THE LECTURES

Simon Moore started the ball rolling on the Friday evening with a talk on Spiders:

In an entertaining and instructive talk Simon discussed the structures of different kinds of web, the feeding strategies and the mating behaviour of different species of spider. He described one way of persuading a hole-dwelling spider to emerge was to use a tuning fork to simulate the vibrations from passing prey!

Simon showed many fine photographs to illustrate his talk, and some of the spiders he talked about mounted in plastic. These included the (in)famous Sydney Funnel Web Spider. I was surprised to see that this was one of the biggest spiders in his collection. I had always assumed that something that notoriously lurked in the lavatory pan would be relatively inconspicuous!

Simon's talk was the last event of the day.

On Saturday morning there were three lectures:

The Uses of Microscopy in Textile Conservation by Dr Paul Garside - which unfortunately I had to miss.

Dragon Flies by John Taverner of the Hampshire Orinithological Society
(Ornithological? I suppose they're all aerial fauna!)

John demonstrates the mighty wingspan of a Carboniferous dragonfly (Proordinata), when oxygen levels were higher than present. He talked about the curious mating behaviour of damselflies, and showed how to identify the sex.

The final speaker was Lynn Formison, Reserves Officer, Butterfly Conservation, who talked about Saving Butterflies.

Joan introduced Lynn, who described how different species had varied in recent years. The picture was very mixed, with variations due to weather and habitat. Typical habitat dependent species had declined whereas wider contryside species numbers were stable or had increased slightly. The generalist wins over the specialist. Nature reserves play an important part: the Large Blue was spreading from the reserves out into the wider countryside.

It was appropriate that Lynn was the last speaker before the buffet lunch, since afterwards she was to take us on a tour of Yew Hill Reserve.