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Discover plants near you with the Plant Club BioBlitz!

Sometimes plants can be easy to miss. But when we take time to look a little closer, we see how exciting and important they really are!  

As part of the Museum’s Family Festival, the Citizen Science Team invite you to join the Plant Club virtual BioBlitz, to take a closer look at plants and discover which grow near you. Look closely at the shapes and textures of leaves and flowers and use the resources on our BioBlitz webpage to help you to tell different plants apart. 

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Highlights from City Nature Challenge 2020 | Citizen Science

Speckled wood butterfly

What were your highlights from the City Nature Challenge this year? Although I missed taking part in a public BioBlitz at the Natural History Museum, I enjoyed my own mini BioBlitz in my little London garden – making 99 observations and managing to identify 80 different species. My favourite find was a tiny Bethylid wasp which was the first one I have ever seen. These wasps are just a few millimetres long and are known as ‘flat wasps’ because of their squashed appearance. They are parasitoids of beetle larvae or moth caterpillars.

Bethylidae wasp
The Bethylid wasp I found, too tiny to do justice with my camera. Photograph by VJ Burton.

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City Nature Challenge 2020 results | Citizen Science

Summary of UK City Nature Challenge 2020

Thank you from the citizen science team!

A big thank you to everyone who took part in the City Nature Challenge: London this year! Despite lockdown restrictions London exceeded last year’s records, making 5,732 nature observations between 24 – 27 April and identifying 1,069 species. The London team were particularly happy to see nearly twice as many people taking part this year – a total of 542 of observers. You can view all the observations made at the City Nature Challenge: London iNaturalist project page.

Results summary from City Nature Challenge: London 2020

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Bee-flies are back! | Citizen Science

Have you seen any bee-flies in your garden? Bee-flies look rather like bees but are actually true flies (Diptera). They have round, furry bodies and a long proboscis (tongue) held out straight. The proboscis can sometimes cause alarm but they do not bite or sting and just use it to drink nectar from spring flowers, often while hovering. Flowers with long nectar tubes such as primroses and lungworts are particular favourites, and bee-flies are likely to be important pollinators of these.

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Bee-fly feeding from a primrose flower. Photo by Vlad Proklov, via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

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Wildlife Garden Autumn BioBlitz|Citizen Science

Photograph of a landhopper, Arcitalitrus dorrieni

A BioBlitz is a race against the clock to find and record as many living things as possible within a specific area over a set period of time. These observations are then used for scientific research and environmental monitoring by our wildlife garden managers and are shared with scientists in the UK and abroad. Our Autumn BioBlitz in the Wildlife Garden was on the 21st October, we had typical autumn weather with a lot of rain, but still saw interesting wildlife.

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Meeting the South-East Citizen Science community | Citizen Science

The Citizen Science team hosted the 2nd South-East Citizen Science Meetup at the Angela Marmont Centre last Friday. As an effort to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field, the ExCiteS research group (UCL) had held the first Citizen Science meetup in London back in January 2019, as part of the Doing It Together Science (DITOs) project. The informal concept of meetups brought together a wide range of citizen science expertise and so we decided to host the next meet up at the Natural History Museum. 

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Challenge Complete: City Nature Challenge London Results| Citizen Science

Over the last weekend of April, London competed with over 150 cities worldwide in the City Nature Challenge. People across the globe banded together and spent four days finding as much wildlife and nature as possible in their respective cities. London was one of the top five cities in Europe, with 5470 observations of 1115 different species recorded by 258 people in total.

Read on for a recap of how the weekend went and a video report: Continue reading “Challenge Complete: City Nature Challenge London Results| Citizen Science”

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Wildlife Garden Autumn BioBlitz – Species Review

collared earthstar mushroom

Continuing the blogs about the Autumn BioBlitz in the Museum’s wildlife garden, we would like to introduce you to more species found during the day! BioBlitzes are only one of the ways wildlife garden species are being recorded; biological recordings take place in the garden in many different ways all year round.

Read on to learn more about the autumn findings in the amazing wildlife garden including a species very rare to the UK and one which made it to a top 10 list!

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The humble harbour porpoise | Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme

Bottlenose dolphin hitting a harbour porpoise out of the water in an attack

As part of the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP), we are often focused on the death of animal and can overlook the amazing lives of marine creatures before they sadly wash up along our coastlines. British waters are home to over 28 different species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, collectively known as cetaceans.

In the UK, the most numerous (and smallest) of these is the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena). Unsurprisingly, these porpoises therefore make up the majority of strandings in the UK. 

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Stranded Sharks | Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme

Across the UK, many different creatures wash up on our shores. The Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) is responsible for documenting stranded animals in the UK and retrieves a portion of those that strand for post-mortem examination every year. The main bulk of the project is made up of cetaceans – a group of marine mammals comprised of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

However, many people don’t realise the project also responds to strandings of sharks. Since 2007, the CSIP has recorded the stranding of basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) across the UK and more recently secured funding  to expand the research to other large-bodied sharks such as porbeagles (Lamna nasus), angel sharks (Squatina squatina) and blue sharks (Prionace glauca).

WARNING: This blog contains photographs of dead stranded sharks which you may find upsetting

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