Uninvited house guests

The rain might be lashing down outside but there's still plenty of wildlife to track down much closer to home. Unless your house is hermetically sealed and doused in deadly chemical cleaning agents, any or all of these could be lurking in the shadows.

If you settle down to read a good book and the punctuation seems to be moving around, then you could be looking at one of these tiny booklice. They are not much bigger that a full stop and feed on fungi that grow on damp paper, and also eat the glue that holds the pages together. Old damp paperbacks are prime habitat but they also like nothing better that feeding on wallpaper paste behind loose wallpaper. If your wallpaper makes clicking noises, it may be because they are headbutting it during their courtship.

Silverfish. You might have these most ancient of insects, that move like greased lightning, in a damp corner of a kitchen cupboard where they like to feed on starchy foods like flour.

Silverfish Lepisma saccharina are covered in tiny scales that rub-off easily, making it easier for them to wriggle out of the grip of a predator - which might go some way to explaining why they've been around for 400 million years.

This is the firebrat, the silverfish's larger and hairier cousin. It likes warmer conditions and used to be common in bakeries. Give yourself a pat on the back if you provide a home for these - they are not very common.

And finally, the daddy long-legs spider Pholcus phalangioides. Whatever you do, don't throw these out of the house as they can't survive anywhere else. They are humans' constant companions, only ever found inside our homes and outbuildings in our northern latitudes. They are useful to have around, preying on other household invertebrates - even on the fearsome house spider that comes into our homes during cold weather. This daddy long-legs spider is showing her maternal instincts by carrying her eggs around in her jaws.

The man who turned down the job of naturalist on HMS Beagle

On August 13th. 1831 Reverend  John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, received a letter asking him to recommend a suitable gentleman ship’s naturalist to accompany Robert Fitzroy, Captain of HMS Beagle, on a circumnavigation of the world.

Henslow, the finest field botanist of his day, would have been the prime candidate but family responsibilities stood in his way. His next thought was to nominate his brother-in-law, Reverend Leonard Jenyns but he declined in favour of tending to the spiritual needs of his parishioners.

So by the end of August Henslow had offered the job to Charles Darwin, his student protégé at Cambridge. The rest is (natural) history.

But what if Henslow, a creationist until the day he died in 1861, or his cleric brother-in-law Leonard Jenyns, had sailed with Fitzroy? It seems unlikely that they would have come up with a theory of evolution. If Charles Darwin’s date with destiny had never arrived it would have been left to some other scientist, in another place and at another time, to provide the theory that underpins all of modern biological science. 

But Jenyns, in his own way, made a lasting contribution to science too – a contribution that is very relevant to the turbulent climatic times that we live in.

It can be found in this little book, A Naturalist’s Calendar, published in 1907 and edited by Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son.

Stay-at-home Jenyns, who by this time had changed his name to Leonard Blomefield in order to claim an inheritance, was curate of Swaffham Bulbeck in Cambridgeshire from 1823 to 1849 and during that period kept detailed phenological records of natural events in his parish. While Charles Darwin, whom remained a life-long friend, was pondering on Galapagos finches and giant tortoises, Jenyns was recording the annual date when local frogs spawned or primroses bloomed.

Phenology, the study of the timing of natural events, is an important science today because observing the changes in ways in which the life cycles of plants and animals respond to climate provides some of the best evidence that the climate really is changing. Jenyns’ meticulous records, for scores of familiar plants and animals, record the earliest and latest dates of phenological events and also the mean dates. They provide a reliable datum point for comparisons in today’s warmer world.

Nature's Calendar the citizen science phenology web site where we can all monitor the natural changes brought about by climate change, is a modern day manifestation of Jenyns' work.

When Jenyns made his observations it must have seemed like a simple pastime for a parson-naturalist with time on his hands – the kind of observational recording that is often today sneered at by experimental scientists. As it has turned out, the results of his curiosity and dedicated recording have become highly relevant to our modern predicament.

I’m typing this on a mid-December evening when the temperate outside is warmer than many a spring day, after one of the warmest Novembers on record. I wonder what Jenyns would have made of that. 

Vere Lucy Temple (1889-1981): a forgotten, gifted entomologist and illustrator

These very attractive plates are from a book called Butterflies and Moths of Britain, written and illustrated by Vere Lucy Temple and published in 1945. 

I bought a copy in a second-hand bookshop about fifty years ago and have always liked the way that the plates were drawn, with the coloured butterflies portrayed against line drawings of their food plants, usually with the larvae and pupae.

It's difficult to find much information about Temple, who was born in 1898 and is thought to have died in 1981. She specialised in natural history and animal painting and seems to have been in demand in the 1920s and 1930s, when she exhibited in leading galleries.

She wrote and illustrated seven books and illustrated five others. All her original work seems to have been auctioned in numerous lots after her death. On the strength of these attractive butterfly and moth illustrations, she deserves to be more widely known. 

Vere Lucy Temple was a Fellow of the Royal Entomology Society, which explains why the text of her book is so full of perceptive detail, but it's also a very lively, personal and engaging account that conveys her passion for butterflies. 

In her preface she acknowledges help and advice from several eminent lepidopterists and scientists of her day and also refers to what was, then, cutting-edge research on insect vision and behaviour.