Rockpooling

First job of the day was to pop down to the seahorse display in the underground section of Seal and Penguin Coasts. Phil, my line manager, said the ID I had put up last week was now propped up on the top of the tank with the sellotape hanging off it, looking very tatty. Jonny was already down there so I arranged to meet him. On entering the underground area I noticed the floor was all wet and found Jonny fixing a tank display. One of the old pipes supplying the tank with water had broke overnight and had drained the tank and flooded the area. Luckily the tank system has a fail safe and about 6" of water remained in the tank keeping the inhabitants, flat fish, safe. So Jonny had a lot on his plate on top of his usual busy rounds in the morning. I headed to the seahorse display alone and sorted out the ID sign, replacing the tape I had used withhopefully stronger tape. But I'm not convinced it will hold either as the glass that the sign needs to be attached too is very cold and things don't stick too well to very cold glass. May have to rethink the way we display the sign.

Back in the studio an email from the bird section gave me a few changes to signs on display where they had moved a few species around the aviaries. Two of the moves were easily sorted by the bird keepers themselves by just carefully removing the ID's and putting them in the holders of the respective new aviaries. The grosbeak starlings (Scissirostrum dubium) had been moved out of the Forest of Birds aviaries so I went over to remove the ID sign from the 'book' displays. There are three 'books' in the aviary and 2 of them were easily sorted as I had been warned some months ago that the species was due to be moved, so in the time since, I had rearranged the ID sequence so that the grosbeak info was on a single page and removing it wouldn't upset the rest of the sequence. However one 'book' had yet to be changed - it's position meant that the 'book pages' didn't get as wet during cleaning etc so it didn't get as tatty as quickly as the other two. Consequently the grosbeak sign was doubled up with another and removing it meant I had to replace the other species.

Back to the studio to print the ID off, trim to size, laminate, hole punch, bang in the eyelets and take over to the aviary to change over. Finishing just before lunch.

After lunch I got back to and completed drawing the tailless whip scorpion, this took a few hours. I have emailed Mark in Bug World (he had a day off today) to see if he has a dead specimen of this species - the photo's I took of the live animals and the ones I found on the internet do not show the feet structure well at all. As the animal has a pair of very long thin legs I have decided to have a plain colour as the background, rather than try and paint it on a log or rock or something. This way these legs will be much clearer to see and appreciate on the illustration (they are very impressive and a very distinct feature). Therefore I need to change the leg and foot positioning as if it is standing on a flat surface (all my ref photos are on a variable surfaces with feet in cracks and crevaces in shadow). So if I can get hold of a dead specimen I could look at the feet under a magnifying glass to see how the feet are constructed so I can paint them in a convincing position.

Unable to progress further with the illustration until I hear from Mark, I went back up to Bug World to try and get more photos on the rockpool species. I sat there for an hour and 15mins waiting and looking. I was rewarded with the harbour crab coming out as well as a better view of one of the hermit crabs. I also found three tiny 'fronds' waving out of a crevice in a rock. Greer, one of the invertebrate keepers walked by and identified my 'fronds' as the legs of a brittlestar. Sadly it didn't come out any further other than to wave its legs about a little more but at least I know what size it is and what to look for in future, so hopefully I can get a photo another time. I also got a good shot of the Painted top shell Calliostoma zizyphinum, a beautifully marked conical shelled snail. People come by and look in briefly thinking the tank is empty. I love being able to point out the hermit crabs the fish, the anemones etc getting people to really look rather than glance and dismiss. The kids get really into it once you point a few things out and start telling you of things that have found in the past in rockpools.

Time was pressing on so I headed back to the studio to upload the 97 photos to the computer and sort through them deleting the out of focus, too dark, blurred images. Then filtering through the rest finding the images I thought I could use resizing and adjusting light levels and filing them in the relevant species folders in my Rockpool Folder on the computer.

Day over - time to go home.