Question: Do you test on animals?

Tom Dally answered on 9 Mar 2020: last edited 9 Mar 2020 11:51 pm

I don’t test on animals, but some of my work does involve catching insects and then taking them back to the lab to identify them. Insect conservation can be a complicated thing. If you want to protect the insects in an area, you first need to know which species are present, because each species is different and has different needs, like specific types of food or nesting habitat. But there are over 27,000 species of insect in the UK, and most of these are too small (less than 5mm long) or look too similar to other insects to identify them by sight. And the features that distinguish different insect species are often tiny, e.g. the number of “toes” on their feet. So we often take a small sample of insects from an area and use a microscope to identify them using these tiny features. We also use these samples to work out how common or rare a species is an area. We never sample more insects than we need, and we always try to allow lots of time in between taking samples. Here’s a really good podcast explaining why biologists sometimes need to kill insects to help save them (as strange as that sounds): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csxgp3.