• Question: where is the best place you've worked or found researched

    Asked by to Thon, Catherine, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anthony Caravaggi

      Anthony Caravaggi answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I’ve not worked in very glamorous locations I’m afraid, so I’ll have to either go with the middle of Northern Ireland, which is a lovely place to do fieldwork, or Flat Holm island off Cardiff where I did some work with gulls.

      I don’t think I can pick one place for the most interesting place I’ve read about though, there are too many options. Madagascar, New Zealand, the deep sea, South Africa’s Fynbos… So many to choose from. If I had to, I might choose New Zealand. Maybe. Such a fascinating place with its ground-living birds, bats which hunt in packs on all-fours, giant insects, marvellous plant life…

    • Photo: Catherine Offord

      Catherine Offord answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Well. I don’t do so much field work now (except for collecting ants in the Alps!) – a lot of my work takes place in the lab. But a few years ago I did more work outside with animals. I studied enormous colonies of harvester ants in Kenya for a few weeks, and I spent two months in Mozambique collecting plant samples for a huge biological survey of a national park. In Mozambique I saw my first ever wild elephant 🙂

      On a less research based note, I worked for two months in inner Mongolia on a ranch – they have a particularly unusual species of horse in Mongolia that’s rather smaller than Western horses. That was rather a lot of fun, and an extremely beautiful area.

    • Photo: Natalie Pilakouta

      Natalie Pilakouta answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I really enjoyed doing field work in Corsica (an island in the Mediterranean) a few years ago. A lot of the research was underwater because I was doing behavioural observations for a fish called the ocellated wrasse (they are really beautiful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocellated_wrasse). In this species, males make nests in the sea and they wait at the nest for females to come mate with them. After the female lays eggs in the nest, she leaves and the male stays at the nest to protect the eggs from predators. I spent a lot of time SCUBA diving and watching these fish mating and taking care of their babies, so it was really fun! I also got to see lots of other pretty fish, octopuses, dolphins, and other animals while SCUBA diving!

    • Photo: James Bell

      James Bell answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I did some coral reef surveying during my degree in Bermuda, it was bliss! Really interesting and cool but also beautiful place.

      Next year I’ll go out on a deep sea research cruise, though I’m not sure where yet, so that’ll be fun!!

    • Photo: Shaylon Stolk

      Shaylon Stolk answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      For my BSc Honours project, I got to go to the Caribbean island of Dominica to study the Purple Throated Carib Hummingbird. Here’s one feeding out of a heliconia flower:

      The island is absolutely gorgeous– clear water, black sand beaches, coral reefs, rainforests. There’s even a hot spring in the middle of the island. It’s actually where they filmed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies 🙂
      http://wikitravel.org/en/Dominica

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