The day of the Olinguito

South America is the bird continent.  During my two years in Ecuador I saw over 1100 species, including a dazzling array of hummingbirds in the cloud forests of the Andes, where I spent most of my time.  Mammals were much harder to come by, especially away from the Amazonian lowlands.  You could almost guarantee a Red-tailed Squirrel and several bats, but anything else was a good sighting and cause for excitement.  Steve and I had one such experience late one afternoon as the clouds closed in on the upper Tandayapa Valley.  We were walking along the road when we saw something in a tree.  It looked like a Kinkajou Potos flavus, a racoon-like mammal I had once seen at the Bird Lodge, but trailing behind the animal we were looking at now was a bushy tail unlike the sleek prehensile tail of a Kinkajou, which grasps branches and wraps around them as it moves through the canopy.  We took some grainy photos in the fading light, and Steve got a short bit of video.  Back at the lodge, the field guide allowed us to identify our mammal as an Olingo Bassaricyon gabii.

Soon after I returned to Britain, Roland Kays contacted me.  He said that he had seen my Olingo photos and that they were of an undescribed species that he and his colleagues were working on!  He asked whether he could use them to help with the paper they were preparing, which he hoped would be submitted by the end of 2006.  I excitedly said yes, but that was seven years ago and I heard nothing more about it until last week when this message from Roland arrived in my inbox:

  

Dear Mark 

A few years ago I contacted you about using your olingo photos as part of a scientific project we have about the genus and you said that would be fine.  In fact, you have the best photographs in the wild of what turns out to be a completely new species.  It took us longer than expected to pull all the parts of this story together, but it is now ready to hit the public via publication in a journal called ZooTaxa.  Kris Helgen from the Smithsonian is the lead author, and we expect (hope) there to be a fair amount of press associated with the discovery, which we hope will also raise the attention for the conservation needs of Andean cloud forest.  

So that is how my photos became the face of the Olinguito Bassaricyon neblina.  It certainly has received a fair amount of press.  Over the last two days I have seen my Olinguito looking out at me from most of the national newspapers, the television news websites, and dozens of blogs and Youtube videos.  My small part in this discovery is all down to luck, but it has been exciting to be involved in it.  And I need to make the most of it: when else will my photos be seen by millions of people?

Okapi weevil

The spectacular giraffe weevil of Madagascar Trachelophorus giraffa is often featured in wildlife documentaries.  We do not expect such bizarre and colourful species in the temperate zone, but although it does not have the fame of its larger relative, we do have our own shorter-necked but just as colourful version.  Apoderus coryli lives on Hazel Corylus avellanae.  It is bright red and black, just like its Malagasay cousin, but although its neck is long by normal standards it is not of giraffe proportions.  Perhaps we can liken it to an Okapi instead.

Like the giraffe weevil, Apoderus coryli is a leaf roller, making barrel-shape rolls from the leaves and laying its eggs inside them.  Although it is a widespread weevil, I have not seen it very often, so I was excited to find one on a Hazel in a copse on the reserve yesterday morning.

Today, another exotic insect got me running.  Some bright orange fluttered past and landed on Traveller's Joy Clematis vitalba in the hedge.  I quickly chased after it and once I had it in the binoculars I could see that it was a Jersey Tiger Euplagia quadripunctaria.  Now it was settled it had transformed from orange to zebra print, losing its colour but none of its visual impact.  This moth has been spreading out from its south Devon home, and it has been resident on the Isle of Wight since the 1990s.

The last of today's spectacular species may not appeal to everyone.  Cave spiders are huge, even bigger than the house spiders that seem to end up in baths more often than is good for them.  Keith took us to the old pump house out on the marshes where he lifted an inspection cover to reveal several enormous shiny, dark chocolate spiders.  Most of them were immature, but there were three big mammas that seemed to be adult, so we set about trying to get one on its back so we could see the relevant bits to identify it.  There are two British cave spiders, and they can only be separated by looking at the epigynes (females) or palps (males) of adults.  Our spider, when we got it flipped over, had the wide, narrow epigyne of Meta bourneti, which is much the rarer of the two.  This was another excellent natural history moment, combining the unexpected and spectacular with just a little frisson.

Many goosefoots are difficult to identify, but Oak-leaved Chenopodium glaucum is easy, and I like it almost for that alone.  It also has an attractive silver lining on the underside of the leaves (just visible in the photo above on the leaf below the tip), which adds to its appeal.  This plant is probably an ancient introduction like poppies and many of our other cornfield weeds.  It is uncommon, but I see it around the Thames Estuary quite often, and there is a good population here at Brading.

Shooting stars

Our visit to the Isle of Wight coincided with the Perseid meteor shower, and in a corner that was darker than my home town, but still probably too bright for most astronomers, we saw four meteors streak across the sky like fireworks.  Being out and looking up on a clear night reminded me that the night sky is one of the wonders of the world.  I could not do it justice with a camera, but I was happy to try with some closer stars.  The Starlet Sea-anemone Nematostella vectensis is tiny and does not produce trails across the sky, but it has an interesting story.  It had been living undiscovered in shallow coastal lagoons until 1935, when Thomas Alan Stephenson described it as a new species based on specimens from Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, which is where we found ourselves today, peering into shallow waters and looking for small white stars in the mud.  It was nice to find them here dotted over the soft surface of the saline pools almost eighty years after they were first noticed.  Since their discovery, these sea-anemones have become a favourite species for those studying developmental and evolutionary biology and other biological questions.

Dr Stephenson named his new anemone after its place of discovery, the island the Romans called Vectis.  It was subsequently found on the other side of the Atlantic, first along the east coast of North America, and then on the Pacific coast.  It has received a high level of protection in England because of fears for its saline lagoon habitat, but recent studies suggest that it is not native here.  Genetic analysis reveals that the English and Pacific populations are so similar to those on the eastern seaboard of America that they could not have been separated for long; hardly the pattern of variation you would expect if the anemones had been separated on both sides of the Atlantic for millennia.  The evidence suggests that Nematostella vectenis, despite being discovered and named here, is only a recent arrival.  The most likely explanation is that it has been accidentally transported as a stowaway on a boat.  Non-native status may rob the Starlet Sea-anemone of the high standing and protection it currently enjoys, but it remains a curiosity and a part of the history of our natural history.

Sea-anemones are best sought by day, but Glow-worms Lampyrus noctiluca are best enjoyed after dark.  I do not often see them in their bioluminescent glory, but we managed to find one on each night we went out on the reserve.  The first was in a wood, the second was along a path between the lagoons where we had heard Wood Crickets Nemobius sylvestris singing during the day.

Apart from the meteors and Glow-worm, our first night had not produced much; a Lesser Stag Beetle Dorcus parallelipideus was one of the few other things of note.

This evening was slightly more productive.   Before the sun went down I had a short walk from where we were staying to the allotments at Lake to look for Martin's Ramping-fumitory Fumaria reuteri.  I had seen this here over ten years ago, when an allotment holder let us in to examine the plants.  There was nobody around this time, but one of the plants had escaped onto the nearby road, allowing close enough examination to confirm its identity.

Like the sea-anemone, this species was once thought of as a rare native, but opinion now considers it a recent introduction.  Whatever its status, there is no doubting that it has been turning up in new places.  The population in the allotments at Lake was for a long time thought to be the only one in Britain, but plants have recently appeared at scattered sites from Kintyre to Kent.