Here’s mine, taken with an iPhone on the way to work (my tummy is better):
And, just a few minutes ago, reader Gregory James sent a fall photo from yesterday:
And reader Dom sent both insect and historic landscapes:
On Sunday [a week from yesterday], cloudless, windless & warm, I went up on the South Downs, and these pictures are from Kithurst Hill in Sussex, south of Horsham & north of Worthing. There, on a late flowering Eurasian plant, common hogweed Heracleum sphondylium, were the common but colourful yellow dung-flies, Scathophaga stercoraria. As usual, the male grips the female to stop her mating with other males – and they fly like that! They were oblivious to the fact that I just discovered how they are used as a model species for studying sperm selection and sexual selection, e.g. here and here; these are open-access articles, but there is much more if you search Pubmed, which all eager readers should acquaint themselves with as it is a great resource for abstracts and free articles.
The South Downs are a long chalk ridge, famous of course where they meet the sea at Beachy Head, and the North Downs at … Dover – but you know that! The views in the first & second pictures are pretty much the same but the second is at the high point of this stretch, at 699 feet, so just a hill. However, the view was spectacularly clear with ships visible 20 miles south in the channel, and the Isle of Wight could be seen: a slight bump just about the fence post in the second view. That is about 30 miles, or50km. In the view that shows the ridge to the east, you can see that the lower land on the left, the Weald, is much more heavily wooded. Indeed ‘Weald’ means ‘wood’.
The South Downs, view east:
The Weald was important in the history of science as Gideon Mantell or his wife discovered fossils of dinosaurs there – and – of course! – it features in On the Origin of Species, Chapter 9, p.285-6:
“Though it must be admitted that the denudation of the Weald has been a mere trifle, in comparison with that which has removed masses of our palæozoic strata, in parts ten thousand feet in thickness, as shown in Prof. Ramsay’s masterly memoir on this subject. Yet it is an admirable lesson to stand on the North Downs and to look at the distant South Downs; for, remembering that at no great distance to the west the northern and southern escarpments meet and close, one can safely picture to oneself the great dome of rocks which must have covered up the Weald within so limited a period as since the latter part of the Chalk formation.”
View southwest from Kithurst:
View towards the Isle of Wight:
Thanksd PCCE for putting up these pictures. I urge readers to make the most of Pubmed – it covers a lot of biology as well as medical abstracts. For example this morning I came across this –
Sound localization in the alligator
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26048335
🙂
Thanks for sending them in, Dom! Lovely! And informative as well.
Brings back memories from many years ago at school, drawing diagrams with dotted line continuations of the different strata to indicate the missing dome of rocks described by Darwin. Thanks!
Nice dung fly pictures too!
There were lots of sheep, so plenty of maggot food!
Love to see pictures of England and all around Sussex. Reminder of much younger days.
Lovely landscapes. And interesting articles on dung flies. I see that the issue of sperm competition via sperm length in insects may be more complicated than simply ‘longer is better’.
Big hairy flies are among my favorite things to photograph as well. Besides being all bristly with interesting gnarly bits, they are often pretty tolerant of having a camera come into proximity.
Yes – why do you suppose that is?
It might have something to do with not yet considering the approaching camera to be a threat since strange, big object is moving slowly and the fly ‘knows’ it can move very quickly if it has to.
I have met Scathophaga only twice. It is a fascinating fly! My first encounter was on a fresh cow pie in Iowa in spring. The males stood around on the cow pie, waiting, occasionally shifting to a more appealing site, sometimes wrestling with a neighboring fly.
Then a female would fly in. The males all flew to her. She disappeared in a pile of flies that looked something like a rugby scrum. Then the scrum would break apart and the lucky (or fit?) male would emerge riding the female. She would explore the cow pie and start laying eggs one at a time in a row, like: . . . . . . Very interesting behavior.
Are these hills anywhere near Watership Down?
It’s how I pictured it.
Very similar downland landscape but that is about 50 miles to the north west just south of Newbury. A real place.
The trees at work still have their colourful Fall leaves but at home, all my trees have been stripped bare!
Glad to live in Brighton with these South Downs just around the corner.
The Seven Sisters, Burling Gap, Beachy Head, are all spectacular. Nearby Devil’s Dyke is something very different but also very much worthwhile.
One of my great regrets will probably be never to have walked the South Downs way. Perhaps I will anyway.