It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…the results of our annual photo competition!
We’d like to start by saying a huge thank you to each and every one of you who submitted your photos. It’s been so wonderful to see such diversity between entries and to get a sneak peek into both your field work and general time you’ve spent in nature. I’m sure all our readers will agree with us how fantastic each photo is, but alas, there can only be one new photo banner!
You are all winners in our eyes but after struggling to narrow it down to our top 5, we couldn’t possibly decide on the winner alone…*Google poll enters the chat*. We had brilliant engagement during the voting process, so thank you to all of you who participated and voted for your favourite. Our winning photo took over 50% of the vote share, with the rest split evenly.
Before revealing our finalists and winner (no scrolling to the bottom yet please), join us while we take you through all of our 2022 entries:
The Entries
Green Shieldbug by Mairéad O’Donnell
Mairéad is a PhD student in the Department of Botany. Her Twitter handle is @MaireadODonn
Sugar Kelp and more!by Jean Williams
Jean is a PhD student in the Dept. of Botany, working with Marcus Collier examining if wild edibles can transition towards a more sustainable food system.
Aminita Muscaria or Fly Agaric by Jean Williams
Imagine the noise! by Katrin Schertenleib
Katrin is a PhD student in Zoology, working in Nessa O’Connor’s lab and her Twitter handle is @KatMarSci
Keep your head down by Mat Cobain
Mat is a postdoc in Zoology and his Twitter handle is @CobainMat
Touch of innocence by Elena Zioga
Elena is a PhD student in the Botany department and her Twitter handle is @ZioElena
The third wheel by Elena Zioga
The Bee Orchid by Marine Valmier
Marine is a PhD student in the Botany department and her Twitter handle is @MValmier
The Bee Orchid by Marine Valmier
Common blue butterfly by Bea Jackson
Bea Jackson is a Research Masters student in Jennifer McElwain’s group and is studying Devonian plant fossils.
A Xylocopa violacea resting on a maple tree branch by Irene Bottero
Irene is a PhD student in Botany working on pollinators under the Poshbee EU project.
A honey bee looking for some food fell into a trap… by Irene Bottero
The Finalists
Lockdown Visitorby Floriane O’Keeffe
Floriane is a PhD student in Zoology, working in The Parasitology Lab and her Twitter handle is @florianeeok
Making a Mockeryby Floriane O’Keeffe
Ichneumon Wasp on a Holly bushby Mairéad O’Donnell
Mairéad O’Donnell is a PhD student in Botany and her Twitter handle is @MaireadODonn
Eggs, Eggs, Eggsby Jason Keegan
Jason is a postdoctoral research fellow in Zoology, working in The Holland Lab.
The WINNER!
Lookwhat I’ve brought!by KatrinSchertenleib
Katrin is a PhD student in Zoology, working in Nessa O’Connor’s lab and her Twitter handle is @KatMarSci
Thank you to all who participated and congratulations to our deserving winner! The EcoEvo blog banner will be updated to Katrin’s beautiful image shortly.
As 2022 rolls around quicker than any of us could have ever imagined, it’s time to say farewell to our current editors – Erika Soldi and Sam Preston – and introduce our new editing trio.
Many thanks to Erika and Sam for their wonderful contribution to the EcoEvo blog, bringing us all some much needed light in a challenging year. Highlights include advice on how to make your lab greener, the connection between nature and wellbeing, and of course your research (Fungi, Birds , Crabs and so much more!). We wish Erika and Sam the very best for their continued research and hopefully this won’t be the last our readers hear from them!
Goodbyes are always hard, but this year’s is even more so in light of the tragic loss of Dr Aoibheann Gaughran. Before introducing ourselves, we would like to take a minute to extend our condolences to Aoibheann’s loved ones and pay tribute to our wonderful friend and colleague. Below is a beautiful photo of a Brown Hawker Dragonfly taken by Aoibheann and submitted for last year’s photo competition. May it remind us of her and her love for nature.
We would now like to introduce you to your new editors… Lucy Harding, Grace McNicholas and Richa Marwaha. Editing is a new venture for each of us, so go easy! Below is a short intro about us and our research. If you have any questions about our work please feel free to get in touch. We look forward to bringing you new content in 2022 and learning from our fantastic contributors.
Lucy Harding
Hi everyone, my name is Lucy and my pronouns are she/her. I am a 3rd year PhD student in the Dept. of Zoology. My background is in environmental science and marine conservation. Before my PhD, I was working in the Philippines and Fiji teaching children and international volunteers the importance of protecting our oceans. But my heart was always in my hometown, so I swapped tropical life for rainy ol’ Dublin and I now study the thermal physiology and ecology of marine fish, with a focus on warm blooded sharks, under the supervision of Nicholas Payne.
I am a novice when it comes to blogs so I’m very excited to learn a lot over the next year and to hear all of your exciting stories!
Grace McNicholas
Hi all, I’m Grace (she/her), nice to meet you! I recently moved to the Emerald Isle from the UK to start my PhD in the Payne Lab. If you get to know me you’ll soon realise I have a tendency to complicate things for myself, so of course my PhD is no exception and I am actually based in Westport, Mayo not Dublin. The reason being, I work closely with the Marine Institute in their nearby facility, researching the Ecology of Irish Tuna, including their space use and post-release behaviour. Probably a good thing though, as I’m not much of a city girl and since graduating from my MSc I’ve spent most of my adult life running away to remote places – be it the Australian outback or a tiny Bahamian Island!
As with Lucy, blog editing is completely alien to me but I’m looking forward to giving it a go and learning something new!
Richa Marwaha
Hi all, I am Richa working as a post-doc researcher under the supervision of Dr Matthew Saunders in the Botany Department. My project is to investigate the C/GHG dynamics of peatlands using Earth Observation techniques.
My background is in remote sensing and GIS. I moved from India to Ireland for PhD 5 years ago. I recently finished my PhD from Teagasc, Ashtown and UCC. My research was focused on grass growth rate estimation using machine learning and remote sensing.
Outside of work, I enjoy painting, baking and travelling. I am a part of this blog to improve my writing skills and venture into the world of science communication. Looking forward to this new experience and your ideas and research!
Updates:
The annual EcoEvo photo competition is back! For those of you who have been around for a while hopefully you are familiar with the competition, but if not, it’s a chance for our lovely readers to submit and vote on our updated EcoEvo blog photo banner. Keep an eye out for more details in our January post, and in the meantime don’t forget to get out and about in nature this festive season to capture some wintery shots!
We’d also like to take a moment to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and we hope you get to spend time with your loved ones after a challenging few years. Christmas can also be a difficult time for lots of us, so please reach out and ask for support if you feel alone.
Nollaig Shona – and we look forward to 2022 and sharing plenty of new blogs with you!
Irene Bottero is a 3rd year PhD student in Botany (Trinity College Dublin). She is part of PoshBee project (https://poshbee.eu/) and in her thesis she is evaluating the impact of different habitat types on pollinators, specifically, honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies.
Elena Zioga is a 3rd year PhD student in Botany (Trinity College Dublin). She is part of PROTECTS project (https://protects.ucd.ie/) and in her thesis she is evaluating the levels of pesticide residues in pollen and nectar of plants growing in Ireland.
Getting to know them better!
The 20th of May is declared as the ‘World Bee Day’ and its purpose is to acknowledge the importance of bee pollinators in our ecosystem. Animal pollinators play an important role in the reproduction of many plant species (90% benefit from animal pollination – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.18644.x), including crops (crops pollinated by animals make up 35% of global food production – https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2006.3721), ensuring the abundance and good quality of fruits, nuts, and seeds, which are crucial for human nutrition. Beyond food, pollinators also contribute directly to medicines, biofuels, fibers (e.g. cotton and linen), and construction materials.
Last month the Botany and Zoology departments at Trinity held their annual Postgraduate Symposium. Research students from both departments present a talk on recent and upcoming projects for their thesis, and the whole event is run by the students themselves. This is a big event for Botany/Zoology postgraduates not just because they get to show off their work and discoveries to the college community – it’s also great practice for future events, and students receive feedback on their presentations both from other postgraduates and from lecturers and professors in the two departments. Developing your ability to communicate your research is a crucial skill for all scientists. After all, what’s the point in discovering things about the natural world if you can’t share that knowledge!
Today we are celebrating our science using pictures! Here below, you can find a collection of pictures from our PhD student and research staff from Trinity College Dublin who kindly participated in this initiative.
At the start of each year we ask the EcoEvo contributors to share their favourite scientific publications from the past year and why they found them interesting, inspiring, or otherwise worthy of inclusion in the Hall of Fame. Keeping with tradition, here are the EcoEvo Hall of Fame entries for 2020! And if you enjoy reading about our favourite papers from 2020, remember you can also check out our favourites from 2017, 2018 and 2019, too!
I really enjoyed this paper because it tackles a really difficult topic at the intersection of poverty, human rights, development, conservation, and sustainability. It is important to remember that conservation will never meet its objectives without considering how people depend on nature for their needs and livelihoods. The areas of richest biological diversity (and therefore conservation potential) are usually in developing countries with communities experiencing poverty. This paper collects responses from conservation practitioners to examine their viewpoints on poverty in the context of their work.
They found some areas of agreement such as the poorest people should not be expected to shoulder the costs of preserving a global public good (the conservation of biodiversity). However, they also identify differences between responses: Is the focus placed on meeting the needs of people or more closely aligned with the “do no harm” principle? Is poverty a driver of nature’s decline, or is it the over-consumption that drives environmental degradation? This paper was a great opportunity to question my own views on these very complex ideas and to appreciate the wide diversity of thought going on across the world of conservation.
Fisher, J.A., Dhungana, H., Duffy, J., He, J., Inturias, M., Lehmann, I., Martin, A., Mwayafu, D.M., Rodríguez, I. and Schneider, H. (2020). Conservationists’ perspectives on poverty: An empirical study. People and Nature, 2 (3), pp.678-692.
This paper is based on a truly colossal undertaking: to collect their data on dispersal ability, Sheard et al. measured the wings of 10,338 bird species, i.e. 99% of all bird species on Earth. They used the Hand-Wing Index, a measure that correlates with aspect ratio and basically tells you how long and pointed the bird’s wing is. The higher this number (i.e. the pointier the wing), the better the bird will be at dispersing and flying long distances.
This is important for evolution, as the more birds that are able to fly between distant populations the more gene flow there will be and the less likely the populations are to diverge. Sheard et al. found important links between dispersal ability and geography and ecology, as tropical and territorial birds, had lower Hand-Wing Indices and migratory species had higher ones. It’s fascinating to see how these traits affect the ability of a species to move around, which in turn dictates where that species will be found in the world. The authors have made this incredible dataset freely available and it is sure to inform new insights into bird ecology and evolution for years to come.
Sheard C., Neate-Clegg M. H. C., Alioravainen N., Jones S. E. I., Vincent C., MacGregor H. E. A., Bregman T. P., Claramunt S. & Tobias J. A. (2020) Ecological drivers of global gradients in avian dispersal inferred from wing morphology. Nature Communications, 11 (2463).
The COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely challenging for many, so it was great to see some excellent science coming from the ‘natural experiment’ offered by COVID-19 movement restrictions. The authors show that during the COVID-19 restrictions anthropogenic noise (from vehicles etc.) in the San Francisco Bay Area reached a 70-year low, characteristic of the mid-1950s. They use a long-term dataset of White-Crowned Sparrow recordings to show that during the COVID-19 lockdown, when human noise pollution was minimal, Sparrows exploited the emptied acoustic space (usually occupied by human-related noise) by producing higher-performance songs at lower amplitudes, to maximise song distance. The authors highlight the rapidity with which behavioural traits (song characteristics) adapted to changes in human activity, suggesting incredible plasticity and potential resilience to pervasive anthropogenic pressures like noise pollution. To me, this study is a perfect example of nature’s resilience, and also on finding opportunity from tragedy (research made possible by a global pandemic).
Derryberry E.P., Phillips J.N., Derryberry G.E., Blum M.J., Luther D. (2020). Singing in a silent spring: Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the COVID-19 shutdown. Science, 370, 575-579.
This paper looked at the human behavioural responses to a blanket ban on thresher shark fisheries in Sri Lanka and fisher’s perceptions of different aspects of the ban. A blanket ban means a complete prohibition on exploitation of a species, and Thresher sharks are considered to be the most vulnerable species of pelagic sharks. A blanket ban might therefore seem like a straightforward and easy conservation measure to protect them. But this study looked at the human impact behind such a drastic policy decision. A ban like this has consequences for the livelihoods of fishers – particularly smaller fishermen who rely highly on thresher shark landings to provide for their families. The study clearly shows the disparity in the impact this conservation policy has had between fishers who rely on these catches to survive and those for whom they are not the primary catch.
The biggest message I took from this paper is how important it is that human lives are taken into account when making conservation decisions; and more importantly that scientists and policymakers need to involve communities early on in the process, communicate better and work together, not against each other if we want conservation to be effective – and supported. This is a message I think more scientists need to hear and integrate into their work and one I hope to take forward in my future career.
Collins C., Letessier T. B., Broderick A., Wijesundara I., Nuno A. (2020). Using perceptions to examine human responses to blanket bans: The case of the thresher shark landing-ban in Sri Lanka. Marine Policy, 121 (104198).
Drumroll please! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for! The votes have been cast, they’ve been counted and recounted, and we can finally showcase the entries and reveal the winner of the 4th EcoEvo blog photo competition!
It’s that time of year when we redecorate the blog and change the wallpaper with the help of our contributors and their photography skills. That’s right, it’s the 4th annual EcoEvo Blog Photo Competition!
If there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that change is inevitable, and this blog is no exception.
With a great deal of pride and gratitude, we say goodbye to Jenny Bortoluzzi and Floriane O’Keeffe – our 2019/2020 editors. They did a fantastic job managing the blog last year, a year that saw the end of an era with the retirement of the Zoology department’s own John Rochford, and research highlights and experience from far-flung places around the world (including Portugal,Indonesia, the Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand). We wish Jenny and Floriane the best of luck with their continued research and hope they’ll keep us updated with exciting new blog posts in the months to come.
But this post isn’t just about fond farewells. We are also delighted to introduce to you… ourselves! – Erika Soldi and Sam Preston – as the new editorial team for 2020/2021! We’re very excited to bring you the latest research, ideas, opinions, and advice from Trinity’s EcoEvo contributors and to keep making this blog a centre of science and innovation.
With just over a month of confinement behind us and the uncertainty of when it will end, we thought we’d ask the EcoEvo community at Trinity College how they were coping. From the relief provided by our trusty companions to the energising outdoors, find out what measures academics have taken to remain sane, even when the world has seemingly gone insane. You might even find some inspiration for yourself!