Friday, 12 December 2014
Science on the Spectrum is moving
If you are interested in following my posts as an Imperial College PhD student my new blog can be found at: http://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/blog/studentblogs/victoria14/
Friday, 17 October 2014
Eek I’m a PhD student!
Well technically I’m a MPhil student, since you first register fro that and then apply for an ‘upgrade’ at the end of the first year. Checking some old text messages I was amused to find how they tracked the ups and downs of my application, interview and offer and gave me some reflection on the journey before I turn and look towards the path ahead.
Evidently I was very nervous about the interview:
But I wasn’t alone:
I hadn’t! In part because I’d fallen into my old trap of “ignore it and hope it goes away” but also because I had been distracted my a new job I had just started! Anyway after some interview advice / pep talk the next day was interview time which was one of the most stressful things I have done so far. I was placed second, but to my delight the first choice candidate declined and a month later I received an email offering me the PhD scholarship:
So six months later I have started my PhD. Predictably I’m stressed! It helps that I have some familiarity with both Imperial College and the Museum but the start of term at university is not an autism-friendly time, the campus was very busy with fresher’s week stands, and I didn’t feel up to looking around with all the crowds. However in the PREDICTS lab I feel I am settling in ok, I have attended lab meetings which are useful to hear what everyone has been up to and share recent papers. I am still feeling rather lost, but it is improving every day. I’m trying to remember how I felt when I first started in the soil group, did I feel lost and like I didn’t belong? I can’t remember, but if I did it must have gotten better, so logically it will again.
Saturday, 26 July 2014
Sorting litter at home and abroad
Hundreds of termites sorted from a Soil Biodiversity Group litter sample |
Scorpions and a pretty fly from Borneo leaf litter samples |
Monday, 21 July 2014
A day in the woods with the Soil Biodiversity Group
I recently took a day off volunteer on fieldwork with the Natural History Museum Soil Biodiversity Group – my first fieldwork with the group since the BESS Earthworm Project, and a nice change from the pollinator and plant surveys I have been doing as part of my work at Reading University. The project I assisted on this time is the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) Project, this is a structured survey of soil and litter invertebrates across UK woodland types which began in 2002 and is now on its third round of sampling. The National Vegetation Classification categorises all UK ecosystems according to major vegetation type (woodland, grasslands etc.) which are then broken down into community types according to plant species composition. Woodlands are given the prefix W and fall into ‘wet woodland’ W1 to W7 and ‘dry woodland’ W8 to W18, this year is the turn of the dry woodlands and the study site I visited was Warburg Nature Reserve in Oxfordshire, an example of W12, a beech (Fagus sylvatica) woodland with plants characteristic of basic soils such as Dog’s Mercury (Mercurialis perennis).
Quadrat assembled – sampling can begin!
Instead of sampling from random quadrats as in my MSc fieldwork the NVC project uses a transect through the habitat with a 1m square quadrat being sampled at set intervals, alternating each side of the transect line. Other than that the method was similar, fellow volunteer and current MSc student Dan and I took turns scrapping and sieving litter from the quadrat which was then bagged up with a label to take back to the lab. Paul took the environmental readings while Kelly dug a soil pit and collected any invertebrates found into tubes of alcohol. A vegetation survey was also made of each quadrant, although being a beech woodland this was sparse and a lot less effort than my MSc project were the quadrats were often covered in vegetation!
Dan sieves leaf litter while Kelly sorts soil for invertebrates
After the cold wet days sampling in the middle of winter for the BESS Earthworm work the NVC fieldwork on a sunny day was quite a treat, finishing before lunch! Then it was back off to the Natural History Museum to process the leaf litter samples. The sieved leaf litter is placed into mesh bags which are hung inside a Winkler bag, basically a cloth funnel with a pot of alcohol tied to the bottom. These are hung up for three days and as the leaf litter dries the invertebrates move downwards into the pot where they are preserved ready for sorting and identification. Once, the Winkler bags were hung up in one of the towers either side of the main entrance of the Museum, but now they are in a much more convenient location which doesn’t involve carrying bags of leaf litter up narrow Victorian staircases!
Paul puts the sieved leaf litter samples into Winkler bags
After the three days are up the pots can be removed ready to be sorted and counted to order level by volunteers with selected invertebrate groups later identified to species level. The NVC dataset is just one example of long-term data collection by the NHM Soil Biodiversity Group, another being the monthly sampling at Whitley Wood in the New Forest, which I am volunteering on in August. I am very excited to be given the opportunity to analyse these datasets, among others, in my upcoming PhD.
Monday, 7 July 2014
Celebrating 50 Years of the Biological Records Centre
Saturday morning in Bath |
The cake was tasty too! |
Keiron and Vicky from the ESB make do with turning over stones to find earthworms on Salisbury Plain |
Vicky and I with the first earthworm of the day, probably Apporectodea longa, found under a rusty drum |
Armadillidium vulgare with young on Salisbury Plain |
Marbled Whites, Burnet moths and assorted flies nectaring on thistle |
Forester on Greater Knapweed at Salisbury Plain |
Knapweed Broomrape (Orobanche elatior) on Salisbury Plain |
BRC 50th delegates huddle around temporary pools created by military vehicle manoeuvres to look for the elusive Fairy Shrimp |
Fairy Shrimp (Chirocephalus diaphanus) |
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
A royally good earthworm meeting
Richmond Park is one of the Royal Parks and the largest enclosed space in London, it is a National Nature Reserve, Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and a European Special Area of Conservation (SAC), because of this the ESB had to obtain special permission and a permit to collect earthworms. It was one of those glorious English Summer days when you can get soaked and sun-burnt in the same day! A group of 10 earthworm fans assembled at Richmond Station, clad in waterproofs before taking a bus to the park – my first ever trip on a London Bus – so that’s another ‘things to do in London’ crossed of my list! I had barely stepped into the Park when I got stuck in grubbing about in a rotten tree, finding the first earthworm off the day – and it was adult, so into a tube it went ready for Sunday, when it turned out to be Eisenia fetida.
Towards the end of the day Keiron gave a demonstration of how to relax and straighten earthworms using a plastic storage box. Putting the earthworms straight into a 80% solution of alcohol (industrial methylated spirits or IMS in this case) is a quick way to sample but causes them to twist and curl which can make them more difficult to identify. By first using a 30% alcohol solution to anaesthetise them they can be arranged in the groves of a plastic storage box (or I use drinking straws cut in half lengthwise). This helps make a nice neat reference collection, but I find it takes too much time if a lot of sites are being sampled.
The next Earthworm Society of Britain meeting is planned for the Autumn – why not join in? Membership is only £5 a year and on completion of the workshop you are given a recording pack which includes a copy of the AIDGAP Key to Earthworms.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Earthworms by numbers
Last week I finished sorting and identifying ‘my’ half of the Soil Biodiversity Group’s samples from the BESS Earthworm Project. The tubes from the last couple of fields were rather full, and because earthworms contain a high percentage of water this had diluted the alcohol, reducing its preserving qualities. The liquid in the samples was dark and pungent and the earthworms soft, this made identification more difficult as the features can be obscured and the earthworms fragile to manipulate. The final earthworm I identified from the samples was a somewhat underwhelming, squishy, headless and tailless Aporrectodea longa!
The final tube was a particularly ‘squishy’ sample
Some previous samples were more exciting however, in particular during the project I have identified by first ever Ap. limicola, Ap. caliginosa subsp. noctura and Octolasion tyrtaeum, although sadly I did not meet the Ap. icterica I was also hoping to find. Here are some of the facts and figures from my time volunteering on the BESS earthworm project:
Sorting and identifying earthworms from 14 fields from seven farms took around 90 hours, and I counted a total of 5940 earthworm specimens, 2124 which could be identified to species. I identified 16 earthworm taxa in total, with the highest number (12) occurring at the Dorset site. This was also the site with the highest number of earthworms per single pit – a whopping 110 individuals, but the highest number of species per pit was from the Dumfries and Galloway site, with seven.
The most common species in my samples were, as expected, Aporrectodea caliginosa (742) and Allolobophora chlorotica (506), but the sites differed in abundance between the two and it will be interesting to see if any environmental preferences emerge when the whole dataset in analysed. The rarest earthworms in my half of the data are Ap. caliginosa subsp. nocturna and
Subjectively each field and farm had a different ‘character’ of earthworm diversity, and I am particularly looking forward to seeing what the statistics have to say about the variation between and within the different sites. Some preferences are quite obvious, Ap. limicola was found in large quantities exclusively (so far at least) from a field on a floodplain, and is known to have a preference for wet conditions (as suggested by its name, limnic = referring to freshwater). An old favourite of mine from my MSc project, Murchieona muldali, previously associated with hedgerows and field edges did seem to occur more frequently in low intensity fields with some scrub. There are so many other questions about earthworm diversity that the project will go some way to answering, like does earthworm diversity decrease with latitude? What are the environmental tolerances of each species and is there evidence for competitive exclusion? Do more fertile pastures have more individuals but fewer species? I am so excited to see the results!