Double gribble trouble
- Trespassers won’t be prosecuted: do you have a right of access to the beach? - 25th March, 2024
- Why do boomers like minions? - 6th November, 2022
- Are you a true Isle of Wight local? - 30th October, 2022
Oh, those gribbles. So cute, but so hungry. A bit of the nibbled slipway came into the hands of Cat who used her USB microscope to study it: only to discover that it was still very much occupied!
It seems possible from the four spots on the rear end of this little chap that the species represented here is Limnoria quadripunctata Holthuis, 1949; but in the absence of any online gribble guide it’s hard to be sure. Any gribble experts want to speculate?
[Update: see comments below for elucidation]
UPDATE: The release of the gribble armada After our brave little TV stars had managed to survive over 24 hours away from seawater they were starting to look a bit sluggish when asked to perform yet again under the lights this morning at work. The Ranger decided they needed to be given a fighting chance to go off and nibble some toff’s yacht in Cowes. So down to the river Medina went the gribbles, wrapped in a magazine, and they were sent off in a little flotilla of wooden fragments.
GWIBBLEZ!
Just to say that the four greenish “spots” that you see on the telson (back end) of this little fella are a type of epibionts called folliculinids. The “spots” normally used to identify the species are more like little bumps, and are generally difficult to see as they are the same colour as the exoskeleton (you need to hit the light at the right angle to be able to see them)… The common species found down the south coast are either L. quadripunctata (with 4 bumps as rightly said) or L. tripunctata (you guessed, 3 bumps). Yes, people do care…
The Ranger responds: thanks very much for that – folliculinids are a new one on me so I was very interested to learn about them.
anyone wish to buy a 50ft gribbled scottish trawler….e mail me
All life is precious, except maybe one’s inlaws and those horrid little things. Come to think of it, they move like my cousin’s teenage son, heading for the refridgerator.
Cool, gribbles yay!
Did you fit radio trackers before releasing them? They’d better stay away from Yarmouth is all I can say….
Born Free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows….