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Ok there are millions of species on the planet, the question is how many of them
exist on Exeter University campus. We shall find out.
I think we're all right, I think we're all right so
it's all very exciting, it's all happening, we've got a bit of a bottleneck.
Everyone's heading off into the area known as the plantation; it's a collection of...
it's a jumble of vegetation, we've got all sorts of things,
native things and exotic things um and
i think we've got a log jam now, we've got a log jam of enthusuastic BioBlitzers
but hopefully it will sort itself out in a minute.
Look at that. I think
it's a honey fungus of some kind, got an
old tree stump here and this is
exactly like this, so this here is just the tip of an iceberg,
down below going into that deadwood are networks of kilometres
of microscopic micellia, threads that are basically digesting this ex-tree.
And every now and then, usually in the Autumn about now,
they send up the fruiting bodies which is why
at this time of year in the Autumn is a really good time for finding fungi.
So we've got a lovely clump of that,
I'll have to ask the mycologists exactly what it is.
I know Clive will be very excited if they get a bee
because he didn't think he was going to get any bumblebees here.
Are you going to bring them back and offload them onto the computer a bit later on? Yes. Yeah.
Excellent, technology and BioBlitzing.
Mr mycologist, Mr mycologist. Here. Aha, what have we found here?
I have no idea, I was hoping you'd tell me. Ok, this is a cortinarius; there's
two hundred and thirty-odd species of
cortinarius in the UK and I'm going to say I don't know what that one is.
Excellent and this is what I like to hear
you see, is this expert saying "I don't know"
which is what it's about. Sometimes we call it them LBJs which is little brown jobs.
Let's see if the bumblebee people have caught a bumblebee yet.
Are you going to set them a longworth trap or...? Ok.
We will stay and just watch them longworth mammal trap.
This is a longworth mammal trap here by the way. Thank you.
It's basically um... they're very expensive,
these are like fifty or sixty quid each now, but that's the great thing about being part of a
university is we manage to attract lots of people who've got loads of them already
if not part of the... are these the university ones or are these Wildlife Trust ones?
Er, I think they're the uni ones aren't they?
Excellent, see that's brilliant. They're probably the ones I used myself
when I used to be a student here.
And what they are is um a nest compartment
which has got some bait in it, we've got some hay in there to keep the small mammal warm
and this is the trap... the trap bit so you've got an entrance path,
a little door that opens like that and basically,
oh I've broken it, there's a little trip wire on the back so the small mammal
rests on that and the door shuts and that's it.
So you put them all together like that and then you set them somewhere useful
but we'll go and find out more about that now.
Ok, so here where it looks like the animals have already been running through,
that's the perfect place for a longworth trap because
we're not going to disturb them.
And the tube...so the tube...
hopefully they'll just come along and poo in it
and then we can look at their poo and find out
who's been wandering round.
Give them a nice clear run,
cover it over a bit and there's food in there
that the animals can smell and in they go.
Found a frog.
So really uh... backing up Fiona's point very nicely
is that frogs and toads and other amphibians aren't just about ponds,
they're about where they can hunt
and where they can rest out of the water as well.
And he's a boy as well, I can tell that because he's got nuptial pads
erm that's not somewhere he goes on his wedding night, it's um
it's those... on his thumbs he's got these big sort of *** pads there, see?
So the words ***, nuptial... all in the same, all in the same sentence
and I'm just talking about a frog!
I can't see anything. There's a happy BioBlitzer. Look, she's up to her thighs in sludge.
And I found myself doing what...
an old naturist used to... I caught doing on one of the courses I ran which was,
I found myself um, the eyes aren't what they used to be,
I'm using my magnifying lenses, so once you take your picture,
it's kind of cheating a bit and it takes away a bit of the magic
of looking at the living thing, but you just zoom in on them,
on your camera and then you can use your keys and go through all
the details, so you get an idea of uh...
so that's the... that's the beetle larvae we're trying to identify at the moment
um... in close up... is quite cool.
I think I saw something drop out.
Well you've been doing very well on catching things so far so let's have a look.
I just...
Ahh ooh you've got another.. ooh what was that. Yeah. I saw one come out of this hole
and it was black
and I don't even know what it was.
What is that... where did that bucket of stuff come from?
This is on the... on the BioBlitz area. Is it? It's at the bottom of the stream.
Do you notice he's immediately very defensive like I've (honestly) accused him of cheating. Honestly.
So we have a... so is this from the stream, the pond at the bottom? It is, yep.
Wow.
And so we've got sticklebacks, we've got three-spined sticklebacks, gasterosteus aculeatus,
lots of those and then we've got some
dragonfly nymphs, Nick might be able to id these, I don't know.
Mmmm, they look like hawkers of some kind (yea),
I'll have to get my book out on them properly but
we've got some hawker dragonfly and nymphs, yeah lots of those actually and
rather unusual because it's got... as you've seen it's rather covered down there.
So these sorts of margins that perhaps look a bit scruffy, are actually the
main study of the biodiversity that we have on campus, because this is where all the
small mammals are hanging out and that's then going to provide
prey for birds and owls and the kestrels and so on.
The point of this is, again, I'm going to champion Fiona's point here which is
we have just, we've sort of moved through the area quite a lot, I've kind of cheated a little bit,
we're slightly out of the BioBlitz area but it doesn't matter, we're not going to tell anyone.
This little area here is still on campus, it's right in the middle of campus
and this is just a little scruffy area, and everything... we've been here for ages,
there's signs of small mammals, we've had amphibians, we've got loads of bugs, harvestmen
flowers, it's all happening right here so it just goes to show you
just cos it doesn't appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities, doesn't mean it's no good for wildlife.
This is perfect and beautiful in lots of other ways.
So this is um obviously a very special beetle judging by the level of excitement here,
I mean to me, it's not a beetle I've seen, I can tell you that much but it's got
very beautifully fringed paddling legs there, obviously
a pond beetle of some kind so Clive you were getting excited by this.
Yes, it's beautiful isn't it. Apart from the fact it's such a fabulous big insect
it's not actually recorded very often down here either, if you look at distribution maps you get these
dots all around the country where they're distributed
and there's... they've got, I think it's three in the whole of the South West
so it's probably one of the first times it's been recorded in this area.
Wow, and if it wasn't for BioBlitzing we probably wouldn't have turned it up at all so... exactly, yeah.
Wonderful thing to find.
Clive, you're going to have to eat your words because you did say it's a bit late for bees and dragonflies.
A minute ago a bus...
there's buses, there's lots of traffic, there's building things, there's chainsaws going off over there
but that's the whole point, biodiversity is all around us, it's not
somewhere in a nature reserve locked away, it is all around us, we are suspended in biodiversity,
we are biodiversity and we depend on it.
Stick to the frog, he's much prettier.