• Question: id like to know what part of science you specialise in can you tell me?

    Asked by fistfull6 to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi fistfull6! 🙂

      I specialise in ecology, which is a type of biology that involves studying living things and how they interact with each other in the environment. The ‘living thing’ that I study most is the crayfish!

      In the UK, some crayfish species are causing a lot of problems at the moment. Crayfish like the American signal crayfish are not native to the UK – they were imported from other countries and introduced to our rivers and lakes. Now they’re all over the place and spreading like crazy! Non native species can cause a lot of problems for native plants and animals, by competing with them, eating them, or spreading disease.

      I want to found out how crayfish will affect our native species – so I’m doing three years of research (called a PhD) to find out more!

      There’s a photo of a crayfish on my profile (and in my main picture, that’s what I’m holding!) 🙂

      Also, I made a video that will give you a bit of an introduction to the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWn5H2XTl-I (if you can’t access youtube, try http://www.zaragladman.com/cray.wmv )

    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi fistfull6! Thanks for your question!

      I specialise in contaminated land and water. Most of my work involves aggressive methods for cleaning up chemical spills in the environment. These are used when the spills are big or the cleanup needs to be fast. A lot of my work involves combustion. My team has discovered that we can create an underground fire in soil containing the chemical spill to clean it up.

      Because of that experience, I am now getting into other fire-related topics, including natural or unintentional underground fires; charcoal from waste; and fire retardants in the environment. The fire retardants research is really tricky. Fire retardants are added to materials to prevent fires by preventing ignition. They are in everything from fabrics to paints to metal parts. Part of the research will involve finding a balance between using these chemicals effectively and not overusing them. We also have to develop better test methods.

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I use maths and computer simulations to study problems relating to behavioural ecology – how animals behave. I also look at how best to manage animal populations – for example fisheries where we have to balance the amount of fish caught with the number of fish left in the sea to ensure catches are sustainable.

      At the moment the animals that I am studying include coral reef fish such as Nemo, plankton (small bugs that live in sea water) and humans!

      (A bit more info copied from another post):
      Some of the questions that I look at in behavioural ecology can also sometimes be partly answered by using maths and computer simulations. For example one question we asked ourselves is – what would happen if an animal group was trying to find home (e.g. a roost) but there were no leaders in the group who knew where to go? We actually first looked at this problem using a simulation where we tried lots of different behavioural rules to see which would work best. A simulation is ideal for this as it wouldn’t be possible to try out all these possible behaviours with real animals. We then wanted to test the behaviour that we predicted would be best with real animal groups – but fish and birds are very difficult to control which is why we used humans!

      There is some more info about the sort of research I do on my website:
      http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ecodling/EACresearch.htm

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hey fistfull6,

      The area of research I am working on is finding some chemicals from plants that can kill cancer cells!! I don’t know an awful lot about plants before my research but I am learning lots more about medicinal plants! Also I love learning about cancer cell biology – finding out what reactions or mutations that have gone wrong or is different from normal cells because that might give us an idea on how to tackle this disease 🙂

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