Recording Water Beetles – The Long Haul
The first diary I’ve allowed myself to keep starts on 22 January 1961, when I was 17. Most alarmingly the first entry is for a caddis fly, the second for a Cyclops, the third for the hoglouse Asellus aquaticus. Only the fourth concerned a water beetle – but I knew about them long before that and after a dalliance with the rotting cods’ heads I used to catch sexton beetles. The seminal moment came on 13 July 1963, on Ashdown Forest, when I caught a female Agabus that I eventually identified as melanarius Aubé, a species wholly new for Sussex. Professor Frank Balfour-Browne expressed his interest in this new record – and I was on my way! A. melanarius is not a showy beetle, scarcely worth a photograph – it’s just a slightly smaller version of the very common black A. bipustulatus (L.).
Agabus melanarius – courtesy of Jonty Denton
On 18 July 2008 Brian Nelson found a single A. melanarius in Lough Atona, a mountain lake in County Fermanagh, wholly new for Ireland. The habitat was quite unsuitable for this species, which I had learnt since 1963 was in seepage-fed pools on partly shaded hillsides. So earlier this year, on 6 March, Brian, Roy Anderson and I searched the area below the mountains in an area that Roy reckoned would fit my site description. The Agabus was the first beetle we found……My memory bank is pretty flawed but I think I derived as much pleasure from this last record as from the first one. That’s what biological recording is about.
Garth Foster
Garth Foster is Secretary of the Balfour-Browne Club an international water beetle study group
The dataset Water Beetle Surveys from Britain and Ireland is available on the Gateway