freezer and try again tomorrow. Intriguingly, the female which looks like a greyed out version of the male is a night-flyer.

Meanwhile, I cannot find the chemical identity of the female sex pheromone for this species. I can’t seem to find a reference in my usual journal searching, although three US Saturnia species apparently use a long-chain aldehyde, (E4, Z9)-tetradecadienal. I will keep searching. This is where my passion for biology and chemistry overlap, you might say.

UPDATE: I discovered that S pavonia had two older names, not just Pavonia pavonia, but Eudia pavonia. As soon as I learned the latter, it was easy to find a research paper discussing the pheromone – (Z)-6,(Z)-11-hexadecadien-1-yl acetate, which is a close relative of another sex attractant pheromone, gossyplure, which is used in commercial breeding control of pest moths. Read more about it here.

This species is the only member of the Saturniidae that lives in the British Isles, it is found almost everywhere here from heathland to fenland, so there is a chance of at least one turning up. It is the poster-boy of the moth world. You can go away and look it up if you like, but I’ll only post a photo when I’ve snapped one of my own.

An ashy miner bee for the Toon Army

Whereas most of the familiar bees are black and yellow stripey creatures sometimes with a white or russet tail, the Ashy Miner Bee (Andrena cineraria) is black and white with a bit of blue…like a Magpie (hence my blog post title, The Magpies being the nickname of The Toon, Newcastle United Football Club, NUFC). Its name made me think ashy, sooty, pits and miners, obviously; once so common an association with the city to which you need not take coals.

This is a solitary bee, but the females will often make their nests in aggregates along grassy footpaths and short turf. Hence another football connection. I spotted this one on the raised footpath along the water at Earith in Cambridgeshire. Look down as you’re walking and you might spot them from March to June.

Of Marsh Harpoons and Bearded Breasts

Just looking for a nature reserve that I may have missed in our local area when I found a website that discusses the many and varied places you could visit:

The Water of Grafham (Grafham Water), for instance

Then there was Ouse is Washing (Ouse Washes)

Cherries Hinton Chalk Pits (that would be Cherry Hinton)

But, I’m definitely going to RSPB Ouse Fen again where:

The bitters are joined by a support group composed of marsh harpoon hovering above and pretty bearded breasts hanging on the reeds, like small trapeze artists.

Presumably, they’re talking about Bitterns, Marsh Harriers, and Bearded Tits, but I could be wrong…

bearded tit wmk 768px — A “Bearded Breast” hanging on reeds like a small trapeze artist

The only explanation for such a ludicrously badly written web page I can think of is that they ran the copy through an automatic grammar checker and accepted all changes without reviewing them. However, the site looks like the content is originally from the Cambridge News, so maybe the awful edits were done to make it subtly different from the original material.

Indeed, the original Cambridge news article uses this phrase in talking about the arrival of spring:

Pop on a jumper and some sturdy shoes

the “archive” site has:

Put on a sweater and solid shoes

TheÂ site also talks about “forests” whereas the original Cambridge News pages says “fenland”. As far as I know, there are no forests near Cambridge but plenty of local fenland; woods and spinneys yes, but not forests.

Oh and the Cambridge News talks of:

The bitterns are joined by a supporting cast of marsh harriers that soar overhead and charming bearded tits that cling to the reeds like little trapeze artists.

Nut-tree Tussock (Colocasia coryli)

Pleased to see something more colourful and patterned than the Common Quakers in the actinic moth trap last night. A quick lookup in the book confirmed it as Nut-tree Tussock (Colocasia coryli). Very distinctive, but fairly common in Southern England.

The species likes Birch, Hawthorn, and Hornbeam, none of which are present in our garden, although there are birches fairly nearby. This specimen is a female? How do I know? 47 eggs laid in the pot by morning. I will leave them to hatch and release them on to a suitable deciduous tree once they do.

According to UKMoths, the species flies April to June and July to September in the south (double brooded); May to June in the north.

Shallow questions and deep answers

@EstOdek on Twitter asked her followers a simple-seeming question

What did you want to be when you were a kid? And what are you now?

Her answer to kickstart the thread:

I wanted to be a professional rugby player or boxer. I'm now an antibody selections scientist

Well, I was born just before the Moon landings era and grew up reading every single science book I could find in the library from the space books to the dinosaurs and the sharks and whales. There was a series of novels about a team or marine biologists following the submarine passion for sharks, whales, and all the creatures of the sea. And, inspired as an 8-year old I thought I’d probably forsake being an astronaut and be a marine biologist. There was even a Marine Laboratory in the bay of my hometown of Cullercoats on the edge of Northumberland.

I don’t think I’ve ever stopped reading, always have 2-3 books on the go at once, usually a novel, and a couple of non-fiction (these days, they might be about songs, snaps, or science). By the time I got to that career-choosing age where they seem to push you along based on simply how well you pass or how badly you fail trivial memory-recall tests they call examinations, I was doing all the schools sciences – biology, chemistry, physics – and maths and the obligatory humanities ones but not music, despite getting 98% in the exam and being second in the year (I learned saxophone for a couple of terms but it used to give me headaches so I gave up. Nobody nudged me towards piano or guitar lessons, I ended up teaching myself the latter and taking a few lessons on the former when I was about 17).

Anyway, by the time O-levels came around, my biology teacher was advising me to not take that subject at A-level. So, I ended up doing maths, physics, and chemistry. The unholy trinity for boys at the time, only girls got nudged towards biology in my school for some reason. Anyway, at A-level mock exams my physics tutor was advising me to not do physics but to take chemistry at university. It feels like a shame so many years later, although I did eventually fall in love with chemistry, but it just wasn’t sharks and dinosaurs! That said, I did like all the bio and med stuff in the degree more than the inorganic content. The chemistry and all those books became the passion and as I’ve discussed several times on this blog I (obviously) became a science writer.

So, today, a close friend said they hadn’t realised that about my “career path”. I wasn’t shocked that they didn’t know, childhood passions kind of fade from memory, and although we’ve had a lot of late-night conversations where such discussion might arise, that particular one has not surfaced over a single malt.

But! Look!!!

Birds, moths, butterflies, sharks, dolphins, seals, stoats, burying beetles, bees, flowers!!!

Of course, none of this post is about regrets, you take the path you take.

All-black Sexton, or Burying, Beetle

UPDATE: 30 July 2019 – Another Sexton Beetle turned up this one doesn’t seem to have a vernacular name, it’s simply known as Necrophorus investigator.

ETYMOLOGY: A sexton was once a member of staff with responsibility for a church’s sacred objects and burying the dead. The word comes from the Old FrenchÂ segrestien, ultimately from Latin sacrista, fromÂ sacer, meaning sacred.

UPDATE: Sexton beetles often have mite passengers that eat fly eggs and maggots that are on the carrion the beetle buries. I asked about these and whether or not there is a parasitic mite too on the Moth Trap Intruders UK Facebook group, Malcolm Storey had this to say:

“The usual name given for the mite is Parasitus coleoptratorum which misleads people into thinking they’re parasitic (which people presumably thought when the name was proposed). This stage of the mite is the deutonymph. Apparently they’re “paraphages”. It’s the same small number of mite species on various dung and ground beetles. P. coleoptratorum is probably the commonest of the group. More info: Hyatt, K.H. 1980 Mites of the subfamily Parasitinae (Mesostigmata: Parasitidae) in the British Isles. Bull. Br. Mus. nat. Hist. (Zool.) 38(5): 237-378.”

I’ve mentioned burying beetles before. They’re a type of beetle it’s not a morbid hobby, by the way! These insects drag dead rodents and other animals underground, lay their eggs in them and the larvae as they hatch have a ready-meal to die for! The beetle also produces horrendously smelly sulfur compounds to mask the smell of death, you can think of it as a kind of flatulent Neutradol…

Anyway, in my moth trap morning of 20th March 2019, a specimen of the UK’s only all-black burying beetle, Nicrophorus humator, all-black carapace, that is, ignore the orange clubs on its death-seeking antennae. First Sexton Beetle of the year. This one had several pale-orange arachnid passengers, mites, I believe. Not sure whether they’re parasitic or synergistic.

The Sea of Tranquility from your bedroom

Here’s a shot of the waxing gibbous moon I just snapped from our bedroom window. It was just after 5pm. Camera settings: 600mm lens, f 9.5, t 1/1000s ISO 200, ev -1. Sigma 150-600mm lens handheld with no image stabilisation on Canon 6D full frame. Final image cropped to a square with side 768 pixels from original 5472×3648 for the website.

In July, it will be 50 years since humans first set foot on Earth’s biggest natural satellite. You did know we have more than one moon, didn’t you?

First (migrant) Chiffchaff of 2019

We heard an over-wintering Chiffchaff (at RSPB Titchwell on New Year’s Day this year, but today (18th March) I’ve just heard and seen the first one that has presumably migrated from Africa for the summer. It was calling with its plaintive, sound-of-the summer, onomatopoeic, metronomic and instantly recognisable ttt-tss-ttt-tss-ttt-tss-tss-tss call.

Snapped it quickly in Rampton Spinney as it was darting from tree to tree and calling in between. The Common Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) is a warbler and almost identical to the Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus), which I think I may have heard briefly on the opposite of this woodland at the beginning of my walk today. Very another sound-of-the-summer.

This is the call of the Chiffchaff. The first sound is the actual recording I made and it’s as you’d hear the bird in woodland or elsewhere. The bird usually repeats its chiff-chaff 11 to 14 times (in my original records, I’ve got 11 on one and 13 on a second sequence).

The second sound you hear in the video is that of the same bird’s call time stretched (slowed down) by about four times and then the frequency halved to take it down an octave in pitch. It reveals otherwise hidden detail in the bird’s call as well as allowing you to hear the echoing of the song from the trees of the woodland. The normal recording sounds cheery and chipper, the slowed down version rather more plaintive and melancholic, perhaps even eerie.