: Natural History

This morning I presented my last talk to the Fisheries Department which was about the methods of collecting and identifying polychaetes. It seemed to go down reasonably well and then I handed back my key and left for the last time.

My samples are now officially with the Post Office hopefully to be on their way back to the UK shortly. As for me my journey back starts at 5am tomorrow morning. It will already be daylight then and will be the last time I see daylight at that time of the morning for a few months to come. Arrival back in the UK is likely to be a bit of a shock for me I think as there is currently around 8 or 9 hours less daylight there each day than here and the weather is now decidedly wetter and colder. Shortest day is fast approaching in the UK with longest day due here next week. Ah well.

Several weeks ago I pointed out that my challenge would be to still be finding new animals on Day 28. By my calculations that would actually be today so I failed there as there has been no new sampling since Friday which was Day 25. However, as I did have a new worm that day, from my final site, I think that’s pretty good going!

My sampling here has gone well and I’m really pleased with the variety of animals I have been able to collect. I’m looking forward to being able to spend some time looking at them in more detail in the New Year. I’ve enjoyed my time here and had an amazing opportunity to visit a place and see things that many others won’t get a chance to and I appreciate how lucky I’ve been.

I know that some of the people I’ve meet here have also been reading this blog and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone involved for all of the help I’ve had getting out here and during my stay, from loaning me cars to get around to coming out on the shores with me or taking me diving to get more samples. This trip wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without all of your help.  

 
The Shallow Marine Surveys Group, whose survey work I piggy-backed to go diving, do a fantastic job out here with their dive surveys, mostly as volunteers with a few grants to help with costs and the Fisheries Department allowed me free run of their lab at all hours.

Not least of course I must thank the Shackleton Scholarship Fund and National Museum Wales who have funded and supported this visit.

Thank you all!

My directions turned out to be accurate and easy to follow and I arrived at Teal Creek in plenty of time for the tide. The biggest problem I had was deciding where to stop along the creek. At the time I arrived the tide still had a way to go out so it was difficult to know how much ground would be uncovered. I made my decision and walked out into the small inlet off the creek (photo 1). The area was very soft but the depth of the mud varied and I didn’t venture too far into deeper areas, wary of getting stuck. As I dug around I was surprised to find the same new ragworm that I had found at Sand Bay the previous day, having not found it at any site before and now two in a row. There were also many of the bamboo worms that seem to dominate the shores here.

I left the creek shortly before actual low tide in order to give myself time to get over to Camilla Creek where low tide would be in just over 2 hours time. The tide hadn’t gone down much for a while so I didn’t think I would be missing anything new being uncovered.  As I drove out past the previous choices I had had for stopping in the area I realised that the earlier bays had much larger areas of mud flat exposed and I thought maybe I had made a mistake in my choice of sampling site. However, on reflection, the water had retreated to the far side of the creek from these bays and that would have left me with no access to water across the mud which is essential during the collecting, so I probably did make the right choice after all.

Camilla Creek was reached fairly quickly with some expanses of mud flat already exposed. It was a much larger, wider creek (photo 2) than Teal but the shore itself seemed more gravelly leading down to it. I quickly realised that although the approach was easier, the mud itself was softer and deeper and probably not to be ventured too far into without additional company for safety and better sampling gear than what now felt like a very short pair of wellies. After extricating myself from the mud I skirted around the edge of the water level in the small bay sampling different spots and finding quite a variety of different mud, sand and hard areas to try.

Eventually it was time to leave for the journey back. This time I kept the window tightly shut and arrived back slightly less dusty than the previous night. There was at least one new worm for my list from the samples in the form of another different paddleworm (photo 3).

Saturday saw the last of the formaldehyde to alcohol changing where possible. The later samples would all have to stay in formaldehyde though as they needed to stay in that fluid for at least a few days to make sure they were properly ‘fixed’ before being moved to alcohol. That will now be done after both I and they arrive back in Cardiff. This was then followed by several hours of painstakingly sealing and taping around the lid of each pot and then sealing them into bags in order to reduce the risk of any fluid leakage during transport. As there were around 200 pots to do this took a while! The photo shows all of the pots at various stages of packing.

This morning (Sunday) saw a few more hours of sealing and packing until I had 7 boxes of packed samples ready for posting tomorrow (I can’t bring them back on the plane with me sadly).
There had been plans to do a last shore dive locally this afternoon but unfortunately the wind has scuppered our plans, blowing strongly all day. As it would have been a shallow site with entry off the shore, the windy conditions would have made getting in and out of the water difficult, conditions underwater uncomfortable and visibility poor, so an obvious decision was made. Still disappointing though as everyone had told me what a lovely dive it was going to be!

Tomorrow’s plan includes my final talk at the Fisheries Department in the morning followed by getting those parcels on their way and then getting my own packing started. Only one more day left here!

Wow, what a glorious day! It’s a bank holiday here but unlike most in the UK, a bank holiday with fantastic weather. The temperature is 18degC, that may not sound that high but it feels very warm and the burn factor is quite high. It’s been strange driving along listening to the radio reporting the weather in the UK which I hear is particularly bad right now. I am very thankful for being where I am!

This morning’s sampling site was Sand Bay, near Port Harriet, about a half hour drive out of Stanley. The bay opens out quickly to a wide area of sand (photo 1). The sand varies quite widely across the bay from very coarse to fine, sometimes with gravel or rocks and in other places just sand. The animals themselves also seemed to change accordingly so it was worth dotting my sampling sites around the bay.

Although at first this bay didn’t seem that much different to several of the other sites I’ve been to, a couple of the samples turned up some very different animals.

The most interesting was in a patch of the ‘solid’ sand, no stones but with some layers of old plant material as you dug down. Burrowing into those layers were a different sort of ragworm to any of those I’ve seen in any of my other samples, with striking red and white colours along its body (photo 2). I spent a while collecting several of these as they were obviously a different species to those I already had.

There was also a different type of paddleworm, the longest yet (photo 3), from one of the other sample spots. I only found one of these though.

By the time the tide turned, I had a large collection of pots from the different sites around the bay and a few animals that I already knew would be new to my list. As I wanted to get some photos of the ragworm with its colours I decided to go back into Stanley to the Fisheries lab rather than head straight out towards Darwin. I wasn’t that far away and it was worth the time. After a quick photo session I then got back on the road again, back out past where I had already been that morning and on to Darwin which would be nearly a 2 hour drive.

As it was such a warm and dry day I had the window open slightly but wasn’t prepared for just how much dust was created driving along the gravel roads. It was only when I arrived here at Darwin that I realised that the car, both inside as well as out, and myself, were coated in the dust.

I have been given instructions on how to get to the two creeks I want to sample tomorrow and hopefully they will also provide some interesting finds to end the week.

Back out to the shore this morning with Freya for company once again. We were only going a short distance outside of Stanley to an inlet called Mullet Creek (photo 1). This was a stream flowing down towards a sea inlet surrounded by coarse gravelly sand at the higher end, changing to a medium sand further down towards the sea. It was surprisingly less soft than I expected but still had a similar fauna to the site I sampled up at Mount Kent that had been much softer. It wasn’t quite as far down to the sea as it had been at Mount Kent, where I never even got close to finding where the sea had gone to).

I collected more of the Boccardia species (photo 2) that I thought might be different to the first one I had found which burrows into hard places such as the calcareous algae. These are very small and require a long time spent kneeling on the sand teasing them out of the surface layers (photo 3). There were also more paraonids, including more whole specimens, which is always good to find as opposed to small pieces!

The sea did still go out a long way as the inlet was very shallow. We were still heading down it when we came up to a fence that came part way out into the inlet. This was a minefield warning fence and so that was the end of our journey down the inlet. We still managed 6 separate sampling spots spaced out ranging from what would be ‘high shore’ to what was virtually ‘low shore’ so we didn’t do badly.

The sun didn’t come out for most of our sampling which kept it a little cool but also meant we were less likely to burn. It did come out as soon as we were finished though to warm us up.

A few hours back at the lab going through the samples and then a bit more formaldehyde to alcohol changing finished off the day.

The next couple of days will be quite busy. I’ll be sampling at Port Harriet tomorrow morning, a little further out from Stanley than I went today and then from there I’m heading west to Darwin for the night. Darwin is a couple of hours away on a narrow strip of land that connects the two sections of East Falkland, one northeast the other southwest, together. With sea on both sides but from completely different sides of the island, I’ll be able to sample two sites on Friday morning which have tides nearly two and a half hours apart. I’ll then head back to Stanley where I can sort the samples out in the evening. That will then be the last of the shore sampling!

With the tides being so poor at the moment I decided to forego this morning’s tide in favour of organisation for the rest of the week and of what I have done so far. That’s my excuse anyway and I’m sticking to it.

One job that needed to get started was to transfer my large number of samples from formaldehyde to alcohol. Formaldehyde is great for ‘fixing’ the specimens initially but is not good for long-term preservation and vice versa for alcohol. Also, formaldehyde is an acidic solution and this is very bad for those animals that build calcium-based tubes as it starts to dissolve the tubes making them weak and difficult to observe. The formaldehyde has to be poured out of the pots (through a sieve so as not lose those precious worms) and then replaced with water for a short time to help remove salt crystals from the seawater before being moved to 70-80% ethanol. I managed to get through the first two weeks samples before stopping.

Other mundane activities that needed doing including getting some cash out. Not as simple as it sounds as not a single ATM exists on these islands! A trip to the one and only bank is required to be supplied with Falkland Islands pounds.

Then the excitement of picking up my next car, not borrowed this time but hired for a few days. This time I have the luxury of a Mitsubishi Shogun to drive around. A bit bigger than the landrovers but surprisingly not as nice to drive although electric windows are always appreciated. Of course, being a Japanese car this means that every time I want to indicate a turn I now turn the windscreen wipers on instead followed by muttered curses as I indicate late and then try and turn the wipers off. And yes, I did do this every single time today. Hopefully tomorrow I may remember which side they are on and then undoubtedly I’ll do the same in my own car when I next get back in it. It also came with that Falkland Islands signature feature, a large crack in the windscreen. This might have been disconcerting at the start of the trip but since I haven’t seen a single car windscreen here without a similar crack, you have to accept it as a fact of life that comes with driving over loose gravel roads all the time.

Mobility reinstated I went back to the Fisheries department for more land ownership investigations and permission requesting for the next few days localities. So a quiet day compared to most of the others and sadly nothing that generated exciting photos for me to post. Instead I have added a couple more wormy pictures from earlier days for your enjoyment and a gratuitous picture of a crab because I like it.