What do pinewood ecologists at The James Hutton Institute do for kicks? They take 200 Scots pine saplings, measure their every detail to within an inch of their lives and then drive them 60 miles away to live at Ballochbuie for the summer to be eaten by insects! Ballochbuie is a large area of pineforest in the backyard of Balmoral Castle in the gorgeous Dee valley, Aberdeenshire. This idyllic spot is the place for an experiment that The James Hutton Institute is running this summer which focuses on the invertebrate communities that colonise young pine trees. We know everything about these trees; their chemistry, where they came from, even their family history. Scientists at the Institute want to find out if trees with different chemistries and different histories are colonised by insects in different ways. I will be assisting The James Hutton Institute’s pinewood ecologists this summer to try and answer this by helping to identify the critters that come and visit the trees.
After spending a day earlier last month putting out the trees in their experimental plots (which involved lots of falling over hummocks of heather) we revisited the trees at the end of May to see how they are getting on. Not a great deal of insect activity yet, though they’ve only been in the field a couple of weeks so it’s still early days. We saw a species of Heteropteran bug, a lacewing bug (Cixiidae – see pic above) and various spiders making webs amongst the needles. A snakefly also came to say hello, they have long snake like necks, hence their name. I think it was Atlantoraphidia maculicollis which is confined to pinewoods. It’s larvae live inside tree stumps and the adults are not commonly seen so this was a nice find.
It’s going to be tricky trying to identify these beasties to species in the field – we can’t remove them from the trees as it will affect the experiment. In September at the end of the study we can collect all the insects we find to confirm ID in the lab. We’ll be visiting the trees again in July and hopefully they won’t have been completely devoured by caterpillars or dried out in a freak heat wave!
Hayley
Caledonian Pinewood Invertebrates