• Question: What made you interested in your species?

    Asked by sgirl100 to Barn Owl, Brown garden snail, Common Crane, Emperor Dragonfly, Hazel Dormouse, Catshark, Scotch Thistle, St Kilda Wren on 6 Dec 2017.
    • Photo: Emperor Dragonfly

      Emperor Dragonfly answered on 6 Dec 2017:

      My scientist, whenever he gets the chance in the summer, likes nothing better than to run around near ponds and lakes with a big net trying (and mostly failing to the amusement of his daughters!) to catch dragonflies. Mostly he catches another really big brown dragonfly, called Aeshna grandis (or the brown hawker) but this year, for the first time, he caught an Emperor Dragonfly! So that if now his most favourite dragonfly of all time, and so thinks that our genome should be sequenced!

    • Photo: Hazel Dormouse

      Hazel Dormouse answered on 6 Dec 2017:

      Many people think that native British animals can be boring in comparison to other countries however, we have some truly iconic species that we may not have living hear much longer due to either people not being aware of them OR (more commonly) destruction of resources and habitat. We should try and help the environment where we live, and the Hazel Dormouse was once so common that children would exchange in the playground in Victorian times. I think it is very sad you can now only find them in South England IF you are lucky!

      The more I learn about the history of the Hazel Dormouse the more I fall in love with it. Not just because it is extremely adorable, but folklore claimed it has anti-venomous properties! I cannot believe how long the hibernate for or that 40-50% do not survive winter, despite us knowing they can live in far colder conditions! What is happening to the Hazel Dormouse? How can we help it? I think by sequencing the genome we can find out exactly that.

    • Photo: Common Crane

      Common Crane answered on 7 Dec 2017:

      The Book of the Long Sun and its discussion of heredity between Crane and Silk 🙂

    • Photo: Lesser-Spotted Catshark

      Lesser-Spotted Catshark answered on 8 Dec 2017:

      I have been interested in sharks my whole life but when I discovered that there was a small, native species in the UK that I could work with easily I became especially infatuated with the lesser-spotted catshark. What makes this shark so great isn’t that it is the biggest, fastest, strongest or rarest but exactly the opposite! It is easy to work with, common and that means it makes an ideal species for scientific investigations.

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