Ageism?

[diggleken]

What creatures/wildlife exhibit their age for us to tell?
Dendrochronology, tree rings, for ageing cut trees.
Cockles by shell growth lines, I believe.
Some bracket fungi by yearly layering of pores/tubes, hoof fungus etc - apparently.
Hedges by species richness /count.
Ducks / Gulls by moults, 1st winter plumage etc etc.
Thats me exhausted!
What else is there?
Cheers
Ken

[fairplay]

Rock layers ?

Neil.

[Jim Ford]

Fish otoliths:

Otolith - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jim

[loripo]

Instars?
Instar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Picidae]

Originally Posted by fairplay

Rock layers ?

Neil.

Do you have any links to a photo of a 'Rock Creature' Neil ?

[danthekeeper]

Not an exact age but fallow deer by antler growth.
all deer can be properly aged by taking tooth sections and counting the annual growth layers with a microscope

[thunder]

Please note you cannot age hedges by counting species!

henrya

[diggleken]

Hi Henrya, I did mean species, but you made me think, so looked a bit deeper into 'hoopers law'!
From a lecture by Max Hooper - But how do you date a Hedge?

The foremost Landscape Historian at that time was the late W.G.Hoskins. He had just retired to Devon. He promised to date some hedges for me so my wife and I, and Johnny Lovell, my assistant, had a field trip to Devon to count shrubs in these 20 or 30 hedges he had dated. Two I remember well were Saxon boundaries not too far from here at Chelfam and Chumhill and they had the requsite dozen species in them, while hedges from the 1840s at Bratton Fleming had only one or two. I felt we could go into print and the first paper on Hooper's law was in the Devon Naturalists Trust Journal in December 1965.

We did more field work on dated hedges and by the time I wrote the first 8 chapters of the Hedges book we had 227 dated hedges. Enough to be sure that 70% of the variation in tree & shrub content of a hedge was explained by its age! Or Hooper's Law, one species for every hundred years, was at least a good rule of thumb. And I've been dining out on it ever since!
Cheers
Ken

[thunder]

Originally Posted by diggleken

Hi Henrya, I did mean species, but you made me think, so looked a bit deeper into 'hoopers law'!
From a lecture by Max Hooper - But how do you date a Hedge?

The foremost Landscape Historian at that time was the late W.G.Hoskins. He had just retired to Devon. He promised to date some hedges for me so my wife and I, and Johnny Lovell, my assistant, had a field trip to Devon to count shrubs in these 20 or 30 hedges he had dated. Two I remember well were Saxon boundaries not too far from here at Chelfam and Chumhill and they had the requsite dozen species in them, while hedges from the 1840s at Bratton Fleming had only one or two. I felt we could go into print and the first paper on Hooper's law was in the Devon Naturalists Trust Journal in December 1965.

We did more field work on dated hedges and by the time I wrote the first 8 chapters of the Hedges book we had 227 dated hedges. Enough to be sure that 70% of the variation in tree & shrub content of a hedge was explained by its age! Or Hooper's Law, one species for every hundred years, was at least a good rule of thumb. And I've been dining out on it ever since!
Cheers
Ken

That's all very well, Ken, but I am afraid Max was wrong. The theory has been comprehensively refuted in print several times. Sometimes, in some areas, it seems to work, but elsewhere, it doesn't.

henrya

[fairplay]

Originally Posted by Picidae

Do you have any links to a photo of a 'Rock Creature' Neil ?

I look at WAB as taking in the whole wilderness of Britain, so that must include the substrata too, and if one is knowledgeable, this can be aged also.

(Thinks: Must make a clay mould and pour in some molten lava one day to make a lava man).

Neil.

PS. We don't have a separate forum on geology do we. Everything else seems to be covered including the weather. In Suffolk, we have a unique rock called Coralline Crag, which is really interesting stuff, but I don't know enough about it to interest you lot.