Question: What made you begin a career in the study of insects?

Tom Dally answered on 9 Mar 2020: last edited 9 Mar 2020 3:13 pm

So, I actually came to insects pretty late. I did some work on them in my undergraduate degree, but I didn’t realise how interested I was in them until I was doing my masters degree. I was doing my independent research project (a piece of research you carry out yourself toward the end of your degree). I had missed the deadline for choosing projects, so I went to see a professor I got on well with and we created a project instead. I ended up camping on some remote, uninhabited islets in the Isles of Scilly off the end of Cornwall for 2.5 months, researching the insect pollinator communities that lived there and how they moved between the islets. I was fascinated after that. Then, two months after I finished my masters, I got a call from the same professor asking if I wanted to apply for a PhD he was planning. I’ve never looked back.