On the evening of Thursday 24^th January I was fortunate to be invited to the Natural History Museum in London. The event was for the unveiling of a portrait of the intrepid explorer and brilliant naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace by comedian and fellow naturalist Bill Bailey.

The painting was donated to the NaturalHistoryMuseum in 1923 to mark the 100th anniversary of Wallace's birth but was moved in 1971. It has now been restored and returned to its original position on the main stairs of the Central Hall, near to the Charles Darwin statue.

The unveiling of the painting also marked the official launch of Wallace100 and the Wallace Letters Online website, both of which are part of the celebrations for this year's centenary anniversary of Wallace's death.

Some famous names of the natural science world were in attendance at the launch including Sir David Attenborough, whose hand I got to shake!

A number of organisations in Wales, including Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, will be joining the Wallace 100 celebrations. The museum is planning a number of activities and events to run alongside our exhibition planned for later this year. Keep an eye on our website for further information.

Ar 31 Rhagfyr, caewyd yr orielau yn Sain Ffagan: Amgueddfa Werin Cymru er mwyn gwneud lle ar gyfer gofodau addysg ac oriel newydd sy’n rhan o waith ailddatblygu yr Amgueddfa a ariennir gan Gronfa Dreftadaeth y Loteri.Yn ystod project ‘Plant mewn Amgueddfeydd' diweddar, gofynnwyd i ddisgyblion o Ysgol Coed y Gof, Caerdydd, pa wrthrychau ddylai gael eu dangos yn yr orielau a pham.

Thursday: New Haven

Windy,cold, rocky gravelly shore. Watcghed by penguins, attacked by a tern!

Friday: Fox Bay West

Galeforce winds, driving rain, numb hands! Sandy shore, lots of lugworms, very long Orbiniids (20cm) but not much else. Onshore wind holding tide in.

Teresa

(Text update rather than email)

23.01.13
No sampling today and very glad I was too as a torrential hailstorm (photo 1) battered the office windows! A third parcel is now with the post office and will hopefully be winging its way up the Atlantic by the end of the week. The rest of today has been spent preparing for my trip to West Falkland tomorrow. I will be over there for 10 days touring my way around the island to try and get as good coverage of the shoreline as I can. As my choice of shores is largely dictated by the existence of roads by which to reach them and places I can stay my choice of sites was fairly restricted but I think I have a fairly good itinerary.

The ferry goes from New Haven to Port Howard in the evening which gives me time to catch the tide in New Haven just after lunch (why miss an opportunity?!). I’ll then be travelling south down the east coast to Fox Bay, further south and west to Port Stephens before turning north to South Harbour. From there I keep heading north this time up the west coast, stopping in at Chartres and Roy Cove before reaching Dunbar in the northwest. From Dunbar I will move along the north coast to Hill Cove, West Lagoons and Shallow Bay before heading back to Port Howard and digging a few holes there for good measure. Then its back to Stanley, get the last parcels on their way home before packing myself off too. Photo 2 shows the locations of the various sites.

It will certainly be interesting to visit the shores on the west and see if there is any obvious difference in the fauna there, particularly as I get up to the northwestern areas. That part of the islands is affected by more northerly temperate currents rather than the colder southerly currents dominating the southeast so potentially there may be many different species there.

Internet access is unlikely for most of the tour although I am hoping to be able to send short updates for the blog whenever possible by text to report any notable events!

Teresa

21.01.13
Yesterday (Monday) was probably the warmest day so far. Not necessarily the day you would pick for a dusty 3 hour drive across the island but that’s how it was. I was very thankful that the car had working air con as you can’t open the windows while driving unless you want the interior to be caked in half an inch of dust when you arrive. The timings of the tides meant that I would be able to catch both an evening tide and then a morning tide too, getting 2 sites done in the area. Unfortunately the tides at the moment are not the biggest so there is less beach exposed and available for sampling. Still at least I would get something - or so I hoped - North Arm turned out to be a very poor site for polychaetes indeed.

Monday night I picked a small creek just before the settlement (Photo 1). Rocky around the edges, the sheltered aspect meant that much of it was made up of very soft muddy sediment, the kind your boot sinks into and then stays. However, I found I could move around so long as I didn’t stay still too long but despite several attempts I was finding very little in the soft mud. Eventually I started finding some lugworms but by the end of nearly 2 hours I had found little else even though I had tried several places around the creek. It certainly made for a less arduous evening’s work than usual anyway.

The next morning, I tried the shoreline at the other end of the settlement. This proved to be very rocky with extensive mussel beds (Photo 2). The areas outside of the mussel beds had very coarse loose sand that again seemed to harbour very little in the way of obvious animals. However, I collected what I could find and then washed and sieved some of the sediment through a 0.5 mm mesh sieve. This is our standard way of getting a more complete view of the life in the sediment as the smaller worms will ‘float off’ in the swirled sediment and then be held on the fine mesh of the sieve as the water is poured through. The residue on the mesh is then washed into a pot and kept to be later sorted through under a microscope when any tiny animals can then be picked out. I did this for the general sandy sediment and also for some samples of the mussel beds which I washed off in a bucket and then poured through the sieve also. Hopefully there will be many more animals in there that I hadn’t been able to see without a microscope.

The long drive back then beckoned followed by more washing of previous samples and transferring them from formaldehyde to ethanol. Tomorrow I will be able to pack more pots and get at least one if not two more parcels of specimens on the way back to the UK. Photo 3 shows where North Arm is in the Falkland Islands.

Teresa