Question: Do your test studies harm the animals?

Tom Dally answered on 6 Mar 2020: last edited 6 Mar 2020 5:23 pm

Sometimes, yes. But there’s always a reason for doing so (and some paperwork to fill in). My research focuses on insect conservation – trying to find the best methods of monitoring insect populations so we can work out if they’re in decline or not and why. But if you want to monitor all of the different insects in an area then you need to be able to identify which species are present. This can be a bit of a problem because there are more than 27,000 species of insect in the UK, and most of them are too small (less than 5mm long) or too similar to eachother to identify by sight. Sometimes identifying an insect relies on being able to see tiny parts of their anatomy, like whether there are hairs on their eyes or not. So when we go out to do field work, we take a small sample of insects from the area where we’re working and take them back to the lab to identify them using a microscope, which allows us to see these tiny features. We also use these samples to work out how common or rare a species is an area. Once we know all this, we can track the populations of these species over time and help them out if they need it! But 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 (weird, I know): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csxgp3.