A few weeks ago, Mustard and I joined an expedition with a couple of other PhD students. The mission? Hunt for wasps and bees, set some traps and check out some places we'd never been. We didn't have any luck that day, although our colleague who studies wasps that parasitise bees did find some great specimens. We'll see if he can tell us all about them in a post soon!

This weekend I headed back down to check the traps, Mustard and my self-proclaimed support crew (my adventure-keen parents) in tow. It was a three hour drive to Wirrabara State Forrest at the southern end of the Flinders Rangers in South Australia, and unfortunately there wasn't much in our trap there. 

Not to be disheartened, we continued on to Mt Remarkable National Park. This place is beautiful, and I'd highly recommend a visit if you ever find yourself driving the rather boring piece of highway between Adelaide and Port Augusta! 

We made friends with a massive goanna (and by made friends, I mean stayed well back whilst it plodded along then climbed up a gum tree) and check out our malaise trap. Unfortunately somehow the trap had been knocked over, and the bottle that normally catches the insects was unscrewed and empty.

​Malaise traps are basically a big netted tent. As insects are flying along above the ground, they don't notice the inner black netting and crash into it. An insect will then naturally climb upwards. Unfortunately for the insect, the highest part of the trap is a bottle of ethanol. However, malaise traps don't work very well when they're flat on the ground! 

There wasn't much we could do but make a sad face, stand the trap back up and hope that when we visit next month it still be standing and full of wasps! 

We didn't find any wasps for our project this field work trip, but we did eat an awesome pasty at the Port Wakefield Bakery and we had a fun walk in Mt Remarkable National Park. We'll have better luck next time, I'm sure!

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!

Mustard and I really slacked off last year. After the middle of the year, life got crazy busy and this blog took a back seat on the priority bus. I'm determined to give it a better go this year, however, and we're making some changes! 

Firstly, may I introduce... myself! Generally Mustard stars in photos by himself on this blog, but this year I'm going to be in front of the camera as well as behind it. Get ready for my selfie game to hopefully improve!

If you've only just joined us - My name's Erinn, I'm a PhD student in Adelaide, Australia and I study wasps that eat caterpillars from the inside out... you can learn lots more about it in past blog posts, such as this one.

Some really important things happened in the second half of last year's PhD adventure that we haven't told you about, so we'll be doing some throw back posts to catch you up and then continuing to share a day in a life of a scientist as we move towards getting this PhD finished!

So if you're a student interested in what happens on a day to day life of a scientist, you're keen to find out all about wasps, or you're just here for the yellow dinosaur photos - stay tuned, follow our Facebook page and get outside and do some science today!

The Natural History Museum in London, UK, is one of those places that makes me warm and fuzzy inside. It's the most beautiful building - purpose built to hold the British Museum's fossil, animal and plant specimens, and the architecture is themed. Plants adorn the roof of the foyer, and different animals are sculptured on the outside of the building. There are numerous  public galleries and then, tucked behind the scenes, the working scientific collections - rooms upon rooms of insects, mammals, fish, plants... populated with numerous busy scientists tapping away at keyboards or hunched over microscopes.

Mustard accompanied me as I visited the museum and the Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) curator (in a museum, a curator is the scientist who looks after a particular collection) do some work on my PhD at the end of my Famelab trip. 

The museum is home to the holotypes of many of the wasps I work on. A holotype is the single specimen designated by a scientist when they describe a new species as the REAL one - it is the specimen that all future specimens will be compared with. The wasps are kept in cabinets in a temperature controlled building to keep them safe. There are rows, and rows, and rows of cabinets. That's a lot of insects!

Inside each cabinet is a series of drawers. Inside each drawer is a series of little boxes... and in the boxes the wasps are pinned with labels that have important information like the date and location the wasp was collected.

I had a lot of fun being a scientist at the Natural History Museum for a few days - it was amazing to work in such a huge collection, and be part of an institution that has so much history!

It's been a while since Mustard and I wrote a blog post! But we haven't left our PhD in a burning pile of notes and pipette tips... we've just been slack in writing. 

One of the most exciting things we've done in the past couple of months is take part in a science communication competition called FameLab. It's an international competition run by The British Council where you have to explain your science in 3 minutes of talking (no powerpoint slides!) in a way that anyone could understand it. 

It all started when a friend forwarded me the email calling for applications. “I think you should totally enter it and show the joy of dead caterpillars”, he wrote. Why not? I thought. I can talk, and it beats doing more PCRs right now!

To apply for Famelab you had to make a 3 minute video of yourself talking about your PhD thesis. I recorded mine on my super duper iphone camera (read: really old iphone camera) in the lab to make it look more ‘sciency’, just in case that would help… I decided it looked more professional than filming it in my lounge room, anyway. I got through the semi-finals, but since there were so few applicants from Adelaide, we were flown to Perth to compete in the Western Australian semi-finals.
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Writing the talk was so much harder than I thought it would be. I’ve done a reasonable amount of science communication in my time, but I didn’t realise how very different talking about your own science would be, compared to, for example, explaining why bicarbonate soda and vinegar react and cause a film canister to explode… the sci-com-outreachers reading will get me! It’s a totally different kettle of fish (or wasps in this case) explaining your own science, and I think it’s because all the jargon, all the intimate words and phrases and meanings that you literally speak all day to your office-mates and colleagues and supervisors are so ingrained. I found it really quite difficult to take a step back and think… ‘do people know the word gene? Will they know what I’m talking about if I say DNA? Do most people know that wasps undergo metamorphism like a butterfly does? Do most people even know what metamorphism is?’

In the end I had a fun talk written and had a blast meeting the semifinalists in Perth and making the audience boo the evil caterpillar in our superhero story. Whilst I didn’t win a place in the semifinals, I was selected as one of the British Council’s wild card entries to go through to the national finals. So back to Perth with a refreshed talk I went, and again had fun with a really cool audience in one of the nicest buildings I’ve had the pleasure to present in – The Western Australian Museum. If you have three minutes to spare and want to be grossed out, you can listen to my national final winning talk here!

So yes, I was hugely honoured to be chosen by the judges as the Australian winner – there were some absolutely amazing talks that night, and I’m still not sure how on earth the judges would have made a decision. Winning the finals meant that I was rewarded with a trip to the UK to compete in the international famelab competition. The international competition takes place as part of the Cheltenham Science Festival, and there were 27 countries competing. Meeting 26 other young scientists from all over the world, all so passionate about science communication and sharing their joy of science was the most amazing experience. Thanks to the modern inventions of social media, I hope to stay in touch with these inspiring people for many years to come.

The international competition was broken up into semifinals, from which we were selected to go through to the final event the next evening. The catch? You had to have a talk ‘significantly different in content’ for the next night, so I chose to talk about my honours work on the stygofauna (animals which live in underground water) in the Pilbara of Western Australia.  The three winners of the international final were the loveliest people and gave brilliant talks – and it was a pleasure to stand alongside them and entertain, educate and inspire an audience for a few hours.

I can’t thank the British Council enough for the chance to head overseas to the international competition, and for continuing to support the training of PhD students as science communicators here in Australia. So if you’re a PhD candidate and talking about your science gets you bright eyed and bushy tailed, think about applying for Famelab next year- trust me, you won’t regret it!

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.

That was the scientific finding of our grand wasp hunt. There really are a lot of flies in the desert! Last week, Mustard and I set off to the north-eastern corner of South Australia to find a rare wasp. The 4WD was rearing to go, the weather was as perfect as you can expect from the middle of Australia in Summer (ie. hot, dry and hot) and we were filled with optimism as we set off from Adelaide and headed north. 

We were headed north of Maree, near Lake Eyre and the Strzelecki Regional Reserve. The furthest north we drove was to Innamincka, not far from the NT/QLD borders. 

There was a lot of driving along dusty dirt roads, across flat dry desert country. We saw lots of cows, emus and a dingo!

In the evenings we set up our light trap to attract the nocturnal wasps. No one really knows why insects that fly at night are attracted to light, but it definitely works! Our light trap consisted of big white sheets tied to the 4WD, and a really bright light strung up in front of it. 

There were HEAPS of insects that came to the light after the sun set. Lots of different types of moths, a lacewing from the family Ascalaphidae, a rather large mantid, and some pretty cool beetles. Unfortunately, despite having many different insects pay us a visit, there was not a single one of the wasps we were after. What this means, we can't really say. They were last collected there 25 years ago during the same time of the year. Perhaps with different weather conditions, they are flying at a slightly different time this year? Perhaps it's just been a bad season for them? Perhaps they have gone extinct in the last 25 years due to a changing environment or climate, or unknown pressures on them, their hosts, or their host food plant? It's impossible to prove any theory as to why we didn't find the wasps during our field trip.

The plan is to head back next year and have another go - who knows, maybe there will be hundreds then!

Next week we're heading up into the dessert on a quest to find the elusive orange and black Megalohelcon ichneumonoides... a really big wasp. This isn't strictly related to my PhD, but it can be fun to do some side projects along the way. Going on a field trip requires a fair bit of organisation, which is what Mustard and I have been up to the last couple of days! 

The specimens of Megalohelcon ichneumonoides in the University collection (picture above and below) are from 1991... so they're too old to get much usable DNA out of. DNA degrades over time, so to be able to use the DNA for reconstructing evolutionary relationships a long way back into the past, we'll need some fresh specimens preserved in ethanol. 

To find out how we extract the DNA, head over to our citizen science project blog!

These wasps are really rare, but we're heading up to Marree, South Australia, to look in the same locations these original specimens came from 25 years ago. Hopefully they are still there! Heading out on a remote trip requires some special gear, including a satellite phone and GPS as we won't have any mobile phone reception.

​Stay tuned to hear about our adventures next week!

You might remember a couple of weeks ago we set up some malaise traps for catching wasps. Two weeks later we went to see what we'd found! Mustard and I spent hours and hours at the microscope sorting through a lot of insects. We weren't very successful at catching many of the microgastrine wasps that we're studying, but we did find one specimen right at the end of the third bottle! 

Although we didn't find many of our wasps, we did find some pretty awesome wasps that we wanted to share with you! These guys below are in the family Chrysididae and are parasitoids or cleptoparasitoids of other wasps or bees. Head to our citizen science website to learn about parasitoids. Cleptoparasitic wasps such the Chrysididae lay their eggs inside the nests of unrelated wasps or bees, where the baby Chrysidids eat the host young and the food the host provided for them. They are iridescent due to the structural surface of their exoskeleton... and super pretty!

The true bug (Hemiptera) below is super weird and super awesome. We're not entirely sure what family it is from - do you know? Let us know in the comments!

On the weekend, Mustard and I headed out to set up malaise traps to catch some wasps. A malaise trap looks a bit like a tent - the wasps accidentally fly into the cloth, and then they tend to make their way up to the top of the 'tent' where they are caught in a bottle of ethanol. It's not very nice, having to trap and kill insects to be able to study them, but at the moment it's the only way we can collect enough samples for DNA analysis. We're definitely not affecting enough to alter their population levels or impact their place in the ecosystem.

We set up a few different malaise traps in different locations, to see if there are different species of wasp in different parts of Adelaide, and in different vegetation. We'll leave them up now for a couple of weeks - and we'll let you know what we find when we go and collect the bottles! 

One of the best parts of being a entomologist is doing field work - getting to walk around on a beautiful day in a conservation park and call it work!