The Scottish Forestry Trust – despite the name, not just for the Scots

One of the penalties/benefits of being around a long time in one particular field, is that unless you are a hermit or don’t publish anything, people do get to know of your existence.  Couple that with the fact that in the UK university sector, faculty that work in forest entomology are almost as rare as hen’s teeth and it is perhaps understandable that you find yourself on committees that you would never have imagined yourself being asked to join.

Some of us just hadn’t realised that the 1970s had been and gone.

Certainly when I was a long-haired forest entomologist working for the Forestry Commission near Edinburgh, I would have laughed out

loud if someone had told me that 25 years later, with shorter hair but a longer beard, I would be a member of the grandly titled UK Tree Health & Plant Biosecurity Expert Taskforce.  These things do happen however, and continue to happen.  Last year for example, I became a Trustee of the Scottish Forestry Trust. At the time of the invitation (late 2014), I had been involved with forest research in the UK and elsewhere, since 1982, yet to my knowledge, I had never heard of the Scottish Forestry Trust and I am sure that I was not the only one out there.  I have now been a Trustee for over a year, and at our last meeting in December 2015, we felt that it was about time we raised our profile, after all, our role is to “provide funds by way of grants, to support research, education and training” in forestry.    At the risk of bringing down an avalanche of applicants I volunteered to write a blog post about our activities and to tweet about our funding opportunities.

The first thing to make clear, and I have highlighted this at the top of the page, is that we do NOT just fund Scots and Scottish projects. Despite the name, we support forestry projects the length and breadth of the UK.   The projects we fund are extremely diverse; literature reviews, major research projects, public lectures, training events and MSc project field work.   We also part-fund PhD studentships, either directly or from our new Forest Health bursary scheme run in conjunction with the Forestry Commission to specifically fund forest health projects.  Perhaps our most bizaare/adventurous grant was to the Asylon Theatre group to support the production of a play, Fraxi – Queen of the Forest to inspire primary school children to care for and learn more about trees.  In terms of actual funding the grants range from a couple of thousand to £60 000, so perhaps not as much as you could get from other sources but applicants can apply for monies to cover up to 30% of the anticipated cost of their project which is better than nothing, although in exceptional circumstances we may fund 50% of the costs.

As a general guide we are looking for projects that are relevant to UK forestry in the broadest sense, to wider UK forestry research priorities and have clear objectives / research questions and methods, some expected research outcomes, within a clearly defined time frame and have additional funding from other sources.   We specifically do not fund projects that have already started, so there is no point in contacting us to bail you out of a short-fall in funding, nor do we fund capital costs.  We are aware of the difficulty in obtaining funds to do forest research in the UK so are keen to help wherever possible, but please do make sure that your applications are relevant, of a high quality and fall within our remit.  If in doubt about the eligibility of your proposed project feel free to contact us using this link to discuss it before putting in a formal application.

I hope I have inspired all you eligible applicants to download an application form and attempt to make our next deadline, February 19^th, but failing that you can aim for our two other application deadlines in May and October.  Good luck and I look forward to seeing your applications in due course.

Hopefully not as many as these 🙂

 

Thrip, thrips, thripses – A thrips by any other name

As well as the more well-known EntoPub*, the Harper Adams entomologists also indulge in Entolunch**, when we gather in one of our larger offices to eat our packed lunches and keep up to date with what we are doing, covering research, teaching and day-to-day life. This is not because we are anti-social or are averse to mixing with other disciplines, but because our offices are almost 500 m away from the Staff Common Room and nearest food outlet.  Last week our conversation turned to the Thysanoptera, more commonly known as thrips or thunder bugs.

Some fine examples of thrips, including the common thunder bug.

According to Lewis (1997) they were first described by DeGeer in 1744 under the name Physapus, but in 1758, Linneaus, ignoring this, placed the then four known species in a genus Thrips, later elevated to Order by Haliday in 1836.  Why Linneaus decided to call them thrips is a bit of a mystery, as according to the Oxford English Dictionary, thrips is derived from the Latin via Greek, meaning woodworm!

Thrips are tiny little insects, the giants among them, (mainly tropical) can reach lengths of up to 15 mm but most are round about 1-2 mm long (Kirk, 1996; Moritz, 1997).  Although they are not bugs, their feeding process can be described as “piercing-sucking or punch and suck” (Kirk, 1997).

 

There are about 8000 species of thrips worldwide (Lewis, 1997), although probably less than 200 in the UK (Kirk, 1996). Although many are important plant pests (Lewis, 1997), they can also be pollinators and fungivores (Kirk, 1996) or even very effective biological control agents (Gilstrap, 1995).    Some are gall-formers, and these, like some galling aphids, also have fights to the death with their rivals (Crespi, 1988).  All in all, almost as wonderful as aphids 🙂

But I digress, our conversation that lunchtime was not about the biology of thrips, but about the singularity (or plurality) of their name. Thrips are (in)famous for being like sheep, they are thrips whether you are speaking of one or of many, which has, and does, cause some debate among entomologists and others.

http://mxplx.com/memelist/keyword=end

We quite liked thripses although it does conjure visions of Gollum and his precious.

Who knew that Gollum was an entomologist?

Intrigued by the linguistic puzzle of thrips I wondered what it was in other languages. Using Google Translate, and possibly risking a Tolkienesque mistranslation, I found that in most cases, even French, it was boringly enough, thrips.

There were some languages where thrips was not thrips, but not many:

German               thripse

Swedish               trips

Italian                  tripidi

Catalan                 els trips

Estonian               ripslased

Polish                    wciornastki

Czech                    třásněnka

 

Perhaps my favourite was the Afrikaans, blaaspootjies. On breaking it down into parts it turns out that blaas means bladder and pootjies, legs, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Bengali, Chinese and Japanese, were quite picturesque.

 

Bengali              থ্রিপস্ (thripas)

Chinese             牧草虫 (mùcǎo chóng)

Japanese          アザミウマ (azamiuma)

 

But the most ornate was Tamil

(llaippēṉ)

Which is quite a long word for such small insects, but very pretty all the same.  If anyone has any more suggestions for the naming of thrips, do feel free to comment.

 

References

Crespi, B.J. (1988) Risks and benefits of lethal male fighting in the colonial, polygynous thrips Hoplothrips karnyi (Insecta: Thysanoptera).  Behavorial Ecology & Sociobiology, 22, 293-301.

Gilstrap, F.E. (1995) Six-spotted thrips: a gift from nature that controls spider mites. [In] Thrips Biology and Management, pp 305-316, (ed. B.L. Parker, M. Skinner & T. Lewis),  Plenum Press, New York.

Kirk, W.D.J. (1996)  Thrips,  Naturalist’s Handbooks, Richmond Publishing Co. Ltd., Slough UK. [A very nice and simple introduction to the wonderful world of thrips]

Kirk, W.D.J. (1997) Feeding, [In] Thrips as Crop Pests, pp 119-174 (ed T Lewis), CAB International, Wallingford Oxford

Lewis, T. (1997) Pest thrips in perspective, [In] Thrips as Crop Pests, pp 1-13 (ed T Lewis), CAB International, Wallingford Oxford

Moritz, G. (1997) Structure, growth and development.  [In] Thrips as Crop Pests, pp 15-63 (ed T Lewis), CAB International, Wallingford Oxford

 

Post script

Slapped wrist for me – Elina Mäntylä has pointed out that in Finnish, thrips is ripsiäinen, probably to do with the wing structure.  I should have known that having lived and worked in Finland at the Pest Investigation Department.  interestingly, Google Translate thinks it is Thrips in Finnish – but if you do Finnish to English it does indeed translate ripsiäinen to thrips.

 

Glossary

*EntoPub            Drinks and a meal in a local hostelry organised by one of the Harper Adams Entomologists but not confined solely to entomologists.  We do like to mix with non-entomologists occasionally 🙂  Held at approximately 10 day intervals.

**EntoLunch     A communal occasion when the Harper Adams entomologists get together in office AY02 and eat their packed lunches whilst chatting, usually with some entomological connection.  Again this is not entirely confined to entomologists, we are usually joined by a couple of soil and water scientists who share our exile on the edge of the campus 🙂  A daily event during the working week.

Leathers are not Lauders – the problems of genealogical scams

It’s been a while since I did a family history post so I thought it was about time I did one, so here you are.

Back in the 1980s a company called Halberts started up a business to exploit the then newly growing hobby of genealogy. They purported to be able to supply customers with accurate information about their family tree and to provide them with a coat of arms. In fact what they actually did was to supply customers with a book entitled the Book of XXX which was essentially a list of names and addresses of XXX culled from telephone directories around the world with a frontispiece claiming to give the history and origins of the name in question, together with a coat of arms.  More often than not, these were incorrect.  Their claim to respectability was that they had bought the right to use the name of Burke’s Peerage. What they actually did was cause a lot of confusion to fledgling family historians and to make it difficult for genuine family historians, in particular One-Name Studies to gain the trust of those who had fallen victim to the Halbert’s scam. Several articles have been written over the years about this scam and the company has been shut down several times but apparently has miraculous powers of regeneration and continues to pop back into existence. For an interesting read about this duplicitous company see for example: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2004/08/my_least_favori.html

 

Scams aside, our surname Leather, appears to cause the editors of surname dictionaries particular difficulties. For example, in the several dictionaries of English or British Surnames, the name is usually described as being derived from workers or sellers of leather such as this shown below from The Internet Surname Index http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Leather#ixzz2gSAekBD2

This is an English surname. Recorded as Leather, Lether, Leither, and probably other others, it has two distinct origins. Firstly it may derive from the pre 7th Century male given name “hleothar”, meaning a sound or melody. Though not recorded independently, this personal name forms the first element in such placenames as Leatherhead in Surrey; Letheringham in Suffolk and Letheringsett, Norfolk. These are recorded respectively as Leodridan in the Saxon Chartulary, dated 880, as Letheringaham in the Domesday Book of 1086, and as Letheringsete in the Pipe Rolls of Norfolkin 1254. In his famous book “Patronymica Britannica”, Lower states that “One Lethar was a bishop in the days of Ethelbert” (860 – 865). The surname may also have originated as a metonymic occupational name for a leatherworker or seller of leather goods, from the Middle English and Olde English “lether”, leather. Although the surname itself does not appear until the early 16th Century (see below), the word was used in such occupational names as “Lether-dyer” in London in 1373, and one John Lethercarver was noted in a descriptive catalogue of Ancient Deeds for Northamptonshire, and dated 1404. The modern surname is now found chiefly in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The first recorded spelling of the family name may be that of Robert Lether. This was dated 1524 in the “Subsidy Tax Rolls of Suffolk”, during the reign of King Henry V111, known as “Bluff King Hal”, 1509 – 1547.

If the writers of articles like this actually did their homework, they would realise that their hypothesis of it being a metonymic occupational name was nonsense. If it was an occupational name it would be spread throughout the country instead of being, as even the authors of the above state, that the name in now “found chiefly in the Lancashire and Yorkshire” regions of England. A quick look at the map below derived from the 1881 census data shows this very clearly.

Leather – 1881 per 100,000 people

 

A few years ago I decided, given the restricted distribution of our name, evidence seemed to suggest an origin near Winwick a town close to Warrington, that it would be very interesting to start a DNA surname study. Imagine my surprise to find that the name Leather was already registered, but as a derivative of the name Lauder!   [due entirely to the misinformation given by Halberts] I was incensed and decided that this needed to be corrected immediately. Using the same sources http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Lauder#ixzz2gSATbi7f I was able to easily demonstrate that Lauder is a Scottish name recorded in the spellings of Lauder and Lauderdale, this is a famous Scottish locational surname. As Lauder it originates from the village of Lauder in the county of Berwickshire, and as Lauderdale from a name for the western district of the same county of Berwickshire. The translation of the place name and hence the later surname is believed to be from the French-Breton pre 7th century word “laour”, meaning a trench or ditch. The surname is one of the first recorded in Scotland, and early examples taken from authentic rolls and registers of the medieval period include: William de Lawedre, the sheriff of Perthshire in the reign of King Alexander IIIrd of Scotland (1249 – 1286), Alan de Lawadyr, who witnessed a charter by Stephen Fleming, master of the hospital of Soltre in 1426, and Johannes Lathirdale, a notary public, in the city of Glasgow in 1472. Other recordings include Sir David Luthirdale, archdeacon of Dunkeld in 1477, whilst William Lauder, given as being a literary forger, died in 1771. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Sir Robert de Lauedre. This was dated 1250, in the register of the Abbey of Dryburgh and from the map 1881 census data (see below)

Lauder – 1881 per 100,000 people

 

it is pretty clear that the surnames Leather and Lauder are distinct and non-overlapping.

This story does have a happy ending. As a result of this analysis I was able to get Leather registered as a separate DNA-surname study, although sad to say the various surname dictionaries have not yet manged to change their entries, but I continue to live in hope 🙂

 

Planned and accidental landings – Search terms that found my site

Unbelievably yet another year has gone by which means that I have managed to complete three years of blogging at Don’t Forget the Roundabouts writing articles at about ten-day intervals. This post will be my 105^th since I started blogging on January 1^st 2013.  I have written over 15 000 words about aphids and another 31 000 words on other entomologically related subjects ; so at least one book if I can get around to linking the various posts into a coherent form 🙂  My views on the usefulness of blogging at a personal level and in terms of science communication remain as positive as ever and I fully intend to continue blogging for the foreseeable future.  At this time last year last year I summarised my facts and figures in terms of views and international reach.  This year I have decided to ‘borrow’ an idea from three of the blogs I follow, Scientist Sees Squirrel, Small Pond Science and The Lab and Field and speculate about some of the search terms that direct people to my site.

So first the bare facts, I reached 150 countries (145 last year) and received 29 385   views

Top nine countries for views during 2015

(24 616 last year) and as yet the figures seem to suggest that I will continue to gain more views during 2016, but it is only a simple regression and a pessimist might see a plateau appearing 🙂

My top post, as last year, was Not All Aphids are Vegans closely followed by  A Winter’s Tale – Aphid Overwintering both with over a thousand views.  So how do people find me, which search terms do they use?  As you might expect the most frequently used search terms are those that ask do aphids bite people (humans)? In fact most of the search terms that plonk people down on my blog are aphid related.  Jiminy Cricket also turns up a lot; this is because of one of my very early posts in which I pointed out that Jiminy Cricket should really be Gregory Grasshopper.  On the other hand, some people do actually search for me and my site specifically.  There are, however, some weird and wonderful search terms that send people my way, a few of which are worth commenting on.

 

Do police dogs follow the scent of fear?  An easy one to start with, this directed the searcher to my post on aphid alarm pheromone, which will of course, not have answered her/his question.

 

These two are obviously linked to the name of my blog.

Who are the roundabouts in Pinocchio? I didn’t know that roundabouts featured in Pinocchio but Jiminy Cricket certainly does 🙂  On reflection this may have been a misspelling of roustabouts, in reference to the two villains who kidnapped Pinocchio.

Why were roundabouts so big back in the day?  An intriguing question to which I have no answer.

 

This one takes the prize for the most specific set of terms entered.

What is the name of the male group of entomologists that is the oldest group in the world and has recently invited Dr Helen Roy to become a member? – the answer is of course The Entomological Club.

 

I was extremely flattered that Google directed this inquirer to my blog  🙂

Where is the latest global discourse in entomology?

 

Obviously all my trips to Paris and France have upped my international profile,

article sur aphis nerii et ses parasitoides

 

but these are pretty obscure to say the least!

her wellies got sloppy pictures, but probably (s)he meant soppy? so here you are

it’s raining get coat and umbrella study module to get a first in exam results

what is a milligram?  I have no idea how that ended up on my site and as for this one?

joni printed 50 pages, then he took a pair of scissors and carefully cut 300 tag and signed all of them

 

And finally a couple of X-rated ones:

 why girls bum sap changes having sex? I’m guessing that (s)he meant shape –  being directed to an article about aphids ingesting phloem sap must have been a bit deflating!

video sex girls avenae  this one must have really been disappointed but if (s)he comes this way again (s)he might like to watch this video produced by the Silwood Revue which is well worth a view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sBzNsaSzdM

 

I could go on, but enough is enough, and the rest are mainly aphid related.

I continue to find blogging immensely satisfying but would really like to have more comments and interactions via the blog. Twitter is where most exchanges occur at the moment.  As far as I can make out other bloggers, even those with much larger readerships than me, also say that comments on their blogs have fallen over the last couple of years.  It would be nice if everyone who followed me on Twitter read my blog!  That said I must acknowledge my most frequent commenters and bestowers of likes.  These are Emily Scott http://adventuresinbeeland.com/, Jeff Ollerton http://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/, Amelia from A French Garden, Emma Tennant http://missapismellifera.com/, Manu Sanders http://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/ and Philip Strange https://philipstrange.wordpress.com/.   I am also very grateful to the 175 people (40 more than last year) who subscribe to my blog.

Many thanks to you all for your interest and kind words and A Prosperous and Happy New Year to you all.

 

Post script

As a late Christmas present to you all, my favourite roundabout of the year!

On the edge of Surgeres (Charente Maritime) – not very ecological but certainly literary!