Steve's Nature Blog: Lithines

Wednesday, 3 January 2018

The Problem With Icarus

A beautiful sunny start to 2018 and I wish you all a Happy New Year. The other day I passed the back of a curious concrete structure south of Lithines and I decided to stop and walk around to the front of it. Here it is, come on I'll show you. Once upon a time these hexagons were all mirrored which would have been a spectacular sight for that buzzard up there. Despite looking like something out of a Bond movie, it was actually an early solar power experiment. Crete is no stranger to discovering the power of the sun of course. Back in the day an engineer called Daedalus was imprisoned on Crete with his son Icarus by King Minos. In an ingenious escape plan Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax for the pair of them. Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell back to earth with a splat. Actually both Icarus and the story crash at this point because the higher you fly, the colder it gets. Far from melting, the wax was more in danger of icing up. The result would have been the same of course.

Many animals shun the heat of the Cretan sun by hiding under rocks and with so many of these hexagons lying around in the undergrowth I reckon we can have a flipping good day finding some of them. Lets start with a couple of myriapods and dispel a few myths about legs. As children we were taught that centipedes had a hundred legs and millipedes a thousand (and their names reflect this). Neither fact is true. Myriapods, the group to which they belong means ten thousand legs and that's wrong also. Centipedes can have anywhere between 30 and about 350 legs (this one has about 40) and even the most leggy of millipedes only has 750. Our curled up friend here has about120. In addition to this they grow to adulthood by adding segments and legs as they develop, starting with as little as three segments and six legs, so counting legs is not a good way of differentiating the two animals. The trick is to look at the arrangement: centipedes have one pair of legs per body segment, millipedes have two.

I don't know if you've noticed but there's a door in the floor over there which can only mean one of two things. It's either a portal to another dimension or a flat-pack fridge (I often wonder what IKEA do with ideas that don't quite work). Let's open it up and find out what lies within. Corrugated cardboard which seems to be of interest to hundreds and hundreds of ants. I wonder what they find so fascinating? When reading about ants one often comes across the prefix 'myrm' (people who study ants are myrmecologists, seed dispersal by ants is called myrmecochory and so on) and the words come from the Greek 'myrmex'. There is an ancient Greek myth regarding Aeacus and Aegina who grew up alone on the island of Aegina. Getting rather bored of calling out “Aegina” and getting the response “Are you talking to me or the island?” (which wasn't a very good joke in the first place but pales considerably after the hundredth repetition) Aeacus asked Zeus to provide a bit of alternative company. Never one to do things by halves Zeus turned all the ants on the island into men and women and they were known as the Myrmidons who later fought with Achilles at Troy. There is an alternative version in which the Myrmidons were supposed to have been descended from the son of Zeus and Eurymedusa whom he seduced whilst appearing in the form of an ant but that seems somewhat impractical on many levels, even for Zeus.

Moving on to this Lentisc bush for a moment we seem to have something interesting going on. The spider is our old friend Cytophora, the Tropical Tent Web Spider, going about her business of cocooning food trapped in her web. But I'm rather more interested in this little bug that she seems to be ignoring. If I just extract it and turn it over in my hand... Yes, despite the faded colours which indicates that it may have been trapped for some time, it is definitely Zelus renardii. This Assassin Bug, you may recall, is a newcomer to Europe having been discovered on mainland Greece in 2011and here on Crete by ourselves in 2014 (see Red Autumn). Now the question is, why has she not parcelled it up for later consumption? We'll have to keep our eyes out for further instances and see if this is just a one-off or a more general occurrence.

Whilst we're on the subject of dead insects I've just spotted a deceased grasshopper on the floor here. This is one of at least three types of bandwing grasshoppers with reddish wings on Crete which you normally see as just a flash of red, like a miniature firework exploding beneath your feet, as you walk through dry scrubland like this. It is only when they have passed on that you can get a chance to open up their wings and admire their exquisite tracery. The patterning also helps to identify the species. This one is the Slender Digging Grasshopper, Acrotylus patruelis.

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LINKS:

Share your nature thoughts, photos and comments on Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

Explore the region with the #CreteNature interactive Hiking and Nature Map

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)

Wednesday, 20 December 2017

The Purple Ponds of Lithines

The purple ponds are teeming with microscopic life.

We'll make our way back to the main Sitia-Makry Gialos road to Lithines where there are a few interesting ponds to the north west of the village that are worthy of investigation not least of all for their intriguing colour at this time of year. We are still awaiting significant rainfall and the ponds are very shallow at the moment but packed full of nutrients and it is these that are responsible for their unusual colour. If you check them out under the microscope they are absolutely teeming with microscopic life with nematodes, desmids and the like flitting about at tremendous speeds all over the place. But before we get down to them lets see what we can find on the way.

The first signs of the upcoming change of season are here by the track with these Wood Sorrels or Bermuda Buttercups which will soon be adorning every roadside and olive grove. You can make a nice warming winter soup with these; just bring a pot of chicken or vegetable broth up to the boil, chuck in a handful of cooked rice and a handful of wood sorrel leaves, simmer for about eight minutes. Finally stir in a dollop of cream, salt and pepper to taste and serve with a couple of the flowers floating on the top. (Obligatory word of caution: Wood sorrel contains oxalic acid so if you suffer from rheumatism, arthritis, gout, kidney stones or hyperacidity then it may aggravate the complaint but for the rest of us the odd bowl or two is fine). You can also add flowers or leaves to salads for a sharp, lemony bite if you wish as well. As with all wild plants, wash them well, remove any bugs such as this Shield Bug nymph and pick away from roadsides or other contaminated areas.

There are the ponds down there which we have to find our way down to somehow but first a Small Copper has just landed nearby. They like to lay their eggs on Sorrel which is their caterpillar's food plant and you could be forgiven for thinking that this is rather handy as we have some wood sorrel nearby but not so. This is the old confusion of common names. The Wood Sorrel is Oxalis pes-carpe in the family Oxalidaceae; Sorrels (without the wood) are plants of the Rumex genus in the Polygonaceae family. The ambiguity arises because they are all acidic tasting and the word Sorrel reflects this being derived from the old French 'sorele' meaning sour.

Here we are, down at the ponds without too much difficulty and there doesn't seem to be too much activity on the surface but just take a look at this rainwater ditch nearby where the water is a little more free draining. The dragonflies are having a high old time, there must be six pairs here at least, flying along in tandem with the males clasping the females' necks with their special pincers. These little Darters stay together after copulation and then the female gently dips her abdomen into the water and lays an egg which, if we sit and watch them for a few moments we can witness. There she goes, and another, and another. These will hatch out into extremely predatory nymphs and providing that the ditch doesn't dry up they can spend up to three years in this stage before emerging as adults.

And finally the ponds themselves and what an unusual, attractive colour they are at this time of day. Not entirely devoid of life on the surface, I can see one small, white insect skating along on the surface but what precisely it is I cannot tell. No, I am not going to wade in and take a closer look. I have a strong suspicion that beneath this shallow water there lurks a good few inches or more of evil smelling sludge with which I have no desire to get better acquainted thank you. Well, that just about wraps it up for Autumn. Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice and if you'd care to join me in raising a glass to the shortest day of the year the the time of the solstice, when the Earth is at its furthest point from the sun, is 16.48 Universal Time or almost ten to five Greenwich Mean Time as us oldies prefer to call it. That's a most convivial time for a libation out here in Crete being about ten to seven in the evening. So, wherever you are and whatever you're celebrating, have a good one and we'll meet up again on January 3^rd 2018. Cheers!

Photographic Bit

Many of you have asked me what photographic equipment I use so for details of aperture settings, shutter speeds etc. my pictures will be on Flickr within a few days and that has all the geeky stuff. Pictures were edited with FastStone Image Viewer and combined with Microsoft Paint.