Perspectives Archives - Page 2 of 24

06/03/202005/03/2020

The 2020 Postgraduate Symposium: putting the broad range of research in the School of Natural Sciences under the limelight

What started as a good excuse to take a break from thesis writing (while still being productive), ended up being two of the best days I’ve ever had in college – the 2020 Zoology/Botany Postgrad Symposium.

The audience settles in for the second day of presentations.

For two days we were treated to the most incredible talks on a wide range of topics, covering theoretical, lab-based, and field work. It was incredible to see the wide range of research being done in the department. It’s difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on, but these talks gave a great insight into some of the incredible work being done.

07/02/202006/02/2020

Pedagogy in Portugal

The sun rose over the Algarve as I stood outside on my hotel balcony, watching it. In January, imagine that! It was a beautiful start to the day and I was ready to dive into work (after a hearty Portuguese breakfast of course). I was in Portugal for a few days for a workshop on field pedagogy. For the uninitiated, that means teaching techniques and the theory behind teaching, but specifically in a fieldwork context.

I have relatively limited experience of fieldwork. I went on a few wonderful field courses at school, college, and then university, but I haven’t really done much teaching of fieldwork. I did help undergraduate students to sample river invertebrates in the river Dodder which we later identified to learn about the process of measuring biodiversity and also of using the invertebrate community to understand water quality. Other than that, I’ve little fieldwork teaching under my belt, so I was ready to learn how things are done.

24/01/202026/01/2020

The 2019 EcoEvo Hall of Fame

Every year, contributors to the blog look back on their favourite papers of the previous year and tell us what it was about these publications that stuck in their mind so much. With a range of different topics and reasons, it’s always great to see what each of us thinks makes for a great paper! Find out what we elected as our favourite papers in 2018 and 2017, and read on for this year’s entries:

Perrot-Minnot, M. J., Guyonnet, E., Bollache, L., & Lagrue, C. (2019). Differential patterns of definitive host use by two fish acanthocephalans occurring in sympatry: Pomphorhynchus laevis and Pomphorhynchus tereticollis. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, 8, 135-144.

Chosen by Paula Tierney

Read the full International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife paper here

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2213224418300671-fx1_lrg.jpg — Graphical abstract from paper

Sometimes a paper doesn’t have to make huge waves in the broader ecology world to be a great paper and sometimes a paper comes along at just the right time to answer the questions you need answering. Perrot-Minnot et al. 2019 did both for me this year. Since the taxonomic revision of the acanthocephalan parasite Pomphorhychus laevis by Špakulová et al in 2011 resurrected the closely-related species Pomphorhynchus tereticollis, the systematics of the genus in Europe has been something of a taxonomic dumpster fire. It also left one of my PhD chapters with a bit of an identity crisis since,

06/12/201910/12/2019

Fulbright to the Frozen Zoo

What is a Frozen Zoo©? Why do we need them? What species should we keep in them? From January to June this year I was lucky enough to travel on a Fulbright Irish Student Award to the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research to try and answer these questions.

Andrew Mooney at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

To put it simply, a Frozen Zoo© is a collection of living cells from different species which have been preserved and frozen, this is often termed biobanking. These cells can later be thawed and used to help conservationists by introducing genetic variation into existing wildlife populations or for a plethora of other scientific endeavours that require DNA from wild animals.

29/11/201928/11/2019

The Galapagos Islands: paradise lost?

This past August, I was lucky enough to visit the Galapagos Islands during my travels through South America. My visit here was quite possibly the highlight of my trip, with plenty to keep me thoroughly engrossed.

Set some 1000 km off the coast of South America, the Galapagos Islands were first stumbled upon by Tomas de Berlanga in 1535 when his ship was blown off course during a voyage between Panama and Peru. It was almost three hundred years later before the first human briefly settled on the islands, in 1807. However, this was due more to necessity than desire, as the settler in question was marooned on the islands. The islands were eventually made famous by Charles Darwin, who visited aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835, and used his observations of the island species as the basis for his “Origin of Species”.

An array of some of the commonly sighted species in the Galapagos: a blue-footed booby rests *in the foreground* with a juvenile marine iguana to its right. Behind it are a Galapagos penguin and a Sally lightfoot crab.

22/11/201922/11/2019

Home and Away: Monotreme mistakes

Natural history museum collections are invaluable snapshots of history. Research collections can be used to trace how animals have changed over time. Collections are also a reflection of the people and attitudes at the time it was curated. There is a well-represented collection of native Australian animals in the Zoology Museum at Trinity College Dublin. Well-represented in many sense of the word. This is a story about the red land down under, Australia, and the collection of Australian animals held in overseas museums around the world. It is a story in parts. This is the second part. Read the first part here.

Monotreme Mistakes

Echidnas (Tachyglossus aculeatus) are monotremes; Order Monotremata within Class Mammalia. They have hair and produce milk like other mammals but unlike other mammals, they lay eggs. Monotremes are endemic to Australia and New Guinea and consist of the four species of echidna and the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus).

The echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) in the Zoology Museum

15/11/201915/11/2019

The seven stages of fieldwork grief

This summer was my first attempt at a field experiment. As a typically desk-bound researcher, fieldwork presented some unique challenges. If you, like me, try out field research for the first time, you may find that your experience aligns quite well with the extended Kübler-Ross model of grief. So, here I present a satirical journey through the seven stages of fieldwork grief:

Stage 1: Shock & Denial

First, you may be shocked that your project was funded in the first place. How did the grant reviewers miss the underdeveloped methodology and glaringly obvious underestimation of how expensive your experiment will be to run? You tell yourself, ‘of course they’ll come to their senses and the funding body will realise what a mistake they’ve made.’ Don’t worry you’ll never have to actually do the research. This denial will likely leave you scrambling to pack a few days (or hours) before your bus/train/flight.

12/11/201912/11/2019

Natural Capital, Investment Banking and Biodiversity

If you had asked me a year ago if I had any interest in banking, I probably would have said no. As a natural sciences graduate passionate about sustainable development, it just wasn’t a path I associated with my interests. Yet in March 2019, I set off for Luxembourg to undertake a traineeship at the European Investment Bank (EIB). Not just any bank, the biggest multilateral bank in the world, responsible for lending over EUR 50 billion in 2018 alone.

The reason for this sudden change in direction was discovering a new pilot program at EIB called the “Natural Capital Financing Facility” (NCFF). It seemed like a unique project attempting to use traditional investments to support and conserve Europe’s ecosystems and biodiversity. The interdisciplinary aspect of combining finance with biodiversity, economics with environmental sustainability, really appealed to me and was too good an opportunity to miss. I applied for a traineeship position with the NCFF, crossed my fingers, and a few months later, had packed my bags for Luxembourg!

01/11/201904/11/2019

Home and Away: Would a Rosella by any other name smell as sweet?

Natural history museum collections are invaluable snapshots of history. Research collections are snapshots of the animals and plants collected in history. Research collections are also a reflection of the people and attitudes at the time it was curated. There is a well-represented collection of native Australian animals in the Zoology Museum at Trinity College Dublin. Well-represented in many sense of the word. This is a story about the red land down under, Australia, the collection of Australian animals held in overseas museums around the world. It is a story in parts. This is the first part.

An eastern quoll, *Dasyurus viverrinus*, labelled as a native cat

Would a Rosella by any other name smell as sweet?[efn_note] Rosellas, an endemic Australian bird in the Order Psittaciformes, was named by European settlers after Rose Hill (now Paramatta), New South Wales[/efn_note]

This story traces its roots to the day that Europeans invaded Australia, but we will start with the Saturday the 26^th October 2019. For most of the world, Saturday was not a particularly notable day. It was the beginning of the Bank Holiday long weekend here in Ireland; I enjoyed a walkabout through the local park. But as the sun dawned on Uluru in the Northern Territories, Australia, it was the start of a historic day.

22/07/201922/07/2019

Moon Landing Anniversary – Don’t look to the stars when the ground is burning

Buzz Aldrin on the surface of Earth's moon

Space: the final frontier. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission; the first time we had ever stepped foot on the moon. As Neil Armstrong boldly declared “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, we perhaps reached a new peak of human achievement. A peak that continues to climb upwards, itself shooting for the moon.

I’ve grown up with franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. Where somehow there’s always a white (human) man getting into trouble with aliens and flying space ships. One thing that’s common in much science fiction is the idea that we can colonise new worlds, terraforming their surfaces to sustain life (as we know it). This idea is pervasive in the years since the moon landing, and continues to be drawn upon even in recent films claimed to be scientifically sound (e.g. Interstellar and The Martian). Whilst this is a romantic idea—of humans gallivanting across the galaxy (hitchhiking even)—I sometimes worry about the price of this dream. Of course, I’m sure the notion has inspired many great minds the world over to learn about space, and perhaps to successfully take us all there one day. But does this idealism come with a cost?