29-10-2019: Jam packed mid October

Engaging the community with biodiversity

We've had a jam packed October with events. In mid October we kicked off events with other groups at the Kingston University Civic event. It was a great evening meeting local community members, staff and students, showcasing lots of different aspects of the work at Kingston university, including the work that we do in the Biodiversity Action group.

This was followed up with a day of events from 9am to 9pm.

Starting with monitoring our river for pollution incidents by monitoring invertebrate populations. We had a really good score, in spite evidence of rainfall resulting in pollution entering the river in the form of sewage rag. 

We caught a fish - though we didn't think it was a stickleback - if you know your fish and can identify this species - please post below. 

We also had a very very large gammerus specimen in our sample. Its the biggest one that we have ever sampled (we've called it Goliath). We had been worried thinking that it might be an example of the invasive gammerus species? FBA's Invasive FW Shrimps & Isopods guide. ZSL have confirmed that Goliath is in the growth range of native gammerus, but as the invasive species are in our area of London, we'll have to investigate a sub-sample of the individuals that we capture using a microscope to see if we are starting to get invasive species in our samples. 

We spent our afternoon doing our annual thinning of invasive pond plants from our pond at Penrhyn Road Campus.

We were lucky enough to see some individuals from our common frog population as we were clearing the pond. The condition of one of our frogs caused us concern, given that the torso and hind legs appeared to be extremely thin, the bones in the back appeared to be protruding a lot , and the individual wasn't reacting to our presence in a normal way. The photos that we took have been reported on the https://www.gardenwildlifehealth.org/ site. 

Amphibian disease is one of the reasons why we always ask people not to take or add new amphibians to ponds when they decide to clear out or add amphibians to their garden ponds. This old article from Froglife explains more.


31/10/2019 - amendment!
I forgot to say how we finished our day! in the evening we joined other groups from the local area to hear an amazing speaker - Erica McAlister talking about flies - and why, without this much maligned group of animals, the planet would be neck deep in a lot of stuff you wouldn't want it to be neck deep in! You can watch the whole talk on the Kingston Biodiversity Network's Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/529736513729812/ in the video shared by Elliot Newton on the 16th of October.





We'll post soon about our recent ditch management day at Tolworth Court Sports Grounds.
Until next time :)