An email from the University of Cambridge

A report on the first tropical Part II field course and other news...


Zoology alumni newsletter

Dear alumnus/na,

We are proud to report in this newsletter on the Department’s first ever Part II field course in the tropics. We were able to organise this important new experience for our students only because of generous support from our alumni and friends.

Please save two dates in your diaries for 2019:

Saturday, 7 September 2019
Zoology Alumni and Friends open day, with Professor Nick Davies as the headline act

Saturday, 25 May 2019
Field outing to Totternhoe Quarry in the Chilterns, led by Dr Ed Turner

Find out more about the field course and these events below.

Yours,

William Foster
Director of Alumni Relations

First tropical Part II field course

The Department's first-ever tropical field course took place in the summer. A group of 20 Part II students went to Gamboa in Panama. They were joined there by five further students from Colombia and Panama. The students were led by Chris Jiggins, Jason Head and Ed Turner and two PhD students, Gabby Montejo-Kovacevich and Kathy Darragh, with local support from researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Our students spent the first week getting to know the region and the second week conducting research projects they had designed. This continues the successful model developed over many years on the Part II field courses in North Norfolk. The students' projects included a study on chemical attractants and their effects on orchid bees, and another on the personalities of tungara frog tadpoles, looking at their boldness and exploratory behaviour.

The experience has been inspirational for the students. Throughout the trip, they were able to observe a wide range of animals including sloths, iguanas, armadillos, tree frogs and a night-time camera trap photo of an ocelot (unconfirmed).

The field course was made possible only as a result of generous support from our alumni and friends.

The students provided some images on our field course's Instagram account and Libby Daley (Pembroke) wrote a report on the experience, which you can read using the link below.

Next year the course will be in Sabah, Malaysia.

Read the student's view

Zoology Alumni Day 2018

We welcomed 40 enthusiastic alumni and friends back to the Department on 15 September 2018 for the day. Alumni were treated to a fun-packed programme of events, including research lab tours, an art trail and a wonderful lecture on meerkats and molerats by Tim Clutton-Brock.

See what you missed

Top student award

Recent Part II graduate, Andrew Catherall (Homerton) has been awarded the Royal Society of Biology's Top Student Prize for the best bioscience undergraduate degree result at the University.

Hamearis lucina - the Duke of Burgundy butterfly

Alumni outing to Totternhoe Quarry in the Chilterns

Saturday, 25 May 2019 – from 2pm

Join us for a tour of Totternhoe Quarry near Dunstable, a magnificent flower-rich chalk grassland nature reserve (SSSI) on the northern escarpment of the Chilterns. The tour will be led by Dr Edgar Turner, Curator of Insects in the University Museum of Zoology, a leading expert on the diverse butterfly and insect fauna of this reserve. See the scarce Duke of Burgundy fritillary and hear about Ed's research on conserving this species in the sites where they live.

Further details to follow in the spring newsletter.

Read about Totternhoe

Research news

From smell to behaviour in the fruit fly brain - full neural circuit revealed

Mapping a complete neural circuit in the fruit fly brain

An extensive collaboration between the Drosophila connectomics group in Zoology and the Jefferis group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the Biomedical Campus has painstakingly revealed how 195 neurons connect together to form a complete neural circuit that empowers the fly to avoid harmful microbes.

Why a 'cuckoo in the nest' can go undetected

Despite what might seem like obvious benefits, kin recognition by using 'genetic badges' is often absent. Badges tend to be distinctive and rare, and their owners will therefore spend their time being rejected or rejecting others. If an animal acts both as a host and a parasite, and if the costs of rejection – as both host and parasite – are more costly than acceptance, then genetic badges will not evolve.

Research on digger wasps in the Surrey Heaths, published in Current Biology, has shown experimentally that these conditions apply and that the wasps often fail to reject the eggs of intruders slipped into their nests. The research team was led by Jeremy Field of the University of Exeter (Part II 1981–82) and included the Department's William Foster.

Spare the plough and save the plovers

Evidence is accumulating that the best way to increase food production whilst conserving species diversity is to squeeze as much food as possible from the land that is farmed, so that large areas of natural habitat can be left untouched. But this implies that conservation scientists are advocating highly-intensive, industrial-style farming techniques. Some species may be saved, but at what cost to the environment?

An international team of scientists, led by Andrew Balmford (of the Department and Cambridge Conservation Initiative), has shown that intensive agriculture entails relatively lower costs when these are expressed per unit of food produced, rather than per area of land used.

Scanning electron microscope image of the head of a burying beetle larva. Courtesy of Claudia Grossman

Cared-for beetle babies have smaller jaws

A study by Rebecca Kilner’s research group shows experimentally how cooperative social behaviour can lead to reduced investment by a social partner. The research, published in Nature Communications (lead author Benjamin Jarrett), exposed hundreds of burying beetle larvae to two consistently-different levels of parental care over 13 generations.

With continuing parental care, the larvae evolved relatively small mandibles, but when the parents were removed the larvae had to feed themselves and evolved significantly larger jaws to make up for the lack of parental help.

Alumni Q&A

Helen Scales (née Hendry)
Part II 1998–9, PhD 2001–5

Helen is a celebrated writer, broadcaster and science communicator (see details of her latest book further down this newsletter). Discover how her career developed while doing her PhD in the Department and whom she would most like to review her next book.

Read Q&A

Biographies of zoologists

Dr Sidnie Manton: a pioneer of arthropod functional morphology

Dr Sidnie Manton (1902–79), whose photograph now hangs in the Balfour Library, was a dominant figure in the history of arthropod biology and one of the Department's most distinguished zoologists. Her work on the embryology and functional morphology of arthropods completely redrew the map of our understanding of these animals.

Sidnie was also a pioneering figure in the history of women in science: she was the first woman to be awarded the degree of ScD at Cambridge, the first to be appointed to a full-time academic post in the Department and one of the first women to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Read Professor Michael Akam’s lively and readable account of Sidnie in an article about her pioneering paper on crustacean embryology in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Read the article

New book: Eye of the Shoal

A Fishwatcher's Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything

In this book, Helen Scales (Part II 1998–9, PhD 2001–5), casts her net wide to 'reveal the surprising and dazzling lives of all the fishes'. As one reviewer wrote: 'See if it doesn’t instill in you as well a profound change in the way you understand the world’s fishes and the watery world in which they live'.

Save the date: Alumni and Friends Day 2019

Date: Saturday, 7 September 2019

Venue: Department of Zoology, New Museums Site

Next year's departmental Alumni Day will celebrate the life and work of Professor Nick Davies who is 'retiring' in 2019. We hope that many of you will want to come and take part in this celebration.

Details in the next newsletter.

Our campaign for the University and Colleges of Cambridge is raising funds to attract the brightest minds, create the finest facilities and give the freedom to create more world-changing ideas. To do this, we need your help.

Department of Zoology

Call: +44 (0)1223 336600
Email: alumni@zoo.cam.ac.uk

Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, United Kingdom