It’s the first day of lab group retreat. The 13 or so members of our lab are on camp, surrounded by beautiful bush, and freezing our toes off. It’s cold!

Most Ph.D. students are part of a ‘lab’ – a group of people who work on similar things and help each other out. In our lab group there are honours students (honours is a one year research project you do before a Ph.D.), Ph.D. students, post-docs (these scientists have done a Ph.D. and are now employed as researchers) and our supervisors (scientists who have a full time job at the University teaching, researching and supervising students).

Today we are settling in and working hard. We’re all just doing what we would normally be doing in our separate offices, but are sitting around a big table and having the chance to chat, share what we’re doing and have some more formal meetings.

Mustard and I are working on our literature review. We’re still reading scientific journal articles and writing our summary of what we've learnt. Mustard is keen to go look for wasps, but unfortunately being so cold, we are unlikely to find many.

Insects are ‘cold blooded’. This doesn't mean their blood is always cold, but that they can’t regulate (change or keep the same) their blood temperature. Mammals, like humans, can regulate their internal temperature to keep our bodies functioning in the cold. Insects are not able to do this, and if it is too cold they will not have the energy to move around, and therefore won’t be found by scientists and their dinosaur sidekicks. The best time to look for insects is on a warm, sunny day when the insects will have lots of energy and be moving around a lot! 

Today at lab group camp, a very exciting event occurred. Mike, one of the researchers in our lab, walked out of his room… and found a spider!

Whilst this may, in fact, be the least exciting thing you can think of happening, or perhaps exciting purely because of the adrenaline that would start pumping as you run back in the room and scream for help, Mike was ecstatic.

This was a very special spider. It was a male of the Aganippe genus, which Mike is currently working on. These rather large and impressive looking spiders are pretty cool – they can live longer than your dog, and build burrows in the ground from which they hunt prey (omnomnom insects). 

A female can be found by looking for her carefully disguised trapdoor in the ground, and very skilfully digging her out... but the males are much harder to find. Unlike the females, the boys leave their burrows once they are an adult and wander around looking for females to visit, so you really need to be lucky to come across one! To find a male just sitting outside your door is amazing!

Whilst Mike was very lucky, the spider was rather unlucky… since he was nearly dead anyway, he was sacrificed for science and collected in ethanol to preserve his DNA.

Another Ph.D. student in our lab, Sophie, works on trapdoor spiders too, so this awesome find spurred a night-time spider hunt out in the bush. Armed with as many layers of clothing as we could find, beanies, head torches, and optimism, we set off down the trail in search of male trapdoor spiders.

Unfortunately luck was not with us, and not a male trapdoor was in sight. We did find some cool burrows with wolf spiders in them, and a sweet huntsman, but eventually gave up and returned to camp for sticky date pudding.

All in a normal night of science Ph.D.!

We’re going to chat to Sophie about her spider research soon, so stay tuned!