ABBOTS
LANGLEY GARDENING SOCIETY
John Tyler. “Life in a Nutshell”
November 2014
A zoologist by training, but having
spent most of his life (so far!) in nature conservation, John Tyler is in the
ideal profession to take photos and to show us some beautiful slides of natural
history in miniature.
He made a dramatic start with a close
up of the humble adult vine weevil. Hated by gardeners, as the little blighters
grubs eat the roots of your pot plants and the adults eat at the leaf margins
but so beautiful when seen through the macro lens of Johns camera.
He showed us a close up of a silver
fish, that tiny bug that you may see in your bathroom as they love damp places.
Apparently, John told us, they love to feed on the glue that cornflake boxes
are stuck together with. Mmm, maybe I should change to musli.
He said that the top of a fence post is
a great place to see bugs as maybe they climb up the post thinking it is a
tree and when they get to the top of the post they have to stop to work out
what happened. Springtails especially seem to congregate here and have the
strangest hairy bottom. Some of the colours of these tiny insects is truly
amazing with coloured bodies and rainbow eyes.
He then went on to show us tiny things
that we might see in woodlands such as parachute mushrooms that are very aptly
named as they have little white parachute tops with black stems, eyelash fungus
that has a red centre and indeed has eyelashes all the way around, and slime
mould that is more closely related to us than fungus is. Some amazing facts
were imparted to us.
Next was grassland with amongst other
things, pictures of a beautiful fluffy great white plume moth and some beautiful
caterpillars, and an excellent photo of the beautiful eye pattern on the wing
of a moth that has even mimicked the reflection of light that would be seen
in the eye.
There was so much more and it was an
excellent evening with much humour and very interesting to see, up close, some
of the things you never even knew where there.
Pam Cotton.