A Potpourri of British Wildlife Quiz

Answer: Hagfish and lampreys

Fish began to evolve in the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. However, while the earliest fish had a skull and a vertebral column, they lacked jaws and are referred to as Agnathans. Most of these are now extinct, but representatives of this group survive as hagfish and lampreys. In many ways they can be referred to as "living fossils" - they're 100 million years older than the dinosaurs. Jawed fish start to appear in the fossil record in the Silurian period about 430 million years ago, and gave rise to all other vertebrates.

Hagfish and lampreys share many primitive features. For example they are unable to regulate their body temperature and their skeletons are made of cartilage. They have rather unpleasant feeding habits; lampreys feed upon live fish and mammals, scraping tissue and blood from their bodies, while hagfish eat dead animals of any sort. They also look repulsive - eel-like and slimy (especially hagfish, who use their slime to block up the gills of predatory fish when they are attacked).

Answer: A type of rail

The moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) is a common pond, marshland and wetland bird - it swims well, despite the fact that it doesn't have webbed feet. It's related to the gallinule (Gallinula chloropus) in the US and to the common coot (Fulica atra), all of which species belong to the rail family, the Rallidae.

I have the good fortune to live in a house beside the Lancaster Canal and there's a pair of moorhens nesting in the reeds on the other side of the Canal from me. The males fight noisily and vigorously during the breeding season!

Answer: Black redstart

The black redstart (Phoenicurus ochruros) was at one time a migrant species, just calling in on the south and east coasts during the spring and autumn. Very few birds stayed around to breed, but those that did were mainly to be found at rocky coastal sites in Kent. This all changed during WWII when black redstarts rapidly and extensively colonised bomb sites in London and then became an established breeding species throughout much of south-east England. Perhaps the redstarts saw similarities between cliffs and the remnants of bombed-out buildings.

The males are more-or-less all black apart from a white wing panel and a red tail, while females are grey with less red on their tail. The male has a distinctive and attractive song, the last phase of which sounds like a handful of metal balls being shaken together.

Answer: Orca

The killer whale or orca (Orcinus orca) is a large toothed whale of the dolphin family. It is found in UK waters, especially in northern areas. They are highly social apex predators with sophisticated hunting techniques; like wolves, they hunt in groups.

Answer: Ant larvae

The large blue butterfly (Phengaris arion) became almost extinct in the UK in the late 1970's, but has been successfully reintroduced in some areas as the strange details of its behavioural ecology have become clear.

Large blue butterflies are brood parasites, relying on other insects to raise their young. Their eggs hatch into larvae that resemble a myrmica ant, and after a short period feeding on thyme leaves they drop off the plants and start emitting pheromones that will attract these ants. The ants then pick up the larvae and take them back to their nests. Here the larvae will either behave like ant larvae and beg for food (the "cuckoo strategy") or they will actively predate the ant larvae; the latter is the more common option for the large blue larvae. Eventually, having decimated the population of the ant nest, they will pupate. The adult butterfly hatches the next spring.

Answer: European edible dormouse

The edible dormouse (Glis glis) is a charming creature, resembling a small squirrel. Normal body length is from 14 to 19 cm, with a 11 to 12-cm-long fluffy tail. They live in Europe, from France in the west to Russia in the east, and from Italy and Greece in the south to the Baltic in the north.
The animal was farmed and eaten by the Romans, who kept them in terra cotta containers called gliraria. They were fed on walnuts, acorns and chestnuts to fatten them up, then served stuffed and roasted. Dormouse bones found at Roman archaeological sites confirm their presence here in Britain at that time, although none appear to have survived through the Dark Ages.

Their presence in Britain now is down to the banker and biologist Lionel Walter Rothschild, who imported them for his private zoo in Tring at the turn of the 20th Century. Needless to say some soon escaped! Estimates of the current population in Hertfordshire vary from 10,000 to 430,000!

Answer: Their large canine teeth ("tusks")

Muntjac were first introduced into the UK in the early nineteenth century but were initially all held in captivity. They were probably first released into the wild by the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey in about 1925, and are now common throughout the British Isles (they arrived on the island of Ireland in about 2009).

Although they have small antlers, male muntjac are also equipped with large, downward-pointing canine teeth, referred to as "tusks", and they use these for disputes over access to females. Unlike other British deer, muntjac have no seasonal rut; rather, they breed throughout the year.

Answer: Dragonflies

One of my pleasures during the summer is walking along the towpath of the Lancaster Canal watching all the various species of dragonflies: darters, hawkers, darners, chasers, skimmers and many others. They tend to be brightly-coloured - greens, blues and reds are not unusual - and they zip up and down the Canal hunting small flying insects. And of course the aquatic nymphal stage is a voracious hunter with relatively huge jaws!

Answer: Great bustard

60% of the world's population of the great bustard (Otis tarda) live in Spain and Portugal, but they used to live in Britain until the last was shot in 1832. However, birds from Russia were reintroduced in 2004 in a region of Salisbury Plain that is occupied by the army, and there is now a breeding population of about 100 individuals in the area.

An adult male bustard is a big bird, about 100 cm tall with a wingspan of about 2.4 m and weighing up to 18kg. The heaviest verified specimen, collected in Manchuria, was about 21 kg, a world record for the heaviest flying bird. The males and females show a high degree of sexual dimorphism; in Spanish populations the males are nearly two-and-a-half times as heavy as the females.

Of the incorrect answer options, the common crane (Grus grus) can be about 130 cm tall, with a wingspan of between 1.8 and 2.4 m and weighing up to 6kg; although rare in Britain there are recent records of pairs breeding in Suffolk. The capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) and female white-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla) weigh in at about 6 to 7 kg; the white-tailed eagle is remarkable for its immense wingspan of up to 2.6m

Answer: The Scottish crossbill

The Scottish crossbill (Loxia scotica) is the only terrestrial vertebrate species that is endemic to Scotland; it was confirmed as a unique species distinct from all other crossbills in 2006, on the basis of its distinctive song. The Scottish crossbill is a reddish-coloured finch, notable for the way its mandibles cross at their tips.

This adaptation assists them in extracting seeds from pine cones, the birds' main food resource. Climate change is a major threat to this bird. As the climate warms the pine forests upon which it depends for food are retreating northwards, and there will come a time when Scotland will be too warm to support these forests.

The Scottish crossbill will have nowhere to go.