James' UEA Ecology Blog

As part of our fieldwork last week, we were investigating the abundance of holly leaf miners ( Phytomyza ilicis ) in a stretch of holly trees in some of the woodland on campus. In this post, I wanted to explore some of the fascinating biology of these organisms, as well as explain how we decided to survey them to estimate their population. Biology Holly leaf miners  are part of the Agromyzidae family . This is a group of small flies whose larvae mine leaves for food . Many other groups of organisms, however, have leaf-mining larvae as well, including other flies, moths, sawflies and beetles . They have a fascinating life cycle , where adult flies lay eggs on new holly foliage in May or June. The eggs are laid on the midriff of the leaf, on the protected underside of the leaf. The larvae tunnel inside the leaves, feeding on the plant tissues, first the midriff during the autumn months, followed by burrowing into the mesophyll. The following spring, they pupate inside the cuticle of ...

 A very belated Happy Halloween! On the night of Halloween, I joined a bat walk with the Conservation and Wildlife Society (CAWS), where we walked around the lake on campus, looking (and listening!) out for bats, including using bat detectors. Unfortunately, we failed to find any bats :( although it was very interesting to find out about the trees in which they roost and their preferred hunting grounds. It was also very nice to see the campus at night, especially on a suitably atmospheric Halloween! Daubenton's bats One of the many species of bat present on the UEA campus is the Daubenton's bat, and is one of the species I have managed to see on previous night-time walks, especially near the river - these vats are renowned for their use of watery habitats as hunting grounds. For the remainder of this post, I'd like to explore the biology and ecology of these species further. Daubenton's bats  ( Myotis daubentonii ) is a widespread bat in the British Isles, with the exce...

 A few weeks ago, we did pitfall trapping around the UEA campus to investigate invertebrate biodiversity in different habitats with different management techniques, as well as trying out different techniques of pitfall trapping. It was interesting to use a very different style of trapping to the small mammal trapping I have previously written about - catching creepy crawlies instead of cute mice this time! In this blog I'd like to give an overview of the pitfall trapping process, as well as a comparison of how humane it is compared to our small mammal trapping. What we did There was a selection of sites across campus we had the opportunity to survey, but we chose to look at the butterfly meadow (sugars.skinny.plenty) and playing fields (tells.yoga.twig). This allowed us to compare grassland habitats with a lower and higher intensity of management. At each location, we placed two pitfall traps. One was unbaited, and the other was baited with vinegar to kill any insects trapped in it...