Dalgety Bay - Diet of Worms

I decided to take a small break after January's madness. OK, that's a lie. I was painting my kitchen. There's no way I ever decided that, but it happened anyway.

Fortunately I was able to manage a fantastic hour at low tide on Sunday morning to keep the show on the road. It was a nice exercise in the variability of annelids. Ironically this was exactly the group I was thinking of as tedious and possibly avoidable. They showed me! My favourite was Cirriformia tentaculata, a spectacularly tentacled worm from under an intertidal rock. It would have been the scaleworm, which is awesome but which I already knew from last year.

Spirorbis spirorbis

Lepidonotus squamatus - a scale worm

Cirriformia tentaculata

Lumbricus rubellus

The Star of the day, literally, was the lovely Small Brittlestar, Amphipholis squamata, of which there were two. This is a very pretty little thing and allegedly bioluminescent. I spent some time trying to see this (naturally!) but to no avail.

And lastly on the way to the coast I wandered briefly into the woods and picked up Chaetosphaerella phaeostroma, which I expected to find somewhere. The spores are good value under the microscope.

So, we keep moving along and the kitched is even almost finished - I hope.

Numbers:

342		alga	Fucus serratus	Toothed Wrack
343		flowering plant	Ficaria verna	Lesser Celandine
344		diptera	Phytomyza ranunculi	An agromyzid fly
345		lichen	Opegrapha calcarea	A lichen
346		lichen	Lecidella asema	A lichen
347		alga	Laminaria hyperborea	Cuvie
348	*	annelid	Cirriformia tentaculata	A marine worm
349		annelid	Lepidonotus squamatus	An annelid worm
350	*	annelid	Lumbricus rubellus	An earthworm
351		annelid	Spirorbis spirorbis	An annelid worm
352		bird	Anser anser	Greylag Goose
353		bird	Streptopelia decaocto	Collared Dove
354		bryozoan	Electra pilosa	A bryozoan
355		cnidarian	Actinia equina	Beadlet anemone
356	*	echinoderm	Amphipholis squamata	Small Brittlestar
357		fungus	Chaetosphaerella phaeostroma	A pyrenomycete
358		mollusc	Littorina littorea	Common Periwinkle