Eanna Ni Lamhna

Mon, 15 August 2016

SNAILS

They are hermaphrodite – which means that each snail is both male and female at the same time. They do need another snail to mate with – but then both snails go off and lay 100 eggs each.

They are herbivores which means that they eat plants. Their teeth are in rows on their tongue and they can rasp off the smallest plant particles or demolish your basil plant with equal facility.

So they climb up walls to eat the small tiny algae that grow there and they do so under the cover of darkness. When daylight comes they freeze to the wall.

How to stop this? You could hose down the wall with a bleach solution and that would remove the algae from the wall.

 

DADDY LONG LEGS

It is approaching the time of year when daddy long legs will be flying into our sitting rooms and kitchens.

These are adult crane flies – not spiders. They have no poison and cannot harm us in any way. That story about them having the worst poison in the world is complete rubbish.

They live most of their lives in the soil as leatherjackets feeding on the roots of cereals and grasses.

So in August they pupate – develop two wings.  We have our windows open in August because it is still warm and the lights on because it is getting darker a little early now and so these insects come in attracted by the light.

Bats catch them and eat them.

 

BATS

We have 9 species of them in Ireland. They are all on the wing at the moment with their young who are not so good yet at navigating so they sometimes end up in bedrooms by mistake. 

They will fly out again by themselves if you leave the window open. 

Bat Detector- Shows how to know what bat is flying overhead. They all emit ultrasonic sounds that we cannot hear, but at a different pitch for each species. It ranges from 20KhZ for Leislers Bat to 55Khz for the soprano pipistrele. The bat detector can interpret these sounds and resend them so that we can hear them and know what bat is flying.