Whilst much of the country is wilting under the unprecedented summer heat and praying for rain, I was hoping for the dry weather to persist for just long enough for me to complete my August field surveys in Cumbria. It would have been ironic in the extreme if, after all this dry weather, my fieldwork had [ ]
Back in May, I wrote about some algae I had encountered in Upper Teesdale (see: “Vertically-challenged …”). I commented on the range of diatoms that I saw living in and around the Cyanobacterial growth, but only gave broad details because identification can be difficult without cleaned samples and high magnification. I’ve now had a chance to look [ ]
I’ve written about the benefits of returning to the same site over and over again in order to catch it in all its moods. There is a danger in this, in that you can become blasé and approach the site with expectations already fixed in your mind. This is a particular danger towards the end of a [ ]
In my career as a freelance consultant, I have analysed over 6500 diatom samples and I thought that the next of my occasional essays on diatom genera should probably focus on the genus that I have found most frequently in those samples. A quick query on my Access database showed this to be Achnanthidium, more specifically Achnanthidium minutissimum which, [ ]
The headlines screamed “hottest May ever!” last week, and whilst the south of England sweltered under record temperatures, the Borders, where Bill Brierley and I were teaching a course on rapid algal assessment, became the perfect outdoor classroom, with the cool waters of the River Tweed to keep us from overheating. This is, I feel, payback [ ]
There was a heatwave forecast across northern England on the Whitsun holiday, so we set off early to avoid the worst of it and, when we arrived in Upper Teesdale, the growing heat of the morning sunshine was abated by a refreshing breeze. Curlews, oyster catchers and red shanks circled and called in the sky above [ ]
My comments on diatoms and topophilia (see: “Hannaea: springing into life …”) also apply to the subject of this post, but with a few variations. The genus Eunotia is, like Hannaea, a species of remote, often upland habitats, but the landscapes it conjures in my imagination are likely to be boggy places where my boot might, at any moment, [ ]
I’m back from my annual fortnight sojourn in western China and spending a day standing in cold streams in West Cumbria pondering the condition of their algae and the state of the world. And how the state of the world impacts the condition of the algae and what the condition of the algae tells us about [ ]
I was asked during my recent Diatom Web Academy talk about how I produced my paintings of the microscopic world so this post is a diary of the journey, from idea to finished image, for a picture that I have produced in the aftermath of that talk. The germ of the idea for this particular picture [ ]
Sometimes, the sight of a diatom generates associations in mind, and I am momentarily transported to the time and place where I collected the sample. My optic nerve triggers other nerves and, all of a sudden, memories are welling up, if not of an actual place (I know that from the slide or sample label) but [ ]