
June 2008

More squiggles in the shale, similar to these.
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.
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.
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.
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.


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.
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.
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.



