Mammal camera traps are sexy and butterfly nets make you feel like a Victorian scientist. But nothing beats the gruesome realities of catching dung beetles. Dung beetles are just about one of the most important and cost-effective animals you can sample, whether you’re doing so to test the impacts of […]
Once upon time, the island of Borneo was blanketed by dense and pristine rainforests. Ancient dipterocarp trees pierced the canopy, towering over a sea of treetops like parasols. These noble giants were the first to go when the chainsawing started. When industrial logging came to Borneo, it struck with an […]
Most of the news we hear about coral reefs nowadays is gloomy. This is not surprising given how pollution, overfishing and bleaching events are blighting many of our planet’s most vital marine ecosystems. But there’s optimism to be had too. From the discovery of a new “Coral Supersite” holding the […]
Towards the start of our Borneo fieldwork, I bumped into Nathan Trowbridge walking through the forest. We would eventually record a pretty funny podcast, the highlight of which was Nathan’s story of his pet lungfish with an anal prolapse. But for starters, Nathan wanted to know what our project was […]
This is how Redmond O’Hanlan starts his fantastic book Into the Heart of Borneo: As a former academic and natural history book reviewer I was astonished to discover, on being threatened with a two-month exile to the primary jungles of Borneo, just how fast a man can read. Powerful as […]
Deep inside a mountain on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, lies the Global Seed Vault. That’s such a cool sentence. I didn’t write it. It’s the sentence that sits at the top of the Crop Trust website, over a picture […]
The best thing about being a student at the University of Sheffield is the small piece of plastic you get given when you enrol. On this piece of plastic, you might look like a 9-year-old fluff head. But it doesn’t matter because with this humble piece of plastic, you can […]