Expanding our horizon...

Good afternoon.

We have a new website that is being added to all the time.

The new website makes this blog void now, with any rockpool visits now documented on the homepage of the site.

You can visit the site by clicking here

Thanks for following the blog, we hope you stay tuned to our website.

Take care and God bless

Steve

The Future

Next year will hopefully herald many exciting visits to some beautiful areas of Britain, in search for unseen life.

Next summer we plan to visit the southwest of the UK for a few days, spending the day rockpooling, and the night mothing. All this was very uncertain until recently. I secured a job working at the uni canteen, so I shall be earning some much needed cash from next year :) Thankfully I'll be able to finance such a trip now.

We don't plan to stick purely to rockpooling in the sea. One thought is to buy some waders and a shrimping net. This allows exploration of the submerged sublittoral, and can yield some good finds. As the name of the net suggests, shrimp (pictured) are common finds, but flatfish, and harbour crabs are not rare. If we ever got lucky, we could even catch a cuttlefish!

Exciting times are ahead, and that is even before we search for sea slugs in 11 days time!

Steve

Nudibranches

We're on the hunt for sea slugs!

We have only ever seen one - it was at Scalby Mills earlier this year and it was a Sea Lemon (common name). No disrespect or anything, but it is the most boring sea slug you would ever come across, and most common.

Happily, there are other species that are present (supposedly) here. One of them is called an orange- clubbed sea slug (pictured), named after the 'clubs' on its back.

Typically, sea slugs are found feeding on bryozoans (they are sea mats which often encrust rocks and algae fronds at low tides) or other algae (eg Cladophora spp.)

We plan a visit to Scalby during next months nighttime low tides (13th & 14th December). Wish us luck!

Steve

**Picture taken from MarLin**

A successful couple of nights

When I say successful, I mena really, really successful. So successful in fact that we caught the most species in a single session since well....never!

We found two new species present at Holbeck - a Bristly (or Hairy) Crab (pictured), and a Two-Spot Goby. Both are welcome additions to our database, and hopefully we'll be seeing more of them next month :)

To see the full list of species found, go to this thread (no login required)...here

A worthwhile trip!

Next up, there are two nice low tides in December worth attending - just before we go back for Xmas. There are...

Saturday 13th December: Low Tide 0.93m 22:29 GMT
Sunday 14th December:

Low Tide 0.83m

23:20 GMT

Then we have some exciting tides in January and February 2009 to look forward to :)

Steve

Night Rockpooling

I have been looking forward to this all week!

On Friday night we will embark on our first night rockpooling session of the autumn/winter months.

The tide is at its lowest at 23:02 when it dips down to 0.95m, which incidentally 2cm lower than the night we found the huge Edible Sea Urchin - so we have high hopes.

The following Saturday morning harbours a low tide of 1.08m at 11:26 and then if we fancy it, another night low tide of 0.95m is there for us to take advantage of at 23:49 Saturday night.

Personally, I will be looking amongst the kelp holdfasts in search of some smaller orgnaisms such as sea spiders, and an uncommon slender spider crab :)

There is always potential for a lobster at these tide levels, and of course anything unexpected is a bonus!

I will post a new entry after each session this weekend.

Steve

Photo Competition

Hi all, I bring good news!

Yesterday we entered 6 pictures into the Warcs Bulletin photo competition, and we won 3rd place for our photo of a Marbled White butterfly (see title photo ^^)

We won £5 for our achievement, which just about covers the cost of printing out the photos, so in total we made a profit of £1.61!

Of course, it isn't about the money, we are just pleased that the photo placed highly. It got 18 votes, and the Peacock butterfly also got 5 votes :)

The voters are knowledgeable about their butterfly species, so it snesnible to assume that the rarer Marbled White stood a decent chance :)

On a rockpooling note, we take a trip down to Holbeck next weekend for our first night rockpooling session of the season! Last year we managed to find Judi Dench (our 16cm wide Edible Sea Urchin, so expectations are high!

Next Rockpooling session: Friday 14th November 2008: Low tide 0.94m @ 11:30pm approx

Steve

Long time no post!

Yeah, erm, sorry about that! There has been a rather long-running farce regarding the internet at our new residence in Scarborough. Thankfully that's all been sorted now and I'm back up and running.

At the end of September we took advantage of four low tides, and visited Scalby Mills, Holbeck (x2) and Cornelian Bay.

We caught three lobsters, one of which was in berry (see title photo). It is coming to the time of year when crustaceans are getting broody - we came across a very angry shore crab, who was obviously more interested in finding a mate than dealing with our camera!

We encountered breeding Swimmer Crabs, Shore Crabs and Edible Crabs, as well as the in-berry lobster.

Links to the pictures can be found here

Our next rockpooling trip will be either the 14th or 15th of November. We shall be keeping an eye out for another species of sea spider, and eventually we will be concentrating on finding species that have eluded our capture so far. One particular low tide next year seems a good bet for new finds. There is a low tide of 0.41m in February '09! Compare this to the more than respectable 0.94m tide coming up in mid-November.

Make sure you check out the link!

Steve