birds Archives - EcoEvo@TCD

23/11/202311/12/2023

So, you want to be a Zoologist?

It’s been three years since we’ve had transition year students pass through the door of the Zoology building to take part in a week long work experience programme. A huge thank you to everyone who made this possible and to Prof. Nicola Marples for organising another successful ‘Zoology TY Week’.

The Zoology TY Week is dedicated to exposing transition year students from around Ireland to what it is like to study Zoology in Trinity College Dublin, and to show them the opportunities that come with it. This year we had almost 100 applications, that was whittled down to 24 students, who were then invited to attend the course. The winners got to experience life as an undergraduate zoology student, attending lectures, researching in the lab, conducting fieldwork, having discussions, siting and chatting with new friends over coffee and meeting the cohort who work in Zoology everyday.

And importantly, applications for next year’s TY week are open now until 1st December 2023!

This year, we asked the students to write about their experience of zoology. The following blog consists of paragraphs written by the Zoology TY class of 2023, reflecting on their last day as a zoologist.

“I really enjoyed my time here and the opportunity to be able to participate in this course, meeting others with the same interests as me and meeting the zoology department team. My view on zoology since before I started this course has definitely changed. I wasn’t expecting this course to have such a vast variety of topics to possibly specify if you were to take this course. I learnt that zoology covers nearly all living organisms, right down to bacteria and parasites, and up to big blue whales.“

by Sean Keating

“I have really enjoyed my TY zoology week, I wish it would never end. I learned so much from all the lovely people here and they are all much friendlier than I expected…although I don’t know what I expected. During the week I learned about cells, parasites, how animals work and much more. We did experiments in the science labs which I loved because it was very hands-on and we got to do more than just theory classes.

In my opinion one of the most helpful things was speaking to people who have just finished their degree or are almost finished. They spoke about where they have travelled to, the pros and cons of this course path and what they do as a career from studying zoology. This got me thinking about what career I would like to do after college too.

If you are thinking of doing the TY zoology programme next year I would definitely recommend it as it’s more beneficial than I thought it would be. If you have an interest in ecology, the natural world or animals in the wild etc.. then this is perfect and very ideal for you. I’m walking away from this course with lots of information that I didn’t have before and I’m delighted I did it.”

by Caoimhe Dunne

“My experience in the TCD Zoology TY course has been one of the best things I have done in recent years. I learned so much during the week from fascinating owl pellets to intriguing parasites. It was a truly magical experience and has given me a great view into what it is like to be a zoologist. This course is a must do for anyone who has an interest in zoology. You learn so many intriguing things, I for one never knew the amount of little critters living in the rivers – fascinating! As I reflect upon the week, there was not a moment where I was bored. Everything we did was fascinating, fun and taught by such kind and caring Zoologists. If you have an interest in zoology this is the course for you and I would highly recommend it.”

by Charlie Maher

“I loved my week in the zoology department at Trinity. I loved all the practical work and the experiments we got to do – in and outside the classroom. I never knew there was so much diversity in the types of jobs you can do in zoology, but I learnt about things like parasites to extinct birds to how sharks are monitored and tagged. It’s not just sitting in a classroom learning about different animals. We got to learn about genetics, how PhDs work, the different opportunities zoology can give you and we got to even pull parasites out of fish! When I signed up for this week, I didn’t think I’d actually enjoy zoology to the level I did and I’m now wondering if I should try to do it after school. There’s so many things you can do and places you can travel to by doing zoology. Due to this week, I’m extremely interested in sharks and marine life, and want to know more about what I could do with that after school.”

by Katie McBride

“Overall I really enjoyed this zoology work experience. Zoology is one of my favourite areas of science and I’m so glad I got a chance to experience what it would be like to study this subject in Trinity. I liked how we got to talk to some students, asking them questions to learn more about zoology and how we got experience working in a lab. On the first day we were told the story of the elephant skeleton in the Zoological Museum called “Prince Tom.” The story stuck with me because it was incredibly sad how the elephant was mistreated. We learned how he was forced to carry people on his back when his ribs were damaged, and when he started acting strangely due to the pain he was tied up and kept away from the public in case he tried to hurt someone.

What interested me most about zoology is that you get to travel around the world for fieldwork and get to see animals in person in their natural habitat, rather than just hear about them in lectures. I really like travelling and this is definitely something I would like to do, especially since most of my favourite animals are not found in the wild in Ireland.

I think this experience has made me excited to go to university as I will get to study a topic of my choice rather than studying everything like in secondary school.”

by Elia Ross

“After spending a week in the zoology department of Trinity College, I have learnt so many new things. One of which being exactly what a course and career in Zoology entails. We heard about this from many different people from the undergrads, to the PhD students to the faculty members. We also got to experience first hand what it’s like being a zoology student through lots of field work. One morning, we went to the Dodder river and learnt how to take samples of insects within the river. Afterwards, we brought the samples back to the lab and looked at them under a microscope, to determine what species they were. We learnt that you could tell a lot about the cleanliness of a river by looking at what insects inhabit it. Zoology is a very broad subject and during the week we learnt about everything from mammals, to parasites, to birds and to even skeletons and bones.”

by Emilie Duffy

“When I applied for this program I didn’t think my perspective of zoology would differ. I do love science, but I’ve never really had an interest in zoology, but I just thought “why not”. Ever since taking part in this program my opinion has changed immensely. There’s so much more to zoology than I thought. We took an interactive museum tour and we learnt about different animals, extinct and existing. I’d never heard about the auk bird and learning about its extinction was very interesting. We also had the privilege to hear from undergraduate and postgraduate zoology students. It was very helpful to hear about their journey and the process of studying a science subject at Trinity. My favourite modules were Pepijn’s Parasites and Teeny Tiny Organisms. I knew what parasites were but I learned about how they spread and the way they control their victims’ brains. We got to look at different kinds of parasites in real life and we dissected a worm parasite out of a small fish. It was quite disgusting but very intriguing. For Teeny Tiny Organisms we collected different small organisms from the river and when we brought them back, we examined them through microscopes and identified them. I felt like a real Trinity student! I also learnt other things I didn’t know, for example, how different coloured foods affect bird’s eating habits and how shark data is collected by marine biologists. Overall participating in this programme really changed my view on zoology and I feel more encouraged to apply to Trinity College in the future.”

by Naomi Abu

“The Zoology TY Week was an opportunity not to be missed. This week far exceeded my expectations in so many ways. We were exposed to many different areas of zoology, giving a well-rounded experience of what studying zoology would be like. We were exposed to a broad range of animals, for example, insects, mammals, birds, and parasites in a variety of experiments, both in the lab and in the field. The activity that I most enjoyed was the invertebrates of rivers. We took samples of invertebrates in the Dodder river to gauge how pure the water is in that river. We then took our samples back to the lab and identified them under a microscope. I found this very interesting as I had never seen any of the invertebrates up close before, and it’s certainly not an opportunity that would be available to me in school. I learned in this activity the importance of insects in our ecosystem and definitely have an increased appreciation for them now.”

by Arianna Petley

“One thing I really enjoyed about the Trinity TY zoology course was the bird race. I was amazed how many birds we were able to find in such a small area. That had been a common trend this week. I’ve been amazed by so many aspects of zoology. From the impressive museum and massive elephant to the equally massive laboratory and the gross parasites we saw living there. I’ve learned so much about zoology and science as a whole, and learned what life on campus can be like.”

by Derry Flanagan

“My favourite part of the first day was in the Zoological museum when we were told the story of the Great Auk. We also learned about ‘Prince Tom’ a royal elephant who had an incredible and diverse life. I had to try very hard to not say “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room”, but I managed to persevere .Day 3 was probably my favourite day. The first thing we did was learn about Mini-Mammals with John Rochford. That was my favourite part of the week. It was interesting to see how to trap the animals safely for testing and then to release them back into the wild. We also looked through owl pellets and looked for the bones of little animals. I found the skull of a mouse. We also went to St.Stephen’s Green and tested if seagulls would eat bread if it was a different colour. That was quite fun and we analysed the data later on. What I loved at this experience that was unrelated to zoology was the lunch breaks and tea breaks because I got to socialise with everyone and know my peers better. I would recommend this course to anyone even if you’re not too interested as there is a wide range of things to learn and you will enjoy most of it. All in all a great experience.”

by Euan Flanagan

“I came to the placement with one friend from my school, and within only a few minutes in the Zoology building I had made many more. The friendships that were fostered between others and myself were greatly encouraged by the games and activities that we do, not only on the first day but in the week throughout. As someone who came into TY not really knowing what I wish to do with myself, as I would probably guess most people to be – the sheer scope of Zoology as a whole made it extremely interesting, even if you’re not particularly interested in Science or Geography. For example, History is probably my favourite subject in school and I wasn’t really expecting this week to have much to do with history, but the Zoology Museum viewing with Professor Linnie and the general evolutionary studies that we carried out also brought what I believed to be my main interests to the fold. It’s an extremely hands-on experience, so if you like wading through rivers or cutting up fish I think you should consider! The miny mammals class with Professor Rochford was completely new and was a subject that greatly made me want to look into zoology as a career after school. He showed us the different traps used in field studies to allow Zoologists to study the environment and ecology of a specific area and also explained to us how his students are granted the opportunity to work all over the world in places like Canada and New Zealand, working with species that most of us have only seen in the wild on our TVs. This practical element of Zoology began a genuine interest to pursue doing something similar.”

by James Meehan

“I’ve really enjoyed experiencing what it is like to learn like an undergraduate student of zoology. My favourite part of the week was when we collected freshwater invertebrate samples from the river. We put on wellies and used nets and buckets to collect samples from the river. I liked being out in nature and experiencing everything that we had spoken about the day before. We then took these samples back to the lab and studied them under the microscope. It made me feel like a proper scientist, since we were wearing lab coats and latex gloves. The whole week was just a great experience, and I hope next year’s TYs enjoy it as much as I did.”

by Elisa Terry

“As someone who has always been fascinated by the animals and ecosystem of the natural world, this past week at the zoology week at TCD has been such an eye opening experience. We covered many different topics and carried out experiments that definitely deepened my knowledge of the workings of animals. We even got the opportunity to extract real parasites like liver fluke from fish through dissection. Identifying invertebrates under a microscope was one of my favourite activities of the week, as we got to collect them from the Dodder. It made me realise how little I knew about my local rivers and insects. Having the professors there to answer our questions, help us understand and share their experiences on the different topics has only deepened my interest and passion for zoology.”

by Éadaoin Cullen

Thank you again to everyone involved in this year’s Transition Year Zoology Experience. It was greatly appreciated by the students, as you can see from the above excerpts. If you would like to be a part of next year’s TY week applications are open until the 1st December 2023!

25/10/202216/11/2022

No new thing under the sun? Finding sunbird species in Wallacea

Our understanding of how species interact and evolve depends on accurate knowledge of the species that exist on Earth. There are still many species to be identified, however, even in evolutionarily significant regions such as Wallacea in central Indonesia, site of Alfred Russel Wallace’s pioneering work. Our new paper, completed jointly with researchers from Universitas Halu Oleo and just published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, draws on work carried out in Wallacea to identify multiple unrecognised species in the beautiful sunbird family. Made using modern genetic, acoustic, and statistical techniques, these discoveries add to our understanding of how life evolved in this region and reinforce some of Wallace’s original ideas.

The key discovery is the “Wakatobi Sunbird Cinnyris infrenatus”, a species endemic to the small islands of the Wakatobi archipelago, off Southeast Sulawesi in central Indonesia. The Wakatobi Islands have been separated from other landmasses since they first rose out of the sea, and so there has been plenty of time for their populations to evolve in isolation and produce endemic taxa, found nowhere else on Earth. The Wakatobi Islands have been recognised as a Key Biodiversity Area for their importance to the survival of biodiversity. The Wakatobi Sunbird is the latest endemic species to be identified by our research group, following previous work on the Wakatobi Flowerpecker and the double discovery of the Wakatobi White-eye and Wangi-wangi White-eye. It’s important that we know all of the species of Southeast Sulawesi and the Wakatobi Islands, because this region acts as a “natural laboratory” for the study of evolutionary processes such as cryptic sexual dimorphism, the “supertramp strategy”, and the links between behaviour and population divergence. The Wakatobi Sunbird is currently treated as a subspecies of the widespread Olive-backed Sunbird (Cinnyris jugularis), but our findings indicate that the Olive-backed Sunbird is actually made up of at least 4 reproductively isolated species.

Male Olive-backed Sunbirds from Sulawesi and nearby islands. Our new paper supports splitting this population as the “Sahul Sunbird (Cinnyris clementiae)”.
Male Wakatobi Sunbirds. This population is currently viewed as a subspecies of the Olive-backed Sunbird, but the genetic divergence we have found, along with its darker plumage, shorter wings, and different calls, support its recognition as a new species.
Female Olive-backed Sunbirds (“Sahul Sunbirds”) from Sulawesi and nearby islands. Sunbirds are sexually dimorphic, with the feales usually showing simpler plumage than the males.
Female Wakatobi Sunbirds. The analysis of plumage in our study used male birds, following previous taxonomic work on subirds.

The sunbirds (Nectariniidae) fill a similar niche in Africa, Asia, and Australia to the hummingbirds of the Americas. They are small birds with long bills that help them extract nectar from flowers. Like the hummingbirds, many sunbirds (males particularly) exhibit brightly coloured plumage, with beautiful iridescent or “metallic” feathers that reflect the sunlight. In fact, the naturalist William Jardine tells us in his 1843 volume on the sunbirds that sunbirds get their name “from their brightly-tinted dress, appearing in higher splendour when played on by the sun-beams”. For hundreds of years, ornithologists have used the patterns and colours of these feathers to identify sunbird species. Now, however, we can combine multiple forms of data to uncover patterns that weren’t clear from plumage alone. Our paper also looked at the Black Sunbird (Leptocoma aspasia), a species with male plumage that’s hard to examine because it mostly looks jet-black, except when the sun hits it in the right way to reveal other colours. We found a genetic split in this species that had not been suggested by any previous work, probably due to its plumage being less informative.

Male Black Sunbird (Leptocoma aspasia).
Female Black Sunbird (Leptocoma aspasia)

Finding species like these isn’t just interesting for its own sake. It is also our best evidence to understand how evolution produces new species. This is particularly interesting in a region like Wallacea, which played such a significant role in the development of evolutionary biology. The observations that Wallace made around this region led him to discover evolution by natural selection, work which was published jointly with Charles Darwin in 1858 in the same journal where our sunbird paper has just appeared.

One of the observations that inspired Wallace’s evolutionary thinking was the importance of biogeographic barriers. Wallace noticed that the animals found on Sulawesi are markedly different from those on neighbouring Borneo, evidence that species would evolve on one island and then have difficulty crossing over. This boundary came to be known as Wallace’s Line. We now understand that it represents the beginning of the deep waters of the Wallacea region, which persisted even when sea levels were lower, unlike the shallower waters of the adjoining Sunda Shelf which gave rise to land bridges. A similar barrier to the east came to be known as Lydekker’s Line. As seen in the map below, the range of the Olive-backed Sunbird (in yellow) is currently thought to cross both Wallace’s Line and Lydekker’s Line, while the Black Sunbird (in purple) stops at Wallace’s Line but crosses Lydekker’s Line. It’s quite remarkable to imagine these dainty little birds maintaining gene flow across barriers which block so many other organisms! Our work, however, has indicated that the Olive-backed Sunbird populations on either side of Wallace’s Line actually represent separate species. The same is true of Black Sunbird populations divided by Lydekker’s Line. Modern evidence has actually reinforced Wallace’s original ideas, showing once again that these Lines represent significant biogeographic barriers that block gene flow in most animals.

Map showing populations sampled for our new paper. We found evidence that the Olive-backed Sunbird is actually composed of separate species in the Philippines (“Garden Sunbird”). the Sunda Shelf (“Ornate Sunbird”), the Wakatobi Islands (“Wakatobi Sunbird”), and the islands from Sulawesi to the Sahul Shelf (“Sahul Sunbird”). We also found that Black Sunbirds in New Guinea are strongly genetically divergent from those in Sulawesi. These findings reinforce the importance of biogeographic barriers like Wallace’s Line and Lydekker’s Line to evolution.

Both evolutionary biologists and ecologists are gaining new insights from large datasets on the traits and genomics of species. However, as these datasets are organised by species, they rely on our species lists being accurate in the first place. Data from “species” like the Olive-backed Sunbird or Black Sunbird might prove misleading, as each of these actually represent multiple species. Meanwhile, a small population like that of the Wakatobi Sunbird may not be included in such a dataset at all if it isn’t recognised as a species.

To quote an 1863 paper by Wallace, the world’s species represent “the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past”. It is therefore an irrevocable loss to the world, to humanity, and to science when a species goes extinct while still unrecognised, “uncared for and unknown”.

Hoga, one of the Wakatobi Islands where sunbirds were sampled for this study. It has been a privilege to see such beautiful places and animals for this research.

While the Wakatobi Islands are biogeographically “remote” due to their small size and the permanent water barriers that surround them, it is worth noting that they are not the stereotypical “desert islands” Western readers may imagine. The islands have been part of important shipping lanes since at least the 14^th century, and the people of the Wakatobi are known for their maritime traditions and unique language. As Dr David Kelly, the second author on the recent paper remarked: “The identification of the Wakatobi Sunbird serves to remind us that biodiversity is everywhere. This bird wasn’t found in a remote rainforest, but along the scrubby margins of busy towns and villages. Let us hope the children of the Wakatobi will be able to enjoy these special birds for generations to come.”

A relief from Borobudur Temple on Java, built over 1000 years ago. The birds in the yellow boxes were identified as Olive-backed Sunbirds by Ashari et al. (2021). Their fascinating paper is available at **https://li01.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/tnh/article/view/253401**

The beauty of the sunbirds has attracted scientists and artists for many years. Elsewhere in Indonesia, Java’s Borobudur (the largest Buddhist temple in the world, constructed in the 8^th or 9^th century CE) displays carvings of Olive-backed Sunbirds drinking nectar on its walls. The researchers who identified these carvings hypothesise that this symbolises the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment. Over a thousand years later, sunbirds are still enlightening us on the origin of species.

Female (top) and male (bottom) Olive-backed Sunbirds, from Shelley’s monograph, published 1876-1880 and available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library at https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.53516. Our new paper has found that the Olive-backed Sunbird is actually made up of at least four separate species.

To find out more, read our paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society here: https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlac081

19/01/202219/01/2022

Tramps in Transition: Wallacea’s monarch flycatchers and their evolutionary natural experiment

Pale-blue Monarch on the left and Island Monarch on the right

A warm welcome back to all our readers! The new year is now well and truly upon us and we hope you’ve all had a safe and energised return to work. This blog is written by Fionn Ó Marcaigh, summarising his new paper. Congratulations Fionn and we hope our readers enjoy learning about your research as much as we have! So without further ado…

Science is about making observations from the natural world, drawing up hypotheses to explain the patterns you’ve observed, and then testing these hypotheses by experimentation. We tend to imagine scientists in white coats doing experiments in the lab, but our understanding of evolution also owes a lot to work done in “natural laboratories” like islands and other isolated habitats, where evolution has taken place under different conditions. Our new paper, just published Open Access by the International Biogeography Society in their journal Frontiers of Biogeography, has used an important natural laboratory in Southeast Asia to test a classic hypothesis based on a bird called the Island Monarch (Monarcha cinerascens). We’ve made observations that contradict parts of the hypothesis and discovered a possible new species in the process!

Our natural laboratory was a collection of islands around a region known as Wallacea in central Indonesia (see map below). Named after Alfred Russel Wallace, this is where he co-discovered evolution by natural selection while travelling around islands of all shapes and sizes, with the waters around them being so wide and deep that most species have trouble crossing them. Some organisms are better at crossing these barriers than others, with the Island Monarch thought to be particularly adept. As its name suggests, the Island Monarch is one of the kings of small islands. It can be found all the way from the islands off Sulawesi in Wallacea, to the farthest reaches of the Melanesian islands east of Papua New Guinea, but is missing from large islands like Sulawesi and New Guinea themselves.

14/07/202114/07/2021

Evolution in the understorey

What is the first image that comes to mind when you think of evolution? Possibly a line of cartoon primates marching, slouching monkeys at one end and naked men with spears at the other. Or a branching tree diagram where each twig represents an organism, maybe with a tentative “I think” scribbled above it. Alternatively, you may have pictured an illustration of related birds from isolated islands, each showing a dramatically different bill shape adapted to a different diet. Darwin’s Galápagos finches represent a foundational influence in terms of where we tend to look for signs of evolution and what we expect these signs to look like. Our new paper, just published Open Access in Zoologischer Anzeiger: A Journal of Comparative Zoology, provides a contrasting image. We looked at the Sulawesi babbler (Pellorneum celebense), a dull brown bird that spends its time hiding in bushes on less isolated islands in Indonesia, looking pretty similar from one island to the next. Nevertheless, we found that several of its populations are quite different from one another in mitochondrial DNA, in morphology, and in song.

07/10/202009/10/2020

Shy birds hiding evolutionary insights: cryptic sexual dimorphism in the Sulawesi Babbler

The most iconic examples of sexual dimorphism are found in birds. Birds are probably many people’s introduction to this concept in the natural world, when brought to the park as a child and shown the difference between male and female mallards. But sexual dimorphism can be much more subtle than that kind of difference in colour (called dichromatism, and seen also in peacocks, pheasants, sparrows, and many more). Our new paper, just published by the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in their journal Biotropica, shows that sexual dimorphism can be missed in some birds even when it is important to their ecology and evolution.

28/07/202013/11/2020

Boating in Ankobohobo, or The Importance of Bird Areas

Many of Earth’s plant and animal species are at imminent risk of extinction. But with the resources necessary to conserve them so sorely limited, where should efforts be focused? The term “ecological triage” has been coined for such decision-making, after the system invented by French army medics to sort patients by the urgency of their need. This borrowing of metaphor from the Napoleonic and World Wars is not accidental: in envisaging the damage done to nature by humanity, you are to think of cannonballs and scorched earth and mustard gas.

“Ecological triage” can focus attention onto the regions that hold a disproportionately large amount of diversity. Such “biodiversity hotspots” have become key to global conservation, from the Caribbean to Wallacea to New Zealand. But one country stands out as among the “hottest” of hotspots: the great island of Madagascar. I’ve written for EcoEvo before about the field season I spent there, which has just resulted in a new paper published in Scopus: Journal of East African Ornithology. The paper presents findings from a series of boat surveys in the threatened and irreplaceable Ankobohobo Wetland, home to some of the world’s rarest birds.

Header: African Darter (Anhinga rufa) in Ankobohobo, by Jamie Neaves.

25/10/201904/11/2019

A Mosaic of Birds in Madagascar

This post is based on the paper ‘The avifauna of the forest mosaic habitats of the Mariarano region, Mahajanga II district, north-west Madagascar’, just published open-access in Bothalia: African Biodiversity and Conservation.

The header image by Jamie Grant-Fraser shows White-faced Whistling Ducks (Dendrocygna viduata) responding to the appearance of a Madagascar Harrier-hawk (Polyboroides radiatus).

24/09/201924/09/2019

Birds in paradise: biogeography in the subtropics

Light-vented bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis), one of the species of interest in the Ryūkyū archipelago

The species-area relationship is considered one of the only ‘rules’ in ecology. We have observed more species on larger ‘islands’ (whether true islands or simply some habitat patch of interest) in studies of different plants and animals all around the world. When MacArthur and Wilson (1967) proposed this pattern and the pioneering biogeographical principles which underpin it, they acknowledged that a piece of the puzzle was missing: species identity.

12/09/201919/09/2019

Surveying birds on an unexplored tropical island – the TCD/Opwall expedition to Menui, South-east Sulawesi, Indonesia.

A big draw for those who study the natural world is the search for adventure – the chance to make a novel discovery, and to explore regions unknown to science. Despite that, in today’s world, such an opportunity rarely presents itself, and it is exceedingly rare to truly break new ground. However, in the summer of 2017 circumstances allowed a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Halu Oleo University (UHO) and Operation Wallacea (Opwall) to venture to the remote, and scientifically unknown, Menui Island, in South-east Sulawesi, Indonesia. The expedition’s motive was to provide an account of the bird species present and their associating habitats. Our survey work, published in the latest issue of Forktail, found the island to be home to a unique avifauna and several important habitats, though these face serious threats from over-exploitation.

21/06/201921/06/2019

Fieldwork, and why students need it

I recently took part in the 3^rd year Terrestrial Ecology field course in Glendalough. Though I already had some experience teaching both lab work and fieldwork, this was my first time being “staff” on a trip I had previously been on as a student. It was a wonderful experience. This field course is a venerable institution of the Zoology Department: it has taken place Glendalough every year since 2007, having previously been held in the Burren and Killarney National Park. It has always been beloved by students, as seen in this video made in 2016.

Zoology students in Trinity have the chance to take part in three field courses: Terrestrial Ecology in Glendalough, Marine Biology on the rich shores of Strangford Lough, and Tropical Ecology around the ancient Rift Valley Lakes of Kenya. Here, from enthusiastic and experienced teachers, they learn skills that will stand to them in any ecological undertaking. On the Glendalough field course, students of both Zoology and Environmental Science are introduced to the techniques used to sample and survey wild animals, including Longworth trapping for small mammals, malaise trapping for flying insects, kick-sampling for aquatic invertebrates, and mist netting for birds. This last one was what brought me on the course.