Want to see something possibly interesting? WARNING: don't enter if you don't like bugs.... :P

Originally Posted by missyorkie_chris

Yep they're a pain to capture, have to sedate them with alcohol first, little critters have never had it so good!

Originally Posted by missyorkie_chris

Yep they're a pain to capture, have to sedate them with alcohol first, little critters have never had it so good!

LOL @ alcohol sedation. Can just imagine you serving them all beer in a mini bug bar

Moving on..so what exactly are you looking at with regards to oystercatchers? their diet? whats the relation between analysing 200 or so of these bugs and oystercatchers? Im genuinely interested

He he, mad little things. They get confused at night if you light a fire on the beach and end up hopping into the flames.

Originally Posted by zsv650

almost looks like a prawn.

indeed.

This is a U rated forum- we don't want prawnography on here thanks!

Originally Posted by Ceri JC

He he, mad little things. They get confused at night if you light a fire on the beach and end up hopping into the flames.

Hehe yeah, this species in particular is known to orientate itself on the shore according to the position of the sun, a "sun compass" its called.

Originally Posted by thedonal

indeed.

This is a U rated forum- we don't want prawnography on here thanks!

LOL!

MissA* : I've been observing oystercatcher feeding bahaviour at high tide on the beach, it seems they feed at certain places but it wasn't clear as to what exactly was the prey. Oystercatchers have a varied diet, best known for eating cockles and mussels but also little worms and small shellfish. However, there isn't much in the literature about feeding on Sandhoppers. Originally I didn't know what it was they were feeding on, but as there's bugger all they could be feeding on - as they are all thats present in my samples - then thats what I'm concentrating my study on.

I wasn't originally intending to look at exact diet, just feeding behaviour, habits and communication between flocks, but there seems to be more data to be found in this particular area I'm enjoying it though, just a tad tedious as mentioned.

Hope I haven't bored you too much there, you can all wake up now

Nope you havent bored us, sounds like a kewl project

Maria

Originally Posted by missyorkie_chris

Yep they're a pain to capture, have to sedate them with alcohol first, little critters have never had it so good!

What a waste of alcohol

Originally Posted by saoralba

What a waste of alcohol

70% ethanol? That do for ya? wouldn't take much

Haha sounds quite harsh..
If its that kinda alcohol were talking about..
Think i leave it..

Originally Posted by missyorkie_chris

70% ethanol? That do for ya? wouldn't take much

OOO I could run my sv on that!!!
Jan and I think that wot your doing is dead interesting and could listen to you for ages.Jan has taken some pics of some god awful looking hedge hog ticks that she plucked off of our dogs, will get her to dig out the pics( she put them on her storage hard drive thingy)and post them on here!!!