Hurricane Damage & Monsoon Flooding, Brexit Spats, Pond Desmids

 6th September - Flooding along the Ganges as seen from Space - NASA’s Terra satellite

May 24, 2017 - Same area before flooding - NASA

Hurricane Irma continues on its wrecking trail to Haiti and the Turks and Caicos islands. It flattened 95% of the Island of Barbuda, Richard Branson's Necker Island, and President Trumps house on the island of St Martin. In Puerto Rico, nearly 900,000 people are without power, parts of the island could be without electricity for up to six months.

In South East Asia, the exceptional monsoon floods have affected more than 40 million people with Bihar, East India, being particularly badly afflicted.

Look East BBC News reported on the problem of increased bullying of Eastern European students at schools in Peterborough. Reports of bullying had generally increased to 500 in the past year, correlated with anecdotal information from a variety of sources. Incidents appear to be linked to times when Brexit and immigration are in the news. This fits with the wider perception by EU nationals, who may have lived in the UK all their lives, of feeling less welcome and more insecure.

This is likely to be fanned again by the multiple news stories about Brexit in the news today. EU negotiators criticising the UK of backtracking on commitments, David Davis criticising Labour for wishing to block the 'The Will of The People' by not voting for the EU law repeal bill. Tories exerting pressure on the government - warning of not using any transitional Brexit arrangements as a mechanism to stay in the EU by stealth. The EU 'worried' by UK's Irish border proposals!'

Desmid - Closterium sp - Photo Guiseppe Vago

Cleared out the pond of excess weed and took a sample to look at under the microscope. Quite a number of rotifers, needle shaped diatoms and desmids. The variety in my pond is a species of Closterium, which are sickle shaped algae. They are quite three dimensional - I took a series of focus stacks but need to process them. Also videoed a spherical shelled amoeba. The first time I've seen one alive and not just the shell. It extruded fine pseudopodia as it wandered slowly across the debris in the slide. Difficult to see if this was captured on the video on the small camera screen.