A wander for millipedes

We had a walk in our local cemetery today. The eastern part of the cemetery is the oldest and the area has been pretty much left to run wild for many decades. There are huge trees embracing headstones and ivy also covering them, so sometimes it is not obvious you are in a cemetery. It is a muddy and wild place to explore. The cemetery has a lot of dead wood left on the ground and loose stones, which makes it a great place to search for millipedes: today's wild thing.
 We pushed through nettle beds, brambles and hogweed, waded through muddy puddles, crossed others by walking on logs and did a little millipede collection on the way. The wet weather had also brought some interesting fungi.
 Millipedes do often go unnoticed, as they live under the cover of logs, bark and stones, on leaf-litter or in the soil. They have many similar body segments and a pair of legs on each segment. Despite their name, no species reaches 1000 legs. Millipedes have defensive glands and they often open into colour spots on the side of the body called ozadenes. There are about 60 British species of which we found four.

Pterostichus niger ground beetle, centipede, Discus snail under stone.

Tachypodoiulus niger is very easy to identify as it has a black body and white legs. When disturbed it wriggles like a snake. I often find it on dead wood.

In contrast, Cylindroiulus punctatus curls up when disturbed.

Here is once stretched. C. puctatus has a characteristic face mask between its eyes and a clubbed tail end.

In Blaniulus guttulatus the ozadenes are bright red. This species has no eyes and it's thin and tiny

Here are two Blaniulus guttulatus under a stone. They are often found together in large numbers.

A Flat-backed millipede, Polydesmus sp.

The Sycamore embracing a headstone.

A mushroom on yew that looked like mango ice cream.

Lots of Jelly ear fungus.

Cemetery Bugs

There is a large cemetery nearby and today me youngest daughter came with me and decided to have a bug safari. It was the first visit in the year that I have taken many more invertebrate than bird photos.

A pine Ladybird on orange lichen, Xanthoria parietina 

A group of the blind millipede Blaniulus guttulatus, with Porcellio scaber and a while slug under a piece of wood

A colourful cluster of Harlequin ladybirds appeared to have emerged from a crack in a damaged tree and some were flying off

Peacock sunbathing

A carpet of Lesser Celandines

Flowering Willow

Harlequins and Amaurobius (with nests?) under broken headstone.

Red Ant nest

We found this Red Ant, Myrmica sp., nest under a stone. The chamber in the middle of the photo had many workers tending larvae, and what appeared to be a queen, a bit larger with darker head on the top left corner. With the ants, there were a few Cyphoderus albinus, a species of white springtail which is often found inside ants nests. There were also many millipedes, thread-like, blind, with red spots, Blaniulus guttulatus.

Blaniulus guttulatus millipede

White springtails, millipedes, red ands and a slug

Flat-backed millipedes

My local - now disused - Victorian cemetery is like an old woodland. There are mature trees with woodpecker holes, tree stumps, dead wood, thick leaf litter. Dead wood is a habitat full of life even in winter. Slugs and snails, springtails, millipedes and centipedes, woodlice, mites, little beetles and their larvae, tiny spiders, and fly larvae: they might be a bit torpid, but still active. In the cemetery, I often come across flat-backed millipedes, Polydesmus on dead wood, often in pairs. They are relatively large and - true to their name -, have a flat, sculptured back. There are five similar species of this genus in the UK that can be only told apart by examining the male gonopods, an 8th pair of modified legs to transfer sperm, or the females' genitalia (which opens behind the second pair of legs), features that can only seen properly when dissected. Males have sturdier legs and appear to have a gap behind the 7th leg (where their gonopods are), where in females the gap appears behind the second pair. The most common species is P. angustus.
 A couple of weeks ago, I surprised this pair of embracing flat-backed millipedes under a piece of rotting stump, maybe mating or just checking each other out? In another photo I can see that the head of the millipede on top is holding onto the rear end of the other one.

Pair of Polydesmus 3rd March 2013

And a few days ago I found a pair of smaller ones, one of them is walking at the top of the post.

Snake millipede

I was out and about this weekend taking advantage of our "mini-spring". When repotting some self-seeded daisies I came across a few millipedes in the soil. I seem to always encounter the same species (maybe the same genus I should say, as there are several similar looking species) of millipede: a long, thin type of various sizes, which, upon encounter rolls itself into a spiral. This is the aptly named millipede Cylindroiulus. The commonest UK species is C. punctatus and it is likely this is my garden's species. Millipedes (Class Diplopoda) like insects and spiders are arthropods, and they are thought been amongst the first animals colonising land, some time in the Silurian Period, over 400 million years ago. There are around 10,000 described species, although there are probably several times that number of species to be described. Just 52 of them are known from the U.K. Millipedes are mainly detritus-feeders, and are often found in the soil, leaf litter, or on dead wood, where they contribute to the recycling of vegetal matter.
 Millipedes means "A thousand legs" but millipedes, although having more legs than centipedes, don't have a thousand legs, the record holder is, apparently, 750! Each of the millipedes body section has two pair of legs, except the few rings behind the head. Their antenna are elbowed and clubbed, and they constantly tap the ground while they move. Cilindroiulus has eyes, but many millipedes, especially those permanently living in the soil or in caves, lack eyes. A curious feature of millipedes eyes is that they add ocelli as they moult, so that adults have much large eyes, and likely much better eyesight, than juveniles. The ocelli are added so precisely to each moult than the growth stage can be determined in some species by counting the rows of ocelli.

 Millipedes can deter predators, physically, curling up into a spiral which shelters the head and ventral area (above), exposing only the chitinous, hard dorsal rings, in a similar way to an armadillo or pill woodlouse. At the same time they curl up, they display their chemical defence: they secrete cocktails of repellent and/or toxic chemicals through glands present in each body ring when attacked. In large centipedes the smell may be quite obvious, in small ones, you have to sniff them to detect the smell. Some small predators might be killed by these chemicals if confined with the millipede in a small space, or deterred by the smell. Despite this defence, millipedes fall prey to birds who like to explore the leaf litter, such as blackbirds.
 During winter, Cylindroiulus moves down into the soil, and sometimes several individuals roll up together during winter or hide under bark. That is what the usually wood dwelling millipede was doing under the pot soil.

More information

Stephen P. Hopkin, Helen J. Read. 1992. The biology of millipedes. Oxford University Press, 1992 233 pp.

Gordon Blower. 1985. Millipedes: keys and notes for the identification of the species. Brill Archive. 242 pages.

The log pile revisited

We made a couple of log piles in the garden last year. Today I dismantled one of them to check what was in it. This was a very 'untidy', and relatively dry log pile, with the logs having been covered on branches from pruning bushes around the garden and the location being under a large Philadelphus bush. The first finding was that a lovely crumbly pile of compost had accumulated around the logs. There was a lot of bug activity in the pile. The most abundant form of -visible- life were woodlice, especially the common rough woodlouse, Porcellio scaber, which made the compost move as they were so many, also some smooth woodlouse, Oniscus asellus and common striped woodlice Philoscia muscorum. I found three species of snails: many common garden snails, Helix aspersa (=Cornu aspersum) most of them hibernating; a yellow banded snail Cepaea (one of 5 specimens we released in the garden a couple of years ago), and several Glass Snails Oxychilus draparnaldi (photo above). Several yellow slugs Limax flavus crawled around. There were quite a few spiders, amongst then a very large Tegenaria and possibly an Amaurobius, which rapidly disappeared amongst the logs. I also found some Blunt-tailed Snake Millipede (Cylindroiulus punctatus), which coiled into a spiral when disturbed. I saw some new springtails, but I couldn't get a decent photo. As for insects, a Harlequin seemed to be hibernating on a log. By far the most shocking thing was a couple of enormous earthworms, Lumbricus terrestris, which I found while they abandoned the log pile - possibly feeling the disturbance - by creeping on the ground. One of them was so large that at first I thought it was a snake! Big fun examining this log pile, I am sure I forgot to mention some bugs. I didn't even go through the whole of it but it yielded quite a number of interesting finds.

A banded snail, some woodlice and an earthworm

Garden Snails

Three species of woodlouse can be seen in the image

A specimen of the millipede Cilindroiulus punctatus

The largest earthworm I've seen in my garden, creeping on the ground

The same earthworm being held, just for scale

A yellow slug, Limax flavus

Bug overload!

These days I find it difficult to settle on a topic for the blog. We have gone from long bug-poor weeks of indoor seclusion through the long harsh winter to a month of March when things seem to happen too quickly. So I am writing posts more alike to my nature notebook, which, by the way, was the original intention when I started. We had a lovely sunny, mild day today and I pottered about in the garden bug-watching and took a couple of local walks. Even when doing the shopping I came across bugs worth posting about. What to choose? I just can't.

Small Tortoiseshell on willow

A male Anthophora plumipes hovering

The morning started by my discovery of a bug magnet in a neighbours garden: a flowering willow. The large bush was teeming with bumblebees, all of the ones I could see were Bombus terrestris. A Small Tortoiseshell, the first one this year, feed in the catkins and several Anthophora plumipes males were hovering around ramming every now and then both the butterfly and the bumblebees. I took a few pictures but I wasn't close enough for good ones. I had to stop myself from picking up the binoculars, though, to watch the activity at close range. Nectar-feeding insects prefer to visit sources where flowers are in large masses, so that they save energy looking for the next source. Willows in early spring provide a large number of flowers where typically there are not many other species flowering, so they are sought after my many bees and bumblebees.

 A brimstone passed by flying over the gardens. This is my typical brimstone sighting, early spring, fluttering past, never stopping and I rarely see them again the rest of the year. A frustrating butterfly! The following photos illustrate other sightings.

A beautiful Harlequin sunbathing

A couple of mating 7 spot ladybirds

Baby millipedes found clinging to an old conker