We may be in lockdown, but nature continues to thrive, plants continue to need tending and borders weeding. Just as the nation is tending to its gardens, so are the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Historic Gardens Unit team, albeit at a reduced working schedule. Here, Juliet Hodgkiss who maintains St Fagans’ beautiful and varied gardens shares a little about what’s going on there.
To keep safe and maintain distance during the pandemic, each of our team are working one day a week to do essential gardening. With only one gardener in at any one time we are in total isolation, keeping both ourselves and others safe. One of the most important jobs we have to do is the planting and maintenance of our collection of heritage potato varieties. These potatoes were donated to the Museum over twenty years ago by the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency. As a living object, these potatoes must be grown every year to produce seed potato for the following year. Our collection includes the Lumper, the potato grown at the time of the Irish potato famine, which we grow in Nant Wallter and Rhyd-y-car gardens. We also grow Yam, Myatt’s Ashleaf, Skerry Blue and Fortyfold, all varieties from the 18th and 19th century.
This winter we had a great time planting many new trees in the Gardens, to replace lost trees, add new interest for the visitors and for attracting wildlife. We’ve added four new mulberry trees to the Mulberry Lawn, several species of hawthorn, rowan trees and Berberis shrubs to the terrace banks, three whitebeam, a katsura tree, a snakebark maple and a snowy mespilus by the ponds, crab apples to the Castle Orchard and a variety of native species for future coppicing. While we’re enjoying the warm, dry spring, it does mean that all these new trees need a lot of watering to keep them alive. Many are planted a long distance from the nearest tap, so have to be watered with watering cans.
We are also keeping the plants in our greenhouses and nursery alive. We have many plants which are either rare or unique to St Fagans. These include two offspring of our fern-leaved beech and seedlings from a pine which was lost in a storm a few years ago. These require daily watering this time of year. Spring is the time of year we replant our beds and borders, filling the gaps left by plants lost over winter. We didn’t get around to planting all the plants we ordered over the winter months before the lockdown, so we’re keeping these plants alive while trying to get as many as possible in the ground, with our greatly reduced staff.
For our avid blog readers, you might recall previous articles about a group of worms which certainly dig! They are the shovel head worms, or to give them their scientific name, magelonids. Shovel head worms are a small group of marine bristle worms (polychaetes), which are sea worms related to earthworms and leeches, with bristles along their bodies. Shovel head worms get their name from their spade-shaped heads, which they use to dig in soft sediments such as sands as muds. They are pretty small and delicate, so although we have them around our coasts, they are often tricky to find. Therefore, they are not as well-known as other marine bristleworms such as lugworms and ragworms, often used by fisherman as bait! Their size also means that they can be pretty difficult to collect, ever tried looking for a worm less than 1 mm wide on a beach? We have! Despite their size they are quite beautiful worms (although, I may be slightly biased!) and like other marine bristleworms they are an important food source for many other sea creatures, and also are the gardeners of the ocean, re-working the sediments like earthworms do on land.
Shovel head worm, Magelona filiformis, first described off Plymouth in 1959
Although, I wear many different hats in the museum, one of my principle jobs is being a taxonomist. Taxonomy is the science of naming, describing and classifying life on earth. That may be finding new species, or re-describing species which were discovered many moons ago. When we find a new species, we draw it, take photographs of it (sometimes using Scanning Electron Microscopes enabling us to Zoom in really closely!), describe it and then pick a name for it in Latin. To give you an example here is a species that I described with colleagues in China.
Shovel head worm, Magelona equilamellae, first described off Southern France in 1964
So, what have we been up to recently? We have been reviewing the shovel head worms of Europe, of which there are currently nine species known. Four of which were first described from the UK, three off France, one off Portugal and one off Sweden. Although, these are worms we know, back when the species were first described we didn’t know all of the features/characters that we needed to know in order to correctly identify and seperate them. Unfortunately, this means that the worms get mis-identified, causing problems for people who monitor the health of our seabeds! This is where we step in, re-describing the species and producing identification keys and guides to help people in the future. Over the last year we have been busy reviewing the species, a paper on which has just been published. Now scientists all around the world will be able to correctly identify their European shovel head worms.
Eight species of shovel head worm found in Europe
We have been doing this with a Professional Training Year Student from Cardiff University, and colleagues from Spain and Portugal.
ACNMW has a dedicated and skilled team of Technicians supporting the care and exhibition of ACNMW’s world class art collections. Here one of the team, Paul Emmanuel, reflects on the links between a piece of his own art work and a work by Claude Monet, ‘Rouen Cathedral’.
Working with the Art collection at the National Museum Cardiff offers incredible privileges, not least is the opportunity of handling works and seeing them close up and out of their frames. This brings new readings to the forms. Techniques and applications appear more visible bringing a visceral quality to the surfaces.
I’m certain that influences from the collection filter into my own Art practice, directly or subliminally. Pink Backward Painting wasn’t made in response to Rouen Cathedral but my work at ACNMW offered a rare opportunity to compare in detail, the surfaces and forms of each work.
The comparison of works comes from a particular time in the conservation studio. Having finished Pink Backward Painting at Nantyffin Chapel and unframed Rouen Cathedral at ACNMW, I felt a resonance between the two paintings which still holds strong today.
Chama sarda from the Caribbean, found in western Ireland
In the previous blog (What are Non-native (or alien) Species?) I talked about non-native species and how they are transported around the planet. In this blog I’ll tell you a bit more more about rafting bivalves that can cross the Atlantic on plastics and about some of the UK hotspots for these non-native (alien) hitchikers.
What is rafting?
Rafting has occurred throughout geological time, and it is how many terrestrial (land-dwelling) species colonised islands and other regions across the seas. A good example of this is the lemurs of Madagascar. 60 million years ago there were no lemurs on the island of Madagascar, but their ancestors were on the mainland of the African continent. So how did they actually get to Madagascar? Palaeontologists tell us that rafting is the answer. Back then, Madagascar was closer to the mainland and currents in the Mozambique Channel were much stronger towards the island than they are now. The lemurs’ ancestors must have found their way onto mats of vegetation or branches and by chance rafted to Madagascar. A completely fluke event!
Violent storms assist the dispersal of non-native species on plastics
Today, our litter ends up in the oceans and provides unnatural vehicles for marine non-native species. Over the last decade more than 20 species of Caribbean bivalve shells have ended up on British and Irish beaches attached to plastic buoys, bait buckets, ropes and others items – even a piece of a car running board! The latter had three different types of Caribbean bivalves attached, one of which, the Bicolor Purse Purse Oyster, is an invasive species in Brazil. Violent storms help to throw the plastic objects high onto our shores and they are then found by beach cleaners, beachcombers and others on the strandline at the top of the beach. Many of the shells or photographs are sent to Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd - National Museum Cardiff to be identified and hence to work out where they came from.
Conveyor belts and hotspots
General locations of rafting bivalve records in the southwest of Britain and Ireland
The rafting species that we are studying start off attaching to plastics in the Caribbean. These plastics eventually float into the warm ocean currents of the Gulf Stream, which originates in the Gulf of Mexico, and provides a conveyor belt to transport non-native species across the Atlantic Ocean to the British Isles. Once here, violent storms then deposit the plastics, with their hitchhikers still attached, onto our shores.
The hotspots for non-native species records are in the southwest of England and western Ireland, but there are also records for western Scotland. Strangely enough there are no records for Wales, even though some of the beaches are prime, exposed shores similar to those in Ireland and England.
I want to discover if there are any welsh hotspots for rafting bivalves, find out which beaches to search and to encourage people to go out to those locations to try and get some records for Wales.
Why should we monitor these species?
It is important to establish points of entry for any non-native species, which is why we need to map where the rafting species are arriving so that we can monitor numbers of any species arriving alive that could possibly pose a threat. When a species moves to a new location, the species that already live there have to adapt to cope with the newcomer. This can put a strain on populations that use the same food source or habitat as the invading species, which is why we want to know where these rafting species are washing ashore. All the rafting species that we’ve encountered so far cannot reproduce in our waters as they need warmer sea temperatures of 20°C or more to breed. However, if sea temperatures continue to rise, climate change could aid more rafting species to create self-sustaining populations here which could become a real problem
The Bicolor Purse Oyster – an invasive species in Brazil
Byssus threads of Bicolor Purse Oyster from the Caribbean
Of the non-native rafting species found so far in the UK, the Bicolor Purse Oyster (Isognomon bicolor) is the one that has shown up in the greatest numbers. It was first described as a species in 1846 by C.B. Adams who collected it in Jamaica. It has been spotted around the coasts of Florida, Texas and Bermuda and several of the Caribbean islands all of which are considered its natural range. However, in 1970 it was recorded outside its natural range in the eastern state of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. It has since moved further southwards and is considered an invasive species in Brazil as it is competing with native oysters and mussels for space and is spreading quickly.
The Bicolor Purse Oyster in Britain and Ireland
The Bicolor Purse Oyster has been found in Cornwall, Dorset and western Ireland by eagle-eyed beachcombers. They noted locations, objects that the oysters were attached to, and they collected the shells. The beachcombers are great photographers so we have a record of the variety of sizes, shapes and colours of the shells found here. The Bicolor Purse Oyster is small (up to 28mm), flattened and elongated. The outside is beige and white, sometimes with purple blotches and is smooth apart from being a bit flaky-looking. The front of the shell has byssus threads of pale to dark brown that protrude ready to attach to hard surfaces. In its natural range this species attaches to rocks and is commonly found in the Florida Keys.
What next?
Although there are lots of records of rafting species in Ireland and England, there are none for Wales. Does that mean that they do not wash ashore in Wales? Doubtful! This is why I’ve set up a project to get people out onto beaches looking for any plastics that could be likely rafts. The project involves citizen scientists – volunteers from the general public – who can help to spot these rafting species in Wales.
To find out more about this part of the project see next week's blog entitled Rafting Bivalves - the Citizen Science project.
