The last few weeks have been a mixture of very tedious data analysis and exciting outreach. You might remember that a couple of months ago we sent off our little vial of hopes and dreams to an external sequencing company. A vial filled with the  amplified genes of over 700 wasps! Well, it turns out sorting through those data takes a really long time. 

The upside is that there is actually data to look through! The sequencing of our wasp DNA seems to have worked reasonably well, and we promise to keep you updated as we sort through it. It's just very slow going! Sometimes science happens quickly, and we have really fun days in the lab or the field. But good science also requires making sure any results you publish are correct, and that takes time. It's more than a little scary knowing I have less than a year left of my PhD (where did the time go?) but hopefully this might be the last big hurdle. 
​
What's been a welcome break from data analysis has been a bunch of outreach events! We headed up to Murray Bridge High School and talked about wasps to year 7/8 students with Children's University Regional Lecture Series, and also visited a primary school to do some slime-making and dry ice demonstrations with the year three students (they were learning about states of matter). I also participated in the Three Minute Thesis Competition, and am off to the University Finals on the 12th September! Hooray for wasps!

This Friday 25 August, we're giving a family-friendly talk convincing you why you should love wasps! Find out more and come along here: https://www.scienceweek.net.au/why-you-should-love-wasps/ 
​

What's next on the cards? Well, we're heading to Canberra for a conference in September, and then Mustard and I are off to Bush Blitz! Never head of Bush Blitz? Don't worry, we'll be writing a few posts as we get ready for the grand adventure, and the next one will explain everything you could ever want to know about why 20 scientists would go to the middle of nowhere for two weeks... stay tuned!

On Saturday, Mustard and I headed to Port Augusta to visit the Friends of the Arid Lands Botanic Garden to talk about wasps, parasitoids and our citizen science project! We had a lovely time chatting to everyone and sharing our love of wasps. The botanic garden is an beautiful site, with over 250 hectares of plants from the arid environments of Australia. These plants have evolutionary adaptations to survive the extreme drought and high temperatures. It's a wonderful place for a walk, bird watching and the cafe does great coffee and food! The garden has also recently opened an Arid Explorers garden for children and families to explore nature together. 

There's a beautiful view of the Flinders Rangers from the garden!

I appreciated the insect artwork!

The Friends of the Garden gave us a lovely arid land plant to take home and add to our garden - it smells divine! 

This week we're in Melbourne! As well as eating crazy donuts and liquid nitrogen icecream, we're sorting through specimens at Melbourne museum!

Museum Victoria have done a lot of biological surveys, and lots of this material might have specimens of our wasps in it that would be useful for our DNA project. So we're slowly sorting through it and borrowing the things we find.

Getting to visit most of the museums in Australia has definitely been a highlight of this PhD, and is one of the awesome parts of being a scientist - we're able to travel and see so much of Australia and the world!

Last week, Mustard and I spent some time at The Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) in Canberra. The collection is a really important resource for scientists, who are able to access specimens for their research. We spent the week hunting through the Hymenoptera (wasps, sawflies, bees and ants) ethanol collection, as we were after specimens of our group of wasps, the microgastrines. 

It was lovely to meet the scientists who work at ANIC and get to visit such a huge collection of insects! We found over 200 specimens of out wasps, so the next step is to see if we can get DNA out of them! 

Check out the youtube video below to learn more about the National Insect Collection.

They do. It's often the only time they get to meet up with collaborators or other people in their field face-to-face. Scientific conferences are generally a few days in length, and most of the people going will either give a talk about their work or make a poster, which will hang in the conference venue for people to read. 

Conferences are an awesome opportunity to introduce yourself to people you might want to collaborate with in the future, meet some peers in a similar field, or get a chance to talk to that semi-famous scientist whose papers you've cited a hundred times but never met. Sometimes it's also just really nice to get out of the office/lab and get re-inspired by the creative research other people are doing!

Mustard and I are at the joint conference of the Society of Australian Systematic Biologists and the Invertebrate Biodiversity and Conservation group in Fremantle, WA. 

The first day of the conference was a workshop on career development that was targeted primarily for PhD and early career researchers, and women in particular. It was run by the amazing Dr. Nerida Wilson of the Western Australian Museum, and had some great speakers giving us tips on everything from grant writing to balancing your work and your life. We had sessions on networking, abstract writing, mental resilience for working in science, and some suggestions for job applications and managing your career path. It was a pretty useful day, and a great opportunity to meet some other cool female scientists in a relaxed setting.

Tomorrow the conference begins properly!

Last Friday night, Mustard and I attended a BioBlitz at Morialta Conservation Park, run by the Discovery Circle. It was great fun! We set up a light trap to attract insects, and helped people collect and identify the critters that came to visit us. 

A light trap is a white sheet hung between two trees, with a bright light strung up in front of it. The light we used was a mercury vapour light, which produces lots of the UV light that insects are attracted to. Exactly why insects are attracted to bright lights, such as your porch light at home during the evening, or our light trap, is not definitively known. 

Theories include:

• The insects might use the moon to navigate by, and man-made lights confuse them
• A light source might be confused as a 'clear path', so insects are heading towards the light so to not bump into obstacles
• Perhaps insects are attracted to UV light because flowers also reflect UV light? 
  

Whatever the reason, we had lots of tiny moths and flies come land on our sheet!

There were plenty of other things happening at the BioBlitz - spider surveys, bat surveys, spotlighting possums and birds, nocturnal ant hunting... it was fantastic to see so many families heading out around the park with scientists. Data from any identified animals and plants was uploaded to The Atlas of Living Australia, which is a great place to find out what lives around you! It is also a great site to upload anything you see (and know what it is). If you find something and want help getting it identified, head to BowerBird, where there is a great community of people uploading sightings to projects and helping each other identify things from photographs.

BioBlitz brought lots of great organisations together. There were even some educational displays about how feral animals (like cats and foxes) cause so much damage to our native wildlife. Mustard was not so keen on the taxidermy cat. 

BioBlitz was a bunch of fun - thanks to the Discovery Circle for having us! There are more BioBlitzs coming up later in the year - find out more about them here, and head out to learn more about our amazing environment!

On Tuesday night, I headed along to The Discovery Circle's Native Bee Workshop. Along with about 50 other people, I learnt all about native bees, and the difference between a native bee and the introduced European honey bee. There are over a thousand species of native bees in Australia - I had no idea! Most of them don't live in hives like the honey bee. Instead, the live in burrows in the ground, or in holes in tree twigs or branches. At the end of the workshop we all got to make a bee hotel to take home attract native bees to our gardens. It was super easy! We took ten pieces of bamboo with holes in one end, made sure the other end was blocked off, grouped them all together and tied them with cable ties! 

The other type of bee hotel was made from pieces of paper straws (make sure you use paper, not plastic) packed into a small PVC pipe. Then we taped it at one end with some sand put through the straws to stick to the tape and remove the stickiness, so we don't turn our bee hotels into sticky bee traps! 

Mustard and I are super excited to see if we get some native bees coming to our garden... stay tuned for pictures!

Read all about native bees and how to make a bee hotel here. 

Check out upcoming workshops by the Discover Circle here! 

Today we're getting everything ready for the weekend, when we'll be part of a massive science festival in Adelaide, South Australia. I'm bringing along some specimens and microscopes for people to be able to have a closer look at insects. 

Science Alive is on this weekend (8-9 of August 2015, 9am-4pm at the Adelaide Showground). The event brings almost all of the science-based organisations in Adelaide together for two days of fun for the whole family. Check it out here! What's even more exciting is this year the Shell Questacon Science Circus are visiting Adelaide and will be at Science Alive! 

Myself, Mustard and the insects will be there on Sunday at the University of Adelaide stand - so come say hi!

Eventually, Mustard and I want to be able to run a citizen science project as part of our PhD. We will ask volunteers to find caterpillars and rear them into butterflies, or hopefully, find some parasitoid wasps living inside the caterpillar instead! We are a long way off that yet, but we are researching citizen science projects for our literature review. 

A citizen science project is real scientific research that involves people who are not trained scientists. There are HEAPS of citizen science projects you can be a part of, with different requirements and time commitments. Here's a few of our favourites: 

The Pieris Project asks volunteers from all over the world to look for cabbage white butterflies (Pieris rapae) around their home, collect a butterfly and send it to the researchers. They are studying the adaptation of the cabbage white butterfly in habitats across the world - how have the genes, colours, shapes and sizes of the butterfly changed as it spread to new places? To do this, they need specimens from all over the world. 

School of Ants operates in both Australia and America. The Australian team of researchers are attempting to build a distribution map of ant species covering all of Australia. They are also interested in what sort of food ants prefer in different habitats. To be a volunteer, you can register on the website, run your own experiment using biscuits, sugar and cocktail sausages (counting how many ants are attracted to each food type), collect the ants and send them to School of Ants HQ!

The Discovery Circle, based in South Australia, organises lots of different citizen science projects that focus on our relationship with the natural world in the urban environment. Their latest project is called Cat Tracker, and although it isn't about insects, it sounds like lots of fun! The researchers will loan you a GPS tracker to attach to your cat's collar. The map of where your cat travels in his or her adventures is then uploaded to the website to build a better picture of what our domestic cats get up to when they are out of the house. 

Don't feel like leaving the house, but still want to contribute to a citizen science project? Notes from Nature is a project where you can help researchers by transcribing museum specimen labels. You will be given picture of the museum specimen and the label on your computer screen, and you type out what is written on it! Easy! It might sound trivial, but having a digital database of these specimens will make a huge difference to the organisation of museum collections, and the usefulness of the specimens for scientists. Notes from Nature is part of Zooniverse, a huge online portal for citizen science projects. If none of the ones we've talked about take your fancy, check out Zooniverse, or if you are in Australia, have a look on the Atlas of Living Australia's citizen science portal. 

Being part of a real scientific research project helps our scientists make discoveries faster, and often learn things they couldn't if they were doing it all by themselves. It can also be a lot of fun to be a citizen scientist! Let us know in the comments if you have a favourite citizen science project, or share your stories of contributing to one!

After lunch today our lab supervisor decided we'd all been sitting at our computers for too long and instigated a walk around the nature trail. 

Mustard and I brought along our new macro lens and took some snaps of the flowers. Scientists who study plants and flowers are called botanists. One of the plants we came across was a sundew, a carnivorous plant. Unlike the Day of the Triffids movie (if you haven't heard of this, watch it, it's a classic), sundews don't eat people... but they do eat insects.

Sundews have lots of sticky 'tentacles' that they use to catch tiny insects, which they digest and absorb nutrients from. Pretty cool! 

Mustard also helped the lab group through the adventure trail at the camp site, tackling swinging bridges and climbing frames.

Being part of a lab group and working with some really great, friendly people is one of the best parts of being a scientist. You get to hear about all the interesting things other people in your lab are doing, have people you can ask for help, and even make some new friends.