Sarah Arnold
@sejarnold.bsky.social
2.7K followers 4.3K following 240 posts
Entomologist, likes pollination, insect behaviour, IPM, horticulture and agriculture, sustainability, nature and especially wild bees. Works at Niab (UK). Views my own. she/her Neurodivergent, quirky, sometimes wrong but usually teachable.
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sejarnold.bsky.social
Oh wow. I didn't know they did a 3rd generation, but I guess where the forage is still there, the weather is still manageable. I did see a male flavipes at the end of September that was in OK condition so maybe that was one too. We've got a B. pascuorum queen that is fresh and collecting pollen...
sejarnold.bsky.social
Alt-text for images: A smiling and happy group of people (student, supervisors, examiners) in two different rooms, lined up posing for the camera with the successful student in the centre.
sejarnold.bsky.social
Really proud of Cedric. It's been a fantastic project, piloting some super cool novel methods in #PollinationEcology and providing new insights into crop #pollination in legume systems. Cedric worked incredibly hard collecting all the data.

Thanks also to Angela Mkindi at NM-AIST in Tanzania!
philstevenson.bsky.social
Congratulations to our PhD student Dr Cedric Maforimbo on successfully passing his PhD viva today. Thx especially to @evoeco.bsky.social who was the external & to Steve Belmain the UoG examiner & @sejarnold.bsky.social who was my co-supervisor along with #steveharte. We are all really proud of you!
sejarnold.bsky.social
I think it's going to be one of those autumns of many, many ladybirds. Seeing multiple reports of this sort of thing today, and enjoyed watching them all flying around in the sun outside work as well.
jeremybartlett.bsky.social
Lots of Harlequin Ladybirds, Harmonia axyridis, at Bodney church Norfolk, this afternoon.

These were inside the church but there were masses outside too.

#Ladybirds
Lots of Harlequin Ladybirds, Harmonia axyridis, inside a church. Lots of Harlequin Ladybirds, Harmonia axyridis, inside a church. Lots of Harlequin Ladybirds, Harmonia axyridis, inside a church. Lots of Harlequin Ladybirds, Harmonia axyridis, inside a church.
sejarnold.bsky.social
They do seem to have suddenly all decided to congregate and look for somewhere to settle. After noticing them all over my office window I popped out and found many, many individuals all over the sunny, south-facing walls of the building. (Kent) I'm sure I've seen similar reports from elsewhere too.
sejarnold.bsky.social
I agree! Maybe the research community could do something like develop and share some hypothetical case studies of how a conservation project could look different if relevant researchers were involved...?
sejarnold.bsky.social
... Or because practitioners have specific experience-based knowledge of what works/what doesn't in that type of environment that they consider trumps theoreticals?

Not sure and probably depends on scale as well (e.g. 0.3ha LWS/field edge v 400 square miles of forest!).
sejarnold.bsky.social
Or because they once tried and the cost of including researchers blew the budget apart? Or they once tried but bringing in a research org as a partner created a layer of admin complexity that delayed the project too much? ...
sejarnold.bsky.social
Was there discussion over how to widen the community involved in review? Summer is a challenge, but not all countries have "summer", and not at the same time. Are researchers from Africa, Asia, Latin America getting same opportunities to be involved in peer review? (Do y'all want to?)
sejarnold.bsky.social
Interesting new paper discussing fieldwork risk assessments and policies in UK HE (but which has some good ideas that other orgs could also incorporate) and how to make fieldwork safer, more inclusive and consider individual needs/intersectionality/etc. #Fieldwork #RiskAssessment
zarahpattison.bsky.social
🏞️𝐅𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐝𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡?
Our new study looked at fieldwork policies and risk assessments from 90 UK universities offering environmental science courses.
The results are eye-opening:
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Improving university policies and risk assessment to support inclusive fieldwork in environmental sciences
Among 90 UK higher education institutions, there was patchy mention of protected and other identity-related characteristics in fieldwork policy and risk assessments, and very limited consideration of....
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
sejarnold.bsky.social
Yes. Some of the males the queens produce are genetically entirely the different species, but the queens can also produce same-species male offspring via the "normal" routes. We know there are 2 species of males produced because morphologically they are different, & their genomes are very distinct.
sejarnold.bsky.social
...It doesn't feel like one of those ring species that exist in a continuum with species A at one end, species B at the other, and lots of individuals that are a bit in-between. These are distinct and discrete species.
sejarnold.bsky.social
The fact that the two ant species diverged basically millions of years ago implies they they ought to be really different. So the fact that a queen ant can lay eggs which hatch out as males of a totally different, separate species is not really like anything that's "supposed" to happen...
sejarnold.bsky.social
True! I think I love it even more when fairly common species do the fun, whacky stuff right under our noses. (Milder example: I *still* feel delight when I remember that common "solitary" bees like Lasioglossum morio are just quietly being primitively eusocial on the edge of strawberry farms!)
sejarnold.bsky.social
Wow. That is...quite weird and wonderful. (And now I have shared this paper to basically everyone I know who is even remotely interested in insect biology. Or evolution.)
sejarnold.bsky.social
DesignShedCymru does some brilliant stuff.
Reposted by Sarah Arnold
kentfieldclub.bsky.social
Not long now till the 2025 Kent Wildlife Conference! This year's themes are urban biodiversity and citizen science - check out the impressive list of speakers here -
www.kentfieldclub.org.uk/programme/up...

Also - tickets only £22 including refreshments and lunch! So why not book your place today?
Kent Wildlife Conference
Saturday 25th October Kent Wildlife Conference 10am to 4pm. At the Darwin Conference Suite, Darwin College, University of Kent. Register by scrolling down and clicking the 'Register' button. Or...
www.kentfieldclub.org.uk
Reposted by Sarah Arnold
lakens.bsky.social
An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.
sejarnold.bsky.social
I totally don't have internal training materials that are written a bit like that for new techs. Definitely not...
sejarnold.bsky.social
"flowers were pollinated daily by shaking plant canopies and flicking individual flowers by hand" - is this feasible at scale? I wonder if/how the light setup impacts managed insect pollinators if using them?
Reposted by Sarah Arnold
abigaillowe.bsky.social
Do you do moth trapping in the UK? We'd love your help! 💡

At @ukceh.bsky.social we're training & testing AI to detect multiple moths in a single image.

Send us top-down photos of multiple moths on egg trays to support this work.

More info & form: forms.gle/e3HzBPEd7RVV...

#mothsmatter #TeamMoth
A top-down image of 12 various moths on a green egg carton.
sejarnold.bsky.social
Sorry! Forgot alt-text. Alt-text = Close-up images of a small (<5mm) long mostly-black beetle in a glass tube, in a human hand. The beetle has red-brown legs, as well as red head and thorax.
sejarnold.bsky.social
I checked the common mallow & sure enough, there was a Podagrica sp. In this case, P. fuscicornis, the red-legged one. I need to do a thread about the Podagricas of common mallow in the UK as they're more interesting than you'd expect for tiny flea beetles...

#KentNature #Kentomology #Coleoptera