Brassica Bugs

From May last year: brassica bugs, Eurydema oleracea (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) on garlic mustard (Allaria petiolata).

Photos taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2012-05-08.

Snails

From back in early last summer: a pair of snails, probably Cepaea nemoralis, mating.  This species is characterized by the dark brown line round the lip of the open end of the shell.  As you can see, the markings on the rest of the shell are pretty variable.  Note also the white gypsobelum ('love dart') sticking into the left-hand snail.

Photo taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2012-06-09.

Cinnamon Porecrust Fungus

Cinnamon porecrust fungus, Phellinus ferreus, growing on a decaying trunk of a birch tree (Betula sp).

I took a sample to examine more closely back at home.  It showed about 4 pores per mm:

The above sample did not yield any spores so I took another a few days later.  This following image (x600, image width 86um) shows spores from this second sample: 

These spores are about 6.5 - 2.5um which agrees well with the 5–6.5 x 2–2.5um quoted at Roger's Mushrooms.

First photo and first sample taken in the Wilderness, Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, on 2013-02-05.  Second sample taken in the same place on 2013-02-08.

Misleading minus signs in Cucumber progress format

I have been recently using the Ruby test tool Cucumber and came across a little annoyance.  In the progress format output there were unexpected minus signs:

  $ cucumber --format progress features/codebreaker_submits_guess.feature
  ---..........................................
  14 scenarios (14 passed) 42 steps (42 passed)
  0m0.117s 
  $

Normally minus signs would be used to indicate skipped steps but here they seem to be displayed for each scenario outline step whether it is skipped or not.

A little Googling revealed that this is a known bug that has not yet been fixed because of the awkward internal design of Cucumber.

Willows

In winter the yellow-twigged willows stand out a amongst the trees lining the middle lake.

Photo taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, on 2013-02-02.