After a wet and dreary February, we’re glad to welcome the return of spring and the various flora and fauna that come with it! With butterflies and bees spotted on the wing, we’re getting excited for a summer of fieldwork, adventures and other fun activities! In the meantime, we have loads of fun updates from February to share!
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If you are an entomological student, we’re really lucky to have the Royal Entomological Society’s Student Forum happening here in Newcastle at the end of this month! It’s not too late to register, and it will be a great way of seeing many of us there! If you are going along and want to see our labs or otherwise meet up while you’re here, just let us know. It’s going to be an excellent couple of days!
Outputs and outcomes
Kicking off the month with a bang, Bea passed her PhD viva with flying colours! Bea’s thesis is an exceptional journey through urban pollinator interactions and network ecology, with an incredible demonstration of the power of nutritional networks for studying how nutrients drive the structure of interactions and flow through ecosystems. Keep your eyes peeled for this research making its way into your favourite journals soon!
Ainsley’s been making headlines again! Ainsley was part of the team behind organising the National Symposium on Inshore & Small-Scale Fisheries which was held in Newcastle on the 4th & 5th of February! The event brought together fishermen, fishers’ representatives, scientists, regulators, policy-makers and NGO staff to discuss the issues facing the sector, share expertise and map possible ways to support the industry into the future. The event was very well received and a success all round, demonstrated by the excellent coverage it received in Fishing News!
FERG in the wild
Out in the wild, Jack has been busy trialling his marine settlement panels in the rough seas off the west coast of Scotland! Jack has been deploying his equipment off the coast of Great Cumbrae, a long way from Newcastle (but perhaps worth it for the views)! More exciting things to come soon!
Will’s been taking to the stage again, giving a strongly applauded talk for the Natural History Society of Northumbria’s 1829 talk series! Will’s talk took a deep dive beneath the soil and into the main topics of his PhD. This included his preprinted article on the application of ecoacoustics to trophic interaction detection and inference!
Will’s world tour continued with an appearance on a webinar panel for Operation Wallacea! Will has worked extensively with Operation Wallacea in the past, and it was great seeing him representing the organisation once again. The webinar was focused on careers in entomology and Will shared the wisdom he’s gained so far from his journey through academia, alongside a range of perspectives from other walks of life.
Fin shared some of his research on freshwater network ecology at the Royal Entomological Society’s Aquatic Insect Special Interest Group meeting! Fin’s been diving deep into the concepts underpinning trophic network structure in aquatic systems, particularly challenging the functional feeding group concept. Read more about it in a recent preprint of his!
Rebecca has been on an adventure too! As part of her MBiol module, “Biodiversity
Policy: Global and National Processes”, she got to travel to Manchester for the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Plenary meeting! It was a unique opportunity to see how international biodiversity policy works first-hand, and has provided all sorts of inspiration for the final stages of Rebecca’s MBiol research project!
We’ve had a few recent conference presentations accepted, too, so make sure you catch them if you’re heading the same way over the coming months! Shannon has secured a talk slot at the UArctic Congress in Tórshavn this May! Shannon’s talk, titled “Assessing invasive potential of bumblebees on the Faroe Islands”, will cover her exciting PhD research on the invasion of the Faroe Islands by bumblebees! Broghan has had a talk accepted at the British Columbia Protected Areas Research Forum (BCPARF) conference over in Kamloops this May too! A great opportunity to connect her PhD research with her homeland while she’s writing up out there! Finally, Ben has has a talk accepted at the UK DNA Working Group’s annual conference, titled “Advancing Entomological Biomonitoring with Metabarcoding: a Case for Assessing Agri-Environment Schemes (AES)” which will spill the latest on his PhD work! Lots of exciting presentations to come!
Fun with FERG
Following on from our data filtering game last month, we’re excited to share another similar game, this time focused on the ‘predator problem’ in predator-prey dietary analyses! When we analyse the gut contents of a predator, the most prevalent DNA is usually from the predator itself. We can circumvent this by using ‘exclusion PCR primers’ that don’t target the predator’s DNA, but this usually imposes other taxonomic biases too. These problems are summarised in a paper that Jordan led a few years back. This game shows how these choices can impact the completeness of our data, especially as we divide our sequencing depth between more and more samples!
Taxon of the month
Our taxon of the month is the spider family Archaeidae – pelican spiders! Gaining their common name from their bizarrely pelican-like cephalothorax and chelicerae shape (their ‘neck’ and elongated jaws), archaeids use this peculiar morphology to catch prey, also earning them the common name ‘assassin spiders’. Their prey are often other spiders, which they snag at a distance using a swift deployment of their elongated chelicerae. They hold their spider prey at a distance while in the final throes to protect themselves from retaliatory bites. Despite their fierce trophic ecology, they are fairly small (2-8 mm), which, alongside their nocturnal habit, meant that living populations remained undiscovered until the late 1800s. There are about 90 species across 5 genera, mostly found in Australia, Madagascar and South Africa.
Research spotlight
This month, we want to highlight this paper from Louise O’Connor, and co-authors: The untapped potential of food webs in systematic conservation planning
This is a really nice overview of one of the important roles food web studies can play in policy and management: that of identifying conservation targets and priorities. The article provides some nice examples ad discusses the cascading impacts on biodiversity within ecological networks. A great read!
Foraging Ecology Research Group 