-
Asked by anon-370692 on 15 Nov 2023.
-
Octavia Brayley answered on 15 Nov 2023:
I first became interested in entomology (the study of insects) during my first degree in Zoology at the University of Bristol. I was able to take some entomology modules as part of my course and I found insects really fascinating! They are very different from animals in terms of the way that they breathe, eat, and survive. There are also SO many different species of insects and they all have unique adaptations and some of them look really cool…for example, jewel beetles are so beautiful! My current research is investigating how a species of insect Antarctica is affecting the ecology and plant species on one of the Antarctic islands. The insect is called Eretmoptera murphyi (a difficult Latin name!) and its larvae (youngsters) are very very tiny. I have to look at big buckets of Antarctic soil under a microscope to find them! But once you find one, you often find hundreds in a handful of soil. They’re everywhere! There are only two species of insect in Antarctica, and Belgica antarctica is the second one. Here’s a video to watch on Belgica:
-
-
-
Andrew Lyon answered on 16 Nov 2023:
My first job was like an apprenticeship and part of this was working with the biology team. I used to take river samples and look at what invertebrates we found because this tells you whether the water is clean or polluted.
Clean rivers always had a large number and range of invertebrates, one of my favourites is a cased caddisfly larvae. They build themselves a protective case out of sand, small stones and sometimes leaves that they glue together.
-
Amy Stockwell answered on 17 Nov 2023:
Octavia’s and Andrew’s answers are really interesting. I don’t work with insects, so I was going to give a silly answer: I don’t find insects. Every time I go outside insects find me! I am always covered in bites. Maybe I can donate my body to their projects and they can use me as bait? 🙂
-
Ian McKinley answered on 21 Nov 2023:
I am not a biologist, but it is very important to remember animals of all kinds when studying and natural environment.
I was involved in developing plans for cleaning up contamination after the Fukushima accident in Japan. Lots of soil was contaminated and the group planning the work was mainly chemists and engineers who expected that contamination would be only very close to the surface. In fact, when we looked, the contamination was deeper than expected – which resulted in some very strange chemical models being developed to explain this. In real life, of course, this was actually due to biological soil mixing – with ants being particularly important in forested areas. We then needed to get input from biologists on mixing by worms, insects and other animals and then use this to plan the cleaning work.
Comments