My top ten highlights of 2025

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Thursday, 1 January 2026 09:07

I have had a break from social media for the last month. This was triggered by a period of feeling really unwell for a while, a trip to A&E after six hours of agonising stomach ache and nausea and a yellow eye (of course, I still went rock-pooling in the dark in gale in this state). I self-diagnosed gallstones and this was confirmed by an ultrasound at the hospital. A radical and rather rapid change in what and how I eat has been extremely successful but it was really scary at first. Every time I ate something it was like playing Russian roulette with my dinner. So the only way to play it was to eat the perfect diet. Not only have I not had a serious attack for nearly four weeks, but I actually feel healthier than I ever have! So I used that time to get my head down and write up a lot of reports.

So, back to 2025. This was a tough year to rank, there were so many red letter days last year. I love the pan-species listing approach to natural history, even 15 years into it (and 38 years since I made my first biological record) there are still countless encounters of amazing wildlife to see and record in the British Isles. So to celebrate that, with each of these ten I will also give a reason to get into pan-species listing. In reverse order then...

10). My first encounter with Eelgrass beds

Back in March, Mark Telfer took me to Seaview on the Isle of Wight where I saw my first Straight-nosed Pipefish! Also on that trip I found these things new to the Isle of Wight at Bembridge Ledges. Sarcodityon catenatum.

PSL pushes you outside your comfort zone into ever strange new worlds of natural history!

9). Surveying the farmland around Brighton

This is an ongoing project I am doing for BHCC. I found a population of Woolly Thistle, the first in Sussex for many years.

A population of Tettigometra virescens was new to Sussex! This is landscape is vitally important for biodiversity.

If you work anywhere hard enough and long enough with PSL, it will come up with the goods.

8). Completing pipefish on Helford Sound in Cornwall

I spent a great day with Finley Hutchinson down on some more Eelgrass beds just round the corner from Falmouth. Deep-snouted Pipefish was a highlight, as it was my sixth and final pipefish in the UK! Yet finding Acanthocardia paucicostata new to me (and Cornwall) was a real highlight!

Some of the best PSL days are when you don’t have any targets and you just find what you find.

7)****. The arable margins of the Norfolk Estate

This might have been the sixth year I have monitored these same eight margins, but in 2025 they were rocket fuel for migrants and recent colonists. I love living on the south coast! The first confirmed breeding of Carporcoris purpureipennis in the UK was great and a lifer for me!

Yet I think finding my first ever Small Marbled was my highlight.

PSL is all about the long game. PSL definitely works best the earlier you start and as such, you could play this game for your whole life!

6). My third trip to Jersey

Now, I have to say it’s testament to the following five highlights that Jersey rockpools are not higher up this list! A huge thanks to Nicolas Jouault for showing us around the marine habitats of the island. He was so generous with his time and I learnt so much from him. I was so glad to be there when he found Discodoris rosi new to the island.

This absolute unit is Dendrodoris limbata. In fact, 2025 was the year of the nudibranch for me. I have seen 35 species so far in my life, ALL of which I also saw in 2025.

The main PSL listing area is ‘Britain, Ireland, Isle of Wight and Channel Islands’ and it’s important to state we are not a recording platform. PSL is something you do as well as recording, not instead of.

5). Praying Mantis on the Isle of Wight

Seeing these breeding **Praying Mantis **with Mark Telfer was an absolute dream come true, this is probably the only twitch I did last year! In a normal year this should been number 1!

That evening, Karen I went to Bembridge Ledges and found this mollusc new to the island! Galeomma turtoni.

No PSL twitch ever happens in a vacuum. Even if you do dip, there’s always a plan B...

4). Oh gawd this is getting tough now! You know it’s an insane year when Rainbow Sea Slug isn’t even in the top three!

It was a dream come true seeing three Rainbow Sea Slugs down at Falmouth with a whole bunch of keen PSLers, rockpoolers and naturalists.

It would seem you can’t go out rockpooling at Falmouth now without seeing Spurilla neopolitana now too! Insane considering it only turned up in September.

PSL is about collaboration and cooperation, we all help each other out. If you have focused on the competitive side, you have totally missed the point. There are no losers in this game.

3). Meeting a whole bunch of brilliant Gen Z naturalists at Menai (and their sea slugs)

Meeting Nathan, Yolanda, Cameron and friends under Menai bridge several times this year was amazing, as well as seeing loads of amazing nudibranchs they have given me hope for the future! They’re already brilliant naturalists, I am glad they’ve caught the PSL bug too! Here is Trinchesia cuanensis.

And*** Coryphella lineata***. Just a few of the amazing beasts they showed me!

PSL is a really sociable way to do natural history. Yes, you can do it on your own but it’s more fun to share some of it at least, some of the time and I have made a lot of great friends along the way.

2). Two days snorkelling on The Ecrehous

Thanks to Nicolas Jouault again, I had an amazing two days snorkelling on the uninhabited islands between Jersey and France. Black-faced Blennies were the commonest fish!

And this bonkers looking crustacean, Axius stirhynchus was a real highlight. I couldn’t get out of the water. Amazing considering not two years ago I was frightened of putting my face in the water!

PSL breakdowns barriers and encourages you to be fearless - whether tackling a new group or jumping face first into a rockpool!

1). Finding Aulonia albimana on the Isle of Wight with Mark Telfer

This was the first record of*** Aulonia albimana ***in the UK in 40 years! It was a very exciting day and led to me sitting on the sofa on BBC Breakfast. The story got amazing coverage, I did six interviews and I think something like 70 media outlets ran the story!

The morning after we found the spider, at 5.00 am I went down to Bembridge Ledges and found another new nudibranch for me, it was only the second record for the island! Trapania tartanella!

PSL is great fun, it’s exciting, it opens doors. Literally anything can happen at any time. So why not sign up now? It’s free and the 1st January is a great time to start something new.

A quick update on the book. Publication has been put back a little to the 26th February! Not long now, you can pre-order it here.

Now it’s time to start my 2026 challenge, to see 6,000 species over the year! I have seen a Human so far, so I better get to work! Yo can follow my progress on the website, only 5,999 species to go. Happy listing!

Worst Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Monday, 8 December 2025 15:00

Here is a bit of fun. I have taken a lot of photos over the 15 years this blog has been running, some of which I am pleased with. I have also taken plenty of awful photos, some of which are exquisitely bad. I present here a selection of them! In reverse order then...

**6). **Above is a **Glanville Fritillary **that was sitting perfectly still on my finger until I took the image.

5). The day I saw my first Quail, I had my camera on, ready to take the shot as I knew I was likely to flush them on this particular farm. When they did fly up, I turned my camera OFF and missed them, even though they were right in front of me. This is all I got (you can just about see them in the bottom right)...

4). On Jersey last year I was taking a sequence of shots of the amazing shrimp Periclcimenes sagittifer that lives among Snakelocks Anemones, the light was perfect! Shame I had it on the wrong setting!!! The problem with taking photos under water is you can’t see what you are doing.

3). You know how it is, on a sunny March day you go for a walk around a site you’ve worked on for a decade when a Large Tortoiseshell flies by! This was the shot I got as it zoomed past me.

2). When you twitch the Beluga on the Thames.

And finally, the winner is...

1). And finally, that time a gorgeous adult Honey-buzzard glided low over head. Surely this would have made a brilliant photo. WRONG! There’s always a bloody pylon in the way!

6000 species in 2026

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Wednesday, 3 December 2025 11:01

In 2026, I am going to use our fantastic website to ‘pan-species year list’, with the aim of reaching 6,000 species over the course of 2026. Now you might think that sounds utterly unachievable but looking at my ‘blind year listing’ efforts in 2023, 2024 and so far this year, it might just be achievable.

There’s still lots that I see that I don’t record every year, plants and marine groups especially. But even with this in mind, I recorded some 4,419 species in 2023 (and 2024 wasn’t that different). Here’s my PSL life list, my 2023 year list and a rough suggested target list for 2026 to get me to exactly 6,000 species. My 2025 list is on about 3,300 species, with just over 40,000 records entered this year (last year was over 60,000 records).

Now, I am a bit apprehensive about PSL year listing being a big thing (PSL is really a life long quest to see as much wildlife as you can over the course of your life). Regular year-listing could potentially detract from that - my blind year listing has been a good way of doing this for me. That is, I only know what my total is when everything has been identified at the end of the following financial year. However, I hadn’t realised how annoying this must be for people year listing as they go. So, I am going to have one big blow out in 2026 and get it out of my system.

It’s also a nice thing to do in the year that my book comes out (should be end of January 2026) as it will no doubt generate lots of stories. I am also going to be fundraising during this time for Sussex Wildlife Trust and there is a Just Giving page here. A target of £6000 seems as bonkers as the challenge itself.

The rules are going to follow the typical PSL approach to natural history. The challenge will not be finished on the 31st December 2026 though, but closer to the end of March 2027 (or whenever I finish all of the specimens I collect over 2026 - which for work alone is a lot of work that takes me all winter to complete). No more specimens will be collected after 31st December 2026 though. One rule that I will stick to is that every species must be recorded in my database. I will stick a new tab on my by blog which will track my progress. I will be itching to get out on the 1st January, so I hope we have good weather. I am so excited to attempt this!

Finally, a few side quests...

In addition to the above, I would like to try to achieve the following (although I might leave some of these ‘blind’ until the end of the challenge).

• 5,000 of the 6,000 species found and identified by me. I am happy to add things like fungi and other groups that I am going to struggle with but I want the bulk of the list to be of things I have found and identified myself, which reflects my pan-species list.
• 4,000 of the 6,000 species to be in Sussex.
• I am on 9,701 species as I write this, just 299 species away from the mythical 10,000 species mark, so I expect to get there at some point in the second half of 2026.
• Visit Scotland at least once. It will have been 19 years by then!

Could this get any more AuDHD?! I will be having a very quiet year in 2027. Well the last nine months of it.

The last passage

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Saturday, 15 November 2025 08:24

Last Thursday to Saturday was an utterly unforgettable rock-pooling experience down at Falmouth in Cornwall. In fact 10 of the above 15 species were lifers for me, one of which was new to Cornwall! On the Saturday, there was a ‘Rockpool Project’ event being run at Castle Beach and given we had already seen the targets on Thursday and again on Friday, I couldn’t really take seeing Babakina and Sprurilla three days in a row - it would have blown my tiny mind. Finley suggested going to Helford Passage after I was talking about a similar site on the Isle of Wight (Seaview - both are eel-grass on sand). So we did just that and it was utterly amazing!

With pond nets, waders and trays in hand, Finley and I set off. It didn’t take long to find something I hadn’t seen before. My 5th new mollusc of the trip - Calyptraea chinensis. A limpet-like species.

I haven’t seen a **Solenette **for years! The fish were were great here. Sand Gobies, Fifteen-spined Sticklebacks and a whole loud of pipefish. I’ll come to them later.

I found this brittlestar and it look different straight away to the ones I see in rock pools. A proportionally bigger disc and a texture and pattern of an animal that looked adapted to living on sand. It’s Ophiura ophiura and another lifer.

Finley took this shot of an Antony Gormley statue that’s called ‘The Lone Pan-species Lister’. There was a chill wind blowing along that passage, with some rather violent shivering employed by both parties.

Visibility wasn’t great, but Finley did spot and photograph this awesome Common Welk Buccinum undatum! By the time I blundered into range, I clouded it up so much a photo wasn’t possible. Look at those spots on the mantle!

Finley had mentioned there being some impressive Spiny Cockles here, although I had seen many shells, I only noticed one live adult. I hoyed it out for a series of photos. Yet when I got home and had a look, it didn’t look right. I soon discovered there was a species that fit for what I had here, and Simon Taylor confirmed it. This is another mollusc on the move and is new to Cornwall! It’s Acanthocardia paucicostata. The shape of the ridges is quite distinct. The cross section of the shell looks more like a series of old tents side by side (rather than say the ‘battlements of a castle’ that are seen in more typical cockles). The spines are different too, being rather spoon-shaped. Size is key, this being a fairly small cockle. My size estimate from memory was way off, fortunately we were able to estimate the size more accurately from my my fingers in the photo!

Then things started getting exciting! I netted my first ever Deep-snouted Pipefish! My 102nd fish - I’ve seen all six pipefish in the UK now! I was proper stoked!

What a gorgeous fish.

Look how compressed the snout is when seen from above!

We found at least five, Finley took this shot of what was perhaps the largest one.

I also found this baby Common Cuttlefish!

Finley pulled out a couple more pipefish. This is only the second time I have seen Straight-snouted Pipefish.

And this small animal that by a process of elimination we are thinking is Nillson’s Pipefish. I’d be interested in what others think of this. It has been a long time since I saw one of these either way.

Then something really unexpected. I only went and found yet another Spurilla neapolitana! That makes three days in a row in which I have seen this recent arrival to our shores, but this time from a totally different habitat! Bonkers. I found it just as Ben Rumsby and a contingent of other students turned up, so they were very happy to see all these wonders.

Here are my records for this species. Three records of four individuals, all likely adults. From three 2 km squares and two diagonally adjacent hectads. Considering it wasn’t even on the British list in August that is mad, imagine how many more of them are out there.

And to conclude, here’s my favourite shot from the weekend, the Rainbow Sea Slug ***Babakina anadoni ***that was found by Rachel Edworthy on Friday at Gylly Reef. What an incredible three days that was!

Oh just one last thing. Following a few last-minute tweaks (including the very last page), my book should be going to print next week! Exciting times.