Last saturday (25th) was St Dwynwen's Day! I hope you all had cards and treats... we had a family drop-in card making session here in St Fagans National History Museum and we also did a bit of sewing too.

We will be doing something pretty similar for Valentine's Day on 8th and 9th of February.

And the mocktail?

That was for reading group! We were discussing 'Rules of Civility' by Amor Towles which is set in 1930s New York and therefore we had suitably 30s type refreshments - Shirley Temples and kit kats all round! (the kit-kat was introduced in 1937). Our next reading group meet up will be on 22 February where we'll be discussing Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Stranger's Child'. It's a big book, so you'd better start now.

At the beginning of January we had a crochet session where myself and Anna Phillips attempted to turn everyone into crochet queens. Anna made up a great little easy pattern to crochet circles which could then be turned into a garland, or maybe a coaster if you stopped at just making one. We will be having another crochet meet up on March 15 so come along to that one, and because everyone seems keen I'll try and add more dates to the rest of the year.

To celebrate Dydd Santes Dwynwen we have searched our Natural History Collections at the Museum for some love related specimens:

The True Heart Cockle, found on reef systems in the Indo-Pacific.

Fioled Bêr/Sweet Violet (Viola odorata), which represents faithful love in the language of flowers.

The Purple Heart Urchin (Spatangus purpureus), a large heart-shaped urchin often found buried in sands and gravels. This is one of the specimens on display in the Life in the Sea Gallery.

Or for an alternative Dydd Santes Dwynwen, how about the Love-lies-bleeding plant (Amaranthus caudatus). This example was collected in Roath Park, Cardiff back in 1924 and is now in the National Welsh Herbarium at National Museum Cardiff.

More information on Dydd Santes Dwynen

Post by Sally Whyman, Jennifer Gallichan and Katie Mortimer-Jones

Happy New Year Bulb buddies! I hope you all had a fun Christmas.

It has been a very stormy in the last few weeks in many parts of the UK. Weather scientists at the Met Office say that this is due to the jet stream – a narrow band of fast moving winds high up in the atmosphere. The jet stream blows from west to east across the Atlantic Ocean and can bring us stormy weather.

December 2013 was the windiest month in the UK since January 1993. It has also been very rainy - in Scotland December was the wettest month since 1910. That means it hasn’t rained that much in Scotland for over 100 years! What has the weather been like where you live?

All this rain and stormy weather has meant that there have been floods in parts of England, Wales and Scotland, and sadly some people’s houses were flooded at Christmas. In areas close to the seaside giant waves also caused flooding.  

SUPER SCIENTIST CHALLENGE:

Why do some areas flood and others don’t? Use these maps to investigate!

Study the first map of Aberystwyth in Wales, where there has been flooding. Can you see the wiggly lines called ‘contour lines’ that show the shape of the mountains and hills? Can you see the sea and the river shown in blue? When rain falls in the surrounding area it runs down the hills into the river then into the sea. If there is very heavy rainfall the river may flood. If it is very stormy there may be very large waves. Where do you think it might flood? Hint – flooding can happen in low lying areas and areas near rivers and the sea. This link has some animations about the different factors that cause a flood.

Study the second map from the Environment Agency – the purple areas show where there is risk of flooding. Is the flood risk where you thought it would be?

Now you can investigate the area where you live…

First search for your school on the first map. Can you see any contour lines? Where is the high land and the low land? Is there a river, lake or the sea nearby? Where might it flood?

Next search for your school on the second map. Make sure you tick the two boxes ‘Flood Warning areas’ and ‘Flood Alert areas’ on the left of the page, flood risk areas will then show up in purple. Is there a flood risk in your area? Is the flood risk where you thought it would be?

(Searching for the ‘missing millions’) 

To an explorer of biodiversity, especially invertebrate biodiversity, tropical forests remain largely unknown and unmapped territory. I study the insect Order Diptera (flies), and while some 150,000 species have already been found and described world-wide, perhaps 2-10 million (maybe more!) remain completely unknown to science and a large proportion of these will undoubtedly be found in tropical forests. As Principal Curator of Entomology, much of my research effort is devoted to finding and describing the ‘missing millions’ (taxonomy), understanding how and where they evolved (phylogeny and biogeography) and investigating the roles they play in modern ecosystems (ecology).

One of my favorite areas to work in is southeast Asia, particularly Thailand where my studies have already described about 70 new species of fly in the group known as Empidoidea (dance-flies and their allies). I recently began a project with Wichai Srisuka, my colleague in the Entomology section of the Queen Sirikit Botanic Garden in Thailand, in which we are using Malaise traps (a tent-like structure into which insects fly and can be trapped) to sample dance-flies and other insects on two of Thailand’s highest mountains; Doi Inthanon and Doi Phahompok. The samples collected will no doubt contain many new species for me to describe for the first time and should also yield valuable data on how communities of insects on the mountains vary with altitude. The summit slopes of Doi Phahompok and Doi Inthanon are covered in a type of thick luxurious wet forest known as Moist Hill Evergreen in which many endemic species occur (an endemic species is one entirely confined to a particular locality). Our earlier results suggest that although these two mountains are only 150km apart and have many similarities in their fly fauna, both have many endemic species on them too. By comparing the degree of ‘endemicity’ on the two mountains we hope to better understand some of the historical processes that gave rise to the exceptional biodiversity of these areas.

When scientists try to identify geographical areas of conservation importance they like to map not only diversity (essentially, how many different species there are) but also endemicity. Knowing exactly where biodiversity and endemicity hotspots are enables conservation planners to better target their efforts. In the tropics, knowledge of diversity and endemicity is largely confined to a few groups of plants and vertebrates. Unfortunately, these creatures represent only a small fraction of the variety of life so prioritizing conservation efforts using them alone is imperfect. Furthermore, measures of plant and vertebrate variety are not effective surrogates of invertebrate diversity whereas knowledge of invertebrate diversity does in fact tell us much about that of other animals and plants. We are slowly starting to produce maps of invertebrate endemicity which we hope will provide better tools to help conservation authorities in Thailand prioritize their conservation efforts.

Dr Adrian Plant