Boulder clay cliffs 11 months apart.

May 2009

June 2008

What is this?

It was not a hot day this pic was taken in January), there was no runoff suggesting the rockpool was contaminated and I wondered if it was some early gamete shedding. It wasn't crystallized out salt either.

Nodule north of Runswick Bay.

The shale is full of these inclusions. They're much harder than the surrounding rock. Crack some and you get lovely whole 3d ammonites (mosr around here and flattened and beyond recovery) , crack others and you get a crystralline interior that smells of oil. Tyr and crack others and you blunt your rock hammer and get a jarred arm.

More lottoral blogging...

The Coastal Zone, all about the lovely Isle of Wight (about where I have fossil envy). Go see Ron's blog now.

Meanwhile here we are expecting force 8-9 onshore winds and a 5.6 metre tide, so I shall pop down and have a look.

Two belemnites, a piece of fossilized wood

And a limpet (Patella sp.) which, if has any thoughts can only be meditating on mortality when faced with such a nearby fossilscape.

Now clear off

and visit Earthstudent.

About 3 feet long, all on the same plane in jurassic shale

...not excatavatable and I know I'm not the first person to see it, but (paleontologists please) do we have a part of a skeleton here?

Zonation illustrated on a sea wall at low spring tide.

Squiggles in Jurassic shale (2)

Ha! Another Jurassic beach and what have we here?More squiggles in the shale, similar to these.

Ragworm...

Nereis, methinks or maybe Hediste diversicolor. Caught in a small rockpool on a sunny day.Just look at the difference in the colours of the animal out of the water and the green of the immersed half. One of these little buggers bit me when I was a kid fishing and they can deliver quite a nip. I was trying to shove a hook through, so fair do's. And if this picture is anything to go by, ragworm spring was in the air... Yep, estuary ragworm boys crawl around releasing sperm at spring tides (it was a spring tide today) which the females them collect. That done, this chap will die.

Squiggles in Jurassic shale: help needed.

Is there a living creature that digs channels in Jurassic shale beaches on the North Yorkshire coast to cruelly mislead me, or could these be Jurassic critter tracks?

Blogkeeping.

Fellow Yorkshire nature blogger Sheffield Wildlife has started a multi-user blog for birders called Yorkshire Birders. It is just out of the egg. Go visit and contribute.

Sociable limpets.

You can't help but get the impression that they like company when hunkered down at low tide. Compare and contrast to Limpet City, where the creatures seem to be more uniformly distributed over the surface in a bid for limpetsraum. Look at how bare the rock is.Either the limpets do an excellent job of eating every alga that tries to grow, the rock is not a suitable substrate for seaweed holdfasts to penetrate or it's just too bashed about by the North Sea for the wrack that grows everywhere else to settle. Maybe all three. It'd be interesting to erect a limpet-proof fence around a section of this rock flat to see what happens in the enclosure.

Pyritical ammonite.

Hilderocas sp., flattened, eroded and part-gilded in iron pyrites.

Lugworms.

A low spring tide, so the fishermen were out in force digging for...Lugworms, Arenicola marina. These polychaetes live in a u shaped burrow in the sand and filter food particles out of the sediment. They can make up a third of the biomass of a sandy beach.
Humans having dug holes and left piles of sand around, some oystercatchers came and had a scavenge.

Thanks Cliff...

Thornton for putting me right on my seaweeds in comments. This is one of the things I love about blogging: that people more knowledgable than myself can correct my mistakes. I am very aware that my identification of seaweeds is lacking and a better field guide is on the wishlist.

Now here's a smart idea...

courtesy of the BBC science and environment webpage. One of those ideas that is so obvious that it doesn't occur to you until someone points it out. Examine coastal erosion by comparing old works of art with modern pics. Hereabouts we have the fantastic work late 19th/early 20th century photographs of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, prints available from the Sutcliffe Gallery in Whitby.

The Sutcliffe pics of Runswick Bay are here. This is also Runswick and one of my favourite Sutcliffes, filed under 'children'. A child launching a model sailing boat into the calm water at low tide.

UK Natural History Blogger (2)

now go and read Beating the Bounds. The writer is a self-confessed:

Father of three, teacher of mathematics, cantankerous git.Based in Silverdale near Lancaster with woods, estuaries, Morecambe Bay, limestone hills and pavements, and reed filled mosses all on the doorstep; a view of the Howgill fells from upstairs windows on a good day.

He has a great eye for photographs, especially winter close-ups.

And if you're a UK natural history blogger, go and join the webring.

Winter solstice 2008

Yes, more natural history is coming, but it's taking some time top plan. A USB camera eyepiece for my microscope. More field guides (and thank you Dispersal of Darwin for the Collins Pocket Guide to the Sea Shore, your kindness has not been forgotten and I am only waiting to find the suitable present in return) bought and transects planned. As I said before, it's time to stop going 'oooh look at that' (although there will be some of that) and time to get scientific on this beach's ass.

In the meantime, happy solstice. The days start getting longer tomorrow.

UK Natural History Bloggers

have a webring to bring us together a reassure us we're not doing this in isolation. So go and have a look at another Yorkshire natural history blog Sheffield Wildlife.

Oh good fossil site...

e-fossils, brought to you by Nev and Mark who occasionally visit Runswick (and have no doubt found some of the fine fat ammonites that should have been mine, but they clearly love their fossiling, so can be forgiven) so if you love fossils click over and have a look.

And if you're into jurassic fossils don't forget...

Latest strange shape in the rocks (probably a cycad frond).

Back end of a belemnite: the experts are baffled. UnID'd fossil counterpart.


Another jurassic fossil unknown. Self explanatory.

Original and best pliosaur. One of those is just waiting for me to find.

I love blogs (jurassic fossil bivalve mollusc special edition). In which we celebrate the greatness that is help from more knowledgeable strangers over the internet.

Cliff erosion pics...

December 2008

September 2008

June

April

January

December beach view...

The recent northerlies have brought a lot of sand onto the beach, covering up the beds of rocks that are usually exposed. I'll photograph the beach from here again in spring and summer to illustrate the different beach profiles through the seasons.

Today.

Grandoise, but no weather to be on a beach naturalizing.

Limpet city.

This boulder has been home to limpets (Patella sp) for a long time judging by the many deep scars. The rock is completely seaweed free: the limpets probably graze down any seaweed that grow on its surface. I'd like to know how secure a home this is: I'm going to take my GPS down and fix its position to find out if the winter storms move up around the beach. I'm also going to take my hand-bearing compass for a second fix. I've been a sailor long enough to have seen some very whimsical positions come from GPS machines.

November sky.

The weather has been disgusting, the skies grey, the light flat. I have been a fairweather natural historian and that will never do. This week I will go down to the sea again (what a good line, someone should use it for a poem) and resume. The cliffs will have eroded, the winter tides should have pushed more sand ashore and it's time to mark out some permanent quadrats on the beach and record how the seaweeds and shelly things change over the course of the year.

Lugworm casts, Arenicola marina

Photographed at low tide.

Runswick Bay from the sea.

Kettleness headland to the left.

Seaweed zonation on Runswick beach

This is extreme low water at a spring tide - feet and cameras rarely get here. We're into the Laminaria digitata beds that are usually below the low tide mark.

View of the Laminara beds at low tide. The smaller seaweed is Fucus serratus, saw wrack.

Mid-beach, the saw wrack shares the beach with the green Ulva lactuca (sea lettuce) and Cladophera rupestris, a green algae which looks reddish brown here.

Around the high water mark amost every other species is displaced by bladder wrack, Fucus vesiculosus.

At high water, no algae can establish themselves on this rock:

Sunset 30 September 2008