We look at an invertebrate commonly found in ponds and ditches, the water lice. We cover the 3 native UK species Asellus aquaticus, Proasellus meridianus, Asellus cavaticus and the non native Caecidotea communis, their life cycle, feeding, breeding and predators. We also read out our listeners 2021 wildlife highlights and discuss our own too.
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We talk to Jack Greenhalgh, who is studying a PhD on the wonderful underwater acoustic world of ponds & rivers. We talk about his research and listen to some of the noises made by freshwater invertebrates underwater.
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A (very) short episode where Neil talks about our freshwater Cnidarians, the usually marine group that include corals and sea anemones, which focuses on the freshwater Hydra species. With a brief look at the alien freshwater jellyfish that occasionally turn up in the UK as well.
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Its world wetlands day, so to celebrate the wonderful wildlife we find in these habitat I thought I’d share my best shots of freshwater life I took last year. All the underwater shots are in photographic aquarium. This a photo heavy post so I’ve kept the text to a minimum! My first freshwater photo of…
What pond creatures, such as the pond oilve mayfly, do to survive the cold in winter, and give some tips on how to look after your pond when it freezes over. Kestrel decline and our first memory’s of garden wildlife, and what surprises us about nature. Seal pup deaths and should dogs be allowed in nature reserves.
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In my last post I mentioned that I temporarily captured a bog raft spider to get some photos and this post will concentrate on just them. I have slight obsession with both species raft spiders, often referred to as the UK’s biggest 2 species. I spent a number of weekends trying to photograph them in…
There has been a bit of a gap since my last blog, so a fair bit to catch up on, but I’ll start with my most recent project; frog tadpoles. Two years ago I dug a small pond in my garden with the hope that some amphibians would turn up, but I only saw one…
I’ve just returned from a lovely trip to the Cairngorms in Scotland and have something like 6000 images to go through! But for now here are some of a Broad bodied chaser dragonfly nymph I took before I went on the trip using my pond creature photography technique. The above and next photo were taken…
Some recent posts on a Facebook page and on the Wild About Britain forum, as well as finding some aquatic caterpillars on some of the currently daily pond dips at work, made me realise I never posted (or even uploaded) my photos of these interesting creatures. These are the caterpillars of one of the china…
I’ve been playing with white backgrounds with my pond creature photography and I’m getting some OK results so far. Here is a Wasp (great) Diving Beetle.