• Question: why was it this set of animals? was it random picking these animals?

    Asked by swaggyp17 to Barn Owl, Brown garden snail, Common Crane, Emperor Dragonfly, Hazel Dormouse, Catshark, Scotch Thistle, St Kilda Wren on 21 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by gabriel thomas.
    • Photo: Emperor Dragonfly

      Emperor Dragonfly answered on 21 Nov 2017:

      My Scientist picked me because for many year he spent hours chasing (and only rarely catching) dragonflies in a local nature reserve. He uses a big soft net so it does not hurt us (and we only go near becuse we think it might be food!).

      Anyway this year my scientist managed to catch one of my sisters and he was so excited – it was a childhood dream come true, and as he spends all his time in the lab thinking about DNA it was just natural to put forward the Emperor Dragonfly as an “iconic” British species to have its genome sequenced!

    • Photo: Hazel Dormouse

      Hazel Dormouse answered on 21 Nov 2017:

      The Hazel Dormouse has been one of my scientists favourite British animals since dressing up as the sleepiest member of The Mad Hatters Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland (possibly my favourite book). My scientists always thought British animals were a little boring, but then found out about how mysterious this little thing is after participating in The Great Nut Hunt to try and identify population trends, which are significantly in decline, and not spotting a single one!

      My scientists works A LOT of work with rodents, because she loves how diverse they are and the fact that there is one so very unique and special to England and the culture was an opportunity not to miss. We used to be everywhere and even kept as pets by certain people including Beatrix Potter!

      Who doesn’t want to see this fluffy little face all over the UK woodlands once more?!

    • Photo: St Kilda Wren

      St Kilda Wren answered on 21 Nov 2017:

      My scientist picked me because he’s interested in birds and island wildlife and thinks that humans could learn a lot of important things by studying my genome. He’s caught some of my cousins on the UK mainland – they always wriggle in the nets and tie themselves up in string, but they’re one of his favourite birds so he doesn’t mind. He lets them go soon after, of course.

    • Photo: Lesser-Spotted Catshark

      Lesser-Spotted Catshark answered on 21 Nov 2017:

      I think it is embarrassing how little scientists know about sharks. We already have (very) many mammal, and bird genomes but only one other shark has ever been sequenced. There has been a long bias towards sequencing birds and mammals and I thin it is about time we evened out the representation a bit with a shark. The catshark is a very special shark because of how easy it is to keep in the laboratory. Think of it like the ‘lab mouse’ of the shark world. It has all of the amazing properties which makes sharks special, like infinitely regenerating teeth, electroreception, and a skeleton made of cartilage but this comes packed into a small(ish) animal which we can simply walk down to the seaside anywhere in the UK to collect. Another advantage of the catshark is that it lays eggs. Many other species of sharks are either too large to work with in a laboratory, give birth to live young which means it is more difficult to study their development, or are threatened with extinction making them poor model organisms.

    • Photo: Common Crane

      Common Crane answered on 23 Nov 2017:

      It is just 160 of us in the UK and it was 0 about 100 years ago. So we could be quite interesting to study 😉

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