Episode 95- On Evolution and Engagement

Welcome to this episode of Naturally Speaking. In this episode, we're thrilled to have Professor Rebecca Kilner as our special guest. Professor Kilner is an evolutionary biologist whose fascinating work on ground beetles provides insights into parental care, selection and evolution. Professor Kilner was also voted by everybody in the department to be our Diamond Day speaker, which is an event that our Institute holds every year.

She very kindly accepts our invitation to speak to us and then again accepted our invitation to join us for our podcast. In this conversation, we'll dive into her journey from her school days to become encapsulated by the wonders of evolutionary science and her passion for outreach and her position as Director of the Zoology Museum at Cambridge. Your hosts for this episode are Madby Neda and Nick Strobridge, two PhD students in the department with Interest in Behavior and Evolution. Join us as we explore what sparked her interest, her inspirations and the contributions she's made to the field.

Naturally speaking. So thank you very much for joining us. So the first question that I've got is kind of a big question, but can you tell us about your journey into the field of evolutionary biology and what sparked your interest in this area? Wow, it is a big question.

So I think we need to rewind all the way back to when I was at school in the sixth school probably. So when I was at school, I have said I didn't find biology very interesting at all. I wasn't excited by the way, it was taught until I got to sixth school and so that was when I was about 16 and my mother's insistence or encouragement I should say. I decided to stick with biology because I was doing other sciences for A-level.

And as the course wore on and specifically as I was in a small group that was preparing to take the Oxford entrance exam, we started to read more broadly beyond the curriculum. And at that point, I started reading popular science books about evolution and started reading detailed accounts. I read about Lynn Margulis's description of the role of symbiosis and evolution, I remember that very clearly actually. And so started to see that there was a kind of bigger pattern to the more tedious stuff that I've been learning about almost by rote because it was all about labeling up to that point.

And thinking more about this bigger pattern really got me fired up and sparked an interesting evolutionary biology that's sort of stayed with me ever since. And when I got to Oxford, I was able to study that in more depth with some of the people that I had, who's books I'd read and I read about, which is completely intimidating and exciting in equal measure. And also while I was introduced to the conformal study of animal behavior as a science and the combination of those two things really fired me up. And that's what maybe we want to carry on staying and doing research in evolutionary biology, but with a particular focus on animal behavior.

And so that led me to start a PhD and I haven't really looked back since I've just been one exciting talk in other. Yeah, that's awesome. Was there any sort of pivotal mentors or maybe professors that you had in your undergrad or when you were starting to sort of adapt on research that were pivotal and sort of influenced you to go into the specific career of animal behavior and evolution of biology? So when I was starting to think I wanted to do a PhD, by chance we had a visit to when I was a student's Oxford, Tim Cluckenbrook came over to give us an hour and I heard him speak about making systems.

I think that was always interested in that point. And I thought he sounded interesting and so I applied to a PhD with him and he ended up being my PhD supervisor. So, so you can say that that chance, a chance if I went to his seminar led to me doing a PhD with him. And then once I arrived in Cambridge, I sort of fell under the spell of Nick Davies, he held all the PhD students who interested in evolution of behavior in the department.

And he's for all because he was very nice and thought so clearly and so cleverly and with great originality about animal behavior and its relationship to evolution. And so he has been a huge influence, I think over the past, my career has taken and the way that I approach thinking about animal behavior and its relationship to evolution. That's really interesting. It's also amazing how things just sometimes work out and sometimes I could chance encounter a seminar and sometimes just the people that we meet to can really just shape the way our careers can form.

Yeah, it's a shoppinging. I'll go ahead. Sorry. No, I was just going to say that there's so many sliding doors moments like that when you look back over your life where you think I've been in the room at the same time and stuff as things much come very differently.

Yeah, it makes a good point that I think I've always tried to tell people who are starting their PhD or doing a master's to make a point and go to these seminars because of these potential chance encounters and you see talks that you may be interested in and want to reach out to that person to make a difference. Maybe discuss their research or you just become a better presenter or researcher yourself. But yeah, I think that's awesome. So we've spoken a little bit there about the choices you've made the party taken and your career in evolutionary biology.

So your research does look at the evolution of parental care in animals. What do you think is a particular aspect of evolutionary biology? Direct comes back down to starting my journey with Tim because at the point when I arrived in Cambridge, he had recently written his book, The Evolution of Parental Care. And he had a number of students working on projects that had come from his synthesis of the literature at that point.

So I think you could probably say that book was the first drawing together, very diverse sort of studies in a systematic way to look at parental care through an evolutionary lens. And it opened up huge amounts of research done by other people, including by members of his own group. So I joined, I think he had four PhD students off the back of that book and I was the fourth one to arrive. And so that started me off on a on a path of thinking about the role of parents in evolution, which I haven't really got off since.

But it touches on so many fundamental aspects of animal behaviour, evolutionary ecology and evolution itself. But I think I can be forgiven for not having got off that path yet. Yeah, definitely. So a lot of your work on parental care involves bearing beetles.

What makes these beetles such a compelling subject for studying parental care and other aspects of behaviour evolution? Well, so the very little beyond usual and shown parental care in insects. So obviously we know that there are these amazing new social insects that have very elaborate forms of care for offspring. But the majority of insects don't really show any sophisticated care at all for their own.

And the bearing beetles are unusual in being one of the few species that are known as the sub-social species, because they hang around in the carto of their offspring. And the reason I was drawn to them is because for the first part of my career, I'd focus my interest in trying to understand the evolution of care in bird families. And bird families are brilliant for studying this because you can watch the interactions between parents and young and among the offspring themselves in huge amounts of detail. And you can manipulate what's going on in the nest and so you can do behavioural experiments to figure out decision making in real time.

So for all those reasons, there are excellent model species from understanding the kind of transactions that happen when the care is allocated within the family. But the shortcoming is that the whole time that you're doing that, you're confined to using a framework that focuses on the outcome of evolution, rather than thinking about the evolutionary process itself. And the reason that you're constrained to do that is because birds have a very long generation time. And so it's just not possible in experimental context anyway to observe evolution in action with birds unless you're planning to carry out an experiment over the entire course of your life, probably.

Which I wasn't at that point. So the attraction of varying details was that they had this shorter generation time, the whole system, kind of brought into the lab. And so it opened up the possibility that we could do some evolutionary manipulations and observe how social interactions that occur within the family cause evolutionary change to happen. So this was the particular appeal for me.

Although as I got to know the better, it's very hard not to be drawn to other aspects of their extraordinary natural history, which just become more and more remarkable to find out about them. Did you share some of those findings and maybe some of those implications that they might have? Well, I mean, so let's start with natural history because I think that's where all thinking should begin. It's I never get bored of looking at a film that we've made of varying details constructing a nest where they were spreading from the dead body of a small bird.

So we have this, I think I showed it in the lecture when I came up to the Glasgow in February. There's time left footage of those details making the dead mouse into a nest to their own. And it's just incredible because, you know, these two insects are working together. They've never before met.

And yet their actions seem very coordinated. And together they're able to take this dead body to remove the fur from it. It's a dead mouse in the film. And then to to roll the flesh having removed the dots, roll the flesh into the very, very, almost perfect sphere and very below ground.

And at the same time cover it with antimicrobial fluids. And I don't have an opposable fun or a plan. If you try and put yourself into the heads of those very things, you'll think, well, how would I go about doing that? And it becomes even more remarkable to think that they can manage to achieve that.

So so that's just incredible in itself. And then the biology of it, the fact that they can raise or spring on this ball of meat, damp ball of meat in soil, they're all spring crawl to the carcass. They know where to go. They know how to feed on the flesh.

They know how to solicit care from their parents. And then within a week, there's nothing left but a few bones and massive fat white lolli but then crawl away into the soil and repute. All of that's never get bored of looking at that extraordinary lifecycle and the pace at which it unfolds from these tiny lolli that hatchets and pearl white eggs made wide range tools into these big fat white grubs four days later. And they must the change in body size during that very short time frame is immense.

So then Natural History is incredible. And there's all sorts of details about it with the associated organisms. It's not just the interactions within the members of the family. That's the whole microbial community that the beetle manages on the dead body.

And then there are these other organisms that they transport with them to the breeding location, like the lights that we can see, so readily on their backs. But also, there's a kind of theoretic nematodes that use the beetle to travel between breeding opportunities on the dead body and they ride inside the adult beetle's hinduct. And then they all come out onto the dead body to breed and then somehow the next generation find their way back into the iron gut to depart with the parent as they fly off. So there's a whole ecosystem that the beetle generates around the dead body while it's reading, which helps its offspring in some respects, might impede their growth in other respects, and then disappears again when the body is depleted and the beetle flies off to the next breeding opportunity.

All of that's incredible. Setting aside all those wonders that some of which you've only just begun to explore. We have the kind of results of our experiment, which ends up running for almost seven years. In the end, which allowed us to see what happens when we permanently prevent any post-hatching care happening for seven years.

So about 50 generations, how that changes interactions within the family and adaptations arising both parents and offspring as a consequence of the removal of post-hatching care. So I can run you through some of those if you like, in the descriptions of what we found. So the first thing that we found was that parents get really good. If you stop them being able to look after their offspring after hatching, then they get really good at looking after their offspring before hatching.

And the main way that shows itself is because they're better able to make a nice nest for their own. So they make the nest quickly, they make a more spherical nest, and they get this little indecision hole, which is the last thing they do when they make the carrying nest. They bite a little hole in the ball of flesh so that the larvae have a way into the flesh when they've just hatched. They get that hole in there sooner before they're removed.

And that's really important because we showed experimentally that that has a huge effect on the novel survival. So the parents that got it in before they got whipped out by us had larvae that were the greatest of all than the parents who didn't manage to get the incision. So that's one set of adaptations by the parents. And we looked in more detail about how they coordinated those outcomes.

And it turned out that that reveals some quite interesting things about who takes the lead in nest preparation and who follows. I mean, the sub-swint experiments we were able to show that it's males that take the lead in making the nest. They're the ones that initiate the security in this preparation that we deploy to the ability to provide post-hatching care. And it's the females that follow the males and females that respond to what the males are doing and they're tailing their behavior in relation to what the males are up to.

And we wouldn't spend time out of it if we hadn't to build these lines that we're doing. Slightly different things and different populations. And by crossing the sexes between the lines we could expose this high level of coordination between the genetic preparation. So that's basically the main findings in the parents want to be, yeah, I've gone.

Really interesting. That finding that, is that something that you've noticed specifically for nest building behavior, is that something that you've seen in other behaviors as well? No, this is solely in relation to the nest building behavior. Yeah.

We haven't been able to interrogate it in this much depth for other behaviors because it's easy to have a metric of nest building behaviors. We simply use the insertion of incisions as our measure of nest quality. We haven't got to easier measure of post-hatching care quality to carry out those sorts of examples. Because the decision meeting is just remarkable.

Sorry, no. No, go. Yeah, I was going to say you sort of focused on the parental care aspect. Was there any sort of effects on the offspring behavior as well?

Like post-hatching? Yes. Yes. So obviously we've imposed quite strong selection on your swing.

We're not letting them have any post-hatching care that's making the world much harsh of them immediately. And so imposed a strong selection on them to come up with some ways of coping with leading in this much more harsh development environment. And so we found a number of ways in which that strong selection pressure played with adaptations for living in the no care world. And one of the ways that they cope is that they look after each other, much better than if they have their parents there.

So it's almost like the sibling care compensates for the loss of parental care. And we don't know exactly how that happens because the way that we found that result was by looking to see how the sibling environment affected offspring growth. So we know that the size that a lot of attains by the point of which it completes, the level of development is a really good predictor of feature, adult survival in the community. And we were able to show that if we put larvae that had evolved in the no care environment alongside other or focal experimental body, those lovely from the no care world were able to augment somehow, level growth of our focal body in ways that the lovely from the full care environment were not.

So somehow those lovely were helping our focal siblings, although we don't exactly know how that was. And together they attained greater fitness as measured by large amounts of dispersal, when if they grew up with more selfish, full care siblings. So we think one way that might happen is perhaps through the proteins that the larvae secrete onto the care environment. So I talked a bit about how the parents do this when they cover the nest in antimicrobial fluids during this preparation, but they continue to do that after having to hold the parents.

And the larvae also add fluids to the care environment both from their anus. And so we've been able to work with Adrian LaBeouf, who's a new academic in the Zollage Department in Cambridge, to study the proteomics of those fluids. And there are differences in the composition, the protein composition of fluids, between the no care larvae and the full care larvae, which might account. We don't know.

We haven't done a causal analysis, but it correlates with the difference in the level of performance between the two lines. Perhaps this is how largely helping each other. That's something we've got to look at more detail in future work. But not only are larvae helping each other, they're also more self-sufficient.

And one way that shows itself is by the relative size of their mandibles. So the mandibles are crucial for larval survival, because they're the way that they bite their way into the caring nest, and they feed themselves on the caring. And we show that the larvae that had evolved in a no care environment evolved to have relatively larger mandibles for their body size than those from a full care environment, which perhaps indicates that they become more self-sufficient in the absence of any post-hatching care. That is fascinating.

That's so interesting. Yeah, that's so interesting. You mentioned how you sort of had a research of that recently. You came to Cambridge.

I was working on a proteomics of those microbes and stuff on the nest itself. How important is it to sort of incorporate and integrate those different scientific disciplines? And you talk a lot about behavioral ecology, evolutionary ecology, proteomics, those sorts of things. And can you give another example, maybe, of how this benefited your work as well?

Yeah, I think we should ever one should embrace as many different ways of measuring what's going on in this possible. And our way of carrying out research should be informed by the questions that we pose rather than the techniques that we employ, but that shouldn't limit the techniques that we employ to address the questions and we should embrace new technologies as they come along. So I can't claim any particular expertise in any new technologies, but it has always been very keen to collaborate with people doing it how to use the latest was found trick on the blog to answer my relatively basic questions. Collaborating with Adrian was a complete joy and we continue to work together.

And I've worked with other people who can bring their skills to bear on some questions that I'm interested in. So for example, I was interested in the microbial environment on the park, so we worked with people that could sequence the bacterial communities that were on the carcass to understand better how the beetles were shaping those themselves with their own fluids. So yeah, so my approach is always to be quite broad minded in thinking about how to go about understanding the biology of the system you're working on, not to be constrained or fearful of the approaches, but to frame the question and then make friends to help you answer it. I think that's a really important approach to have, and I think, like you're saying, it's a really good way of understanding things that we maybe didn't know before.

And I think sort of leading on from that, do you think there's any unanswered questions or new areas of research that you're excited to explore? There's loads. There's loads. There's loads.

You find one thing out and then immediately raises 20 other questions. So I mean, I think the main, when we started this whole work on getting the experiments and evolving populations, it was a bit of a long shot. We didn't know whether or anything would change or whether we see any evolution of action. We kind of, of course, we hoped we wouldn't know that was going to happen.

And so it's been an amazing adventure to see all of that happening. But now we've got to the end of that. But possibly, is how was that happened so far? So how have we been able to see so much change in such short order, really?

And I think the answer to that question is partly because we imposed on quite strong selection pressures by, you know, it was a life-or-death situation for the larvae when we took parents away. So it's no wonder that, you know, they had to, it's basically a death or a death. That was the situation we created for them. But at the same time, you know, you can't adapt.

You don't have very much genetic variation. So there was a huge amount of genetic variation in natural populations, which we used to found these other populations in the lab. And I'd like to understand why that is and how that variation is distributed across populations. So is it that we, by coalescing individuals from different natural populations, each of those populations is very different from the other?

And that caused our starting population to be very genetically diverse? Or is it that actually each of those populations is approximately the same genetically, and they're all very diverse? And so that's why we had such enormous amount of genetic diversity in our starting population. And whatever the answer is to those two questions, and it might be a combination of basic explanations being correct.

So why, how is it that that variation is maintained? And what form does it take in the natural world? What's keeping the variation alive and being generated? So the whole, and brand new such questions immediately pops up and what's substantial would you work for now in a direction of travel with everybody?

We would take. Yeah, that's very interesting. I was wondering if you sort of mentioned that variation that you see genetically within your population and you're wondering if that's the same across different populations in the natural world. Have you looked at behavior in the natural environment as well?

Do they differ in behavior between populations on how they take care of the young or maybe the types of vertebrates, small vertebrates that they're using to feed their young as they grow or anything like that? Yeah, so that's the subject of some projects that are underway in the lab. Now I have a PhD student who's looking at that in a lot of detail. And we're a little bit constrained because although the Bering beetle has this fantastic natural history that we spent some time going through, the natural history is easier to study in the lab than in the field because it all happens below the ground in the wood, which immediately makes it quite tricky to study.

So our approach has been to collect beetles from the wild and then to keep them in the natural populations that we collect them from different woods and then we can maintain them as distinct wooden populations in the lab with netherd within the lab conditions. So if there are any genetic differences between them, we hope that they persist in the lab as well and then if they have any effects on behavior, we can document that in a constant environment. So that's the approach that we're taking and we're looking at all different kinds of aspects of the Bering beetle's behavior. So from the less preparation through to duration of care, how many pigs they lay and so on and so forth, whether they have a particular capacity to wait on one size of carry and on another size of carry.

Yeah, so we've not made very much progress about so far but there are already some differences between with starting to show up in the hangers. I suppose we still have no causal evidence to suggest that that's a little too genetic diversity. So you mentioned that some of these changes are happening quite quickly, you're observing them quite quickly. How many generations does it have?

I was going to say how many generations does it usually take to see a difference? It's probably a bit of a good question. Yeah, so we haven't explicitly set up an experiment to address that question. So we've not sort of tried to measure how quickly adaptations arise.

The very first thing we did was an experiment to test evidence that the populations that had developed also rather had evolved with post-catching care had diverged adaptively from populations that have had evolved without post-acting care by testing for evidence of local adaptation and we were able to find evidence of local adaptation to those different social environments within seven generations of each one starting. So we know that at that very early stage we had already induced it out. So we had to change. And then we just, you know, things just kept changing all the way through to, I think it was generation 52 or something like that when we plug on this one in very good times.

Yeah. Yeah. You were saying how you sort of try to keep your eye on sort of different advancements and how other people can help you with your research. Do you see anything particularly interesting now and sort of advancements that you think will show you the future of your research and make that a little bit of technology in general?

Oh, well, that's a pretty good question. I'm not sure about evolutionary biology in general, but I hope to speak about what I'm doing. So we are continuing on the trajectory that we've been taking for a while now. So we are ongoing collaborations with people that are experts in genomic analysis, epigenetic analysis, proteomics and we also have an interest in biomechanics.

So we've become interested in the head size of male-sliced females. So first sight, male-phenol-vein beetles are basically identical. But it turns out today, the paper came out, well, first paper on this showing that males have a wider head than females. And we think that that's connected to the duties of care that they carry out because the division of labor between males and females, so that the tasks associated with making the nest and defending the offspring of things that males play with and tasks associated with looking after the offspring after they've hatched and making mouth-to-mouth-consect transfer in fluids over other kinds of things, the females' favor.

And we think the kinds of duties of care that the male does probably impose selection on his head size so that it's wider because we know that males with wider heads have a greater bite cause. And so they're better equipped to be able to do things like roll the carcass up or fight off in treaters who might want to take their carrying nest over them if they've got a wider head. So rather than being attributable to sexual selection, I think this is a special case where friends will care on the specific region of labor during friends will care between the sexes, its cause divergence, morphologically in the relative size of male- and female heads. So we described our first paper, described the difference in head width.

And now we have a program of research in collaboration with Gabby Gebontz who works in biomechanics to delve into the nitty-gritty of exactly how it is and having a wider head and what that means inside the head in terms of musculature and so forth, how that enables males and females to carry out different kinds of behavior and to test the cycle of the cyst that maybe not biprontal care and the division of labor between the sexes because the guiding force behind sexual denofers and in-head width in the bearing needle. That's really interesting. So earlier on, you mentioned, and you probably weren't a few viewing facets and you didn't always enjoy the way that you'd been taught biology or you didn't always, you didn't maybe enjoy biology when you first started and that you, it wasn't until sixth-born university that things really started clicking a bit more and read the books that you were reading. Is that anything that you, can you try to incorporate any of those aspects that you really enjoyed into your own teaching and then talk about because you mentioned as well having your own PhD students?

Yeah, so I think the bit that I like and I think this because I'm now doing slightly less biology and slightly more other kinds of problem solving in my work, the bit that I really like is being confronted with something that's very complicated and trying to make sense of it. I still really enjoy biology, that's my first love and will remain a primary love through I'm sure for the rest of my life because there's nothing inherently fascinating in the natural world and trying to understand how well that complexity has always been. It's, you know, who wouldn't want to do that. But the kinds of ways in which I now realise my mind works and that have been helpful to me in trying to figure out that big problem of how biodiversity originates and how it continues to be maintained and function.

But those skills are actually incredibly useful for other tasks that I've been doing more recently in running groups, people running a department, running a museum because most of the bigger issues that those sorts of level of organisation face are basically some form of complex problem where you need to be able to think really about what the conflicting parties want from it and how you can resolve any tensions and how you can move forward and have a strategy that brings everyone along with you. So I think that my mind is kind of designed to work through complex problems like that. I have a kind of inbuilt fascination with trying to apply that way of thinking to understand the natural world, but I can use it to make the context as well. And I'm increasingly using it to help other people explore other aspects of the natural world which I couldn't do myself.

That's so well described. Being able to break something down that's very complicated and something that can potentially be a bit more simple, finding a simple way to answer a difficult question is such a useful skill. Yeah, I think it's useful for everyone, whatever they're doing. And not to be overwhelmed by the complexity of something, everything that's difficult seems complicated at first.

But there's always a way through it and it's always very conown into both sides of chunks and disentangle and sort. Yeah, I was going to say you sort of touched upon some of the work that you do outside of research in public engagement as the head of the Zoology Museum at Cambridge. So I was wondering specifically in reference to Naturalist Museums and the Zoology Museum, what do you think are some of the most important things that Zoology Museums and Naturalist Museums can contribute to society or understanding of scientific endeavor, I guess? Also much.

So I've come to see, I don't think I can claim any credit for this as an insight. I think I'm a laden in thinking this and probably many other people that work in museums would see this link immediately. But museums, traditionally, I think, are seen as places of education where experts handed down truths from on high to the great unwashed and initiated. But I think that's not how we should see them too.

I think museums are community centers where we share ideas that are bigger than ourselves. And what better idea, what more fascinating set of ideas can you possibly share with your community than understanding how the world around them has evolved and works. And so that's the main point of the Naturalist Museum, to inspire people with ideas that are bigger than themselves, to use those ideas to explain phenomena around them in their everyday life, to make them care about the wonders of the natural world and then to go out and do something to make sure it carries on and persists and is conserved for generation after generation. So I've used this phrase before in other contexts.

I like to describe the Naturalist Museum as kind of the gateway drug to nature, where you can experience all of these wonders for yourself, but you can do it and kind of civilise away with a cup of coffee and a pair of socks and a gift shop as your first foray into this world if you come to Naturalist Museum. Yeah, yeah, like that. That's really good gateway drug to nature. Yeah, that's such a good thing.

Like honestly, I feel like Naturalist Museum has played a huge role in actually my sort of understanding and love for biology as well. I remember, like so many memories as a kid going to Naturalist Museum and falling in love with looking at all the different morphologies and packs and everything. And it kind of just gets you thinking about how the world works and how things have evolved and looking at elephant skeleton next to a shrew and you're like, how are these things even possible in the same world? Exactly.

And immediately you're taken out of your own head into thinking about this much bigger problem in a way that, so I've looked at another context as well. I've drawn comparisons between Naturalist Museum and churches. I think they do a lot of the same job. When you go into a museum, people are in awe at what they're seeing in the same way as if you go into a church, people immediately are in awe and they drop their voice to whisper and something bigger in the building.

And museums do the same thing. But you do it alongside other people, just as you do in a church and you share in the ones that you can hear in our museum and which has the most extraordinary acoustic. So the child on one side of the gallery goes, oh, wow, the whisper carries across the other side of the building. And someone else can feel this single day not their spine or whatever else they're looking at in the same way as that happens in a church if you're sharing a moment together.

So there are so many similarities that this kind of thing we have in need as humans to have something bigger than ourselves that explains why we're here. And that we can share with everyone else at the same time and museums do that in space. And it doesn't have to be about Naturalist Museum, it can be anything that you're interested in, particularly in a trust in Naturalist Museum. I think you're right and that museum is really due to a community service and I think what Nick has said is probably going to resonate with so many listeners and something that resonates with me as well, like going to the same as a child.

Especially I think both Nick and I we don't have families with academic backgrounds so it's just such a great first introduction to science and the natural world. It's probably quite pivotal for a lot of people. And you'll try to share with you. Exactly, yeah.

It's also just amazing to see things in real life as well. When you came up to visit us, you'd also spoken to us about some of the projects that you've been involved with the museum. So you've been involved in some public engagement, which you'd be able to tell us about some of the things that you've done. And as a sort of follow-up question, just also a big question.

How do you see the role of scientists in communicating their work to the public? So we have a fantastic public engagement team in the museum that does a huge amount of work and I've really been a step removed from the front line of that and applauding them from the sidelines and what they've done. I can't claim that I'm out there every day. I'm not the one on the front line talking to school kids about souls or showing people the amazing wonders of the insect room or whatever.

My role in the museum has been to facilitate the wonderful work done by our museum professionals and curators in telling the wide world about the treasures we have in the museum and what that means in a bigger context. We do it in all sorts of different ways. During COVID times, our team is absolutely fantastic in pivoting almost overnight from doing everything in person to do everything online. And then we will be just in common with many other museums we thought was the future.

And then the moment we got back in the building and we heard for ourselves the excitement of people in the same room as us in the galleries, we realised that was in the future at the future is in person in the galleries we can augment that experience, which is something we can't replace it. So there are so many ways now in which we can engage communities in our work. We target some events to people with particular needs. We are very careful to make all of our exhibitions and trails and what have you as inclusive as possible so that everyone can find something that they can identify with in the galleries.

We're really interested in understanding the origins of many of our specimens now. This is a new line of work uncovering the hidden histories behind several objects, many of them are 150 years old and they have a fantastic story of their own to be told which has been conceived by history and in some cases actively covered up. Who actually did the collecting how did this animal come to find its way into the museum. And those are stories that we need to tell because they uncover a history of their own that's worth sharing.

It tells us about the kind of society that went out into the world and gathered animals back then and the kind of society that we live in now and whether the inequalities that caused the local people that collected animals names to be erased from the records, did they persist in today's society and there are interesting stories about us as well as the personality and natural history of the animals in museums and we need to start telling those stories more. So the loads of different ones which we use the collections in public engagement. So I'll answer your first part of your question. The second part of your question about science and public engagement.

So absolutely all scientists should do public engagement partly because they were often funded by public funds and so it's kind of only fair that the people that pay for the work to have them do know what has been discovered with their pound and what they gave from their pocket to the scientists that carried it out. But part of anything else is the flavour to the scientists because if you can't explain what you've done to someone that's not a scientist you probably don't understand what you've done. You should be able to explain everything that you've done to someone who has no scientific training whatsoever. You should understand it in that much detail that you can explain it in the ones that want to do.

And if you can't, if you come on start and you start having to resort to job then that's probably because you're not fully across everything yourself. So it's a really good test of your own understanding of the system to tell someone who doesn't know anything about it and even better they will challenge you with a question that you haven't thought of at all because they've not spent months with the same thing going around their heads and they're coming out to get you fresh. And the best questions I've ever had from presentations of being from people that don't anything about what I'm talking about and often under 11 and they come up with the best questions because they're totally untainted by any good conceptions and get straight to matter. Do you have any examples?

I mean, no, I don't. But I've always found them more challenging and interesting ones to answer. Yeah, I that reminds me when I was in my master's I was doing public engagement on my master's project talking about thermal physiology of rainbow trout and I had this one audience member who was like obsessed with space travel and he was asking like oh how could we like get rainbow trout to travel through space and whatever and I just was like totally unfounded it's like you never think about but it's a good question. I gave a talk quite recently to children's audience.

I think that's the first time I gave them a talk with them under five present and it's just fantastic. So much joy. You can't constrain the joy of an under five year off. They're going to be thrilled by something they will get up the dance and run around the room and tell them what that's going to happen.

And it's just something very nice and undidated and raw about that. So you can tell immediately if you've excited about it's not because they're impersonating the insect you're telling them about whether or not to run around the room. That doesn't usually happen in a lecture either. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I think this has been such a great podcast and so great to talk to you about your work and I think we've come full circle from talking about how you originally got into biology through your sort of research and back into public engagement and getting other people excited about pursuing maybe a career in biology. Just maybe one last question. What sort of advice would you give to young scientists or young people in general who are interested in potentially pursuing a career in evolutionary biology?

So I think my advice would be to always follow your nose and to keep doing the stuff that you find interesting. So I think there's a temptation to try and second guess what the next band I can say to be or to shape your career in relation to things that are going on in the wider world rather than in relation to what you find the nice fascinating thing to do. And well, for me, I can speak for my own experience. If I had done that, I think it would have been a complete mistake because I've been really lucky that throughout my career I have been able to frame the questions that I wanted to ask and answer and to go and do it.

And that has driven me in all sorts of different things. I've never imagined in the world streams I would do. And there's always been a way to do it. I mean, sometimes there'd been things I wanted to do that haven't happened, but there's always been something else, as in all terms, if I could have done instead.

So I think having a broad mind and genuinely following your curiosity and not being afraid to say, well, actually, right now, although I started off being interested in evolutionary biology, now it looks like I'm not interested in evolutionary biology, talk about what I'm interested in, some other flavour of biology, or even I'm not interested in biology per se, but I'm interested in telling someone else about biology, or I'm not interested in biology per se, but I've learned all these incredible skills about how to analyse the world that I can go and apply in some other context. So just being driven by the skills that you have and your own curiosity and feeling free to pursue whenever you're in line of inquiry, most exciting, I think is a very unconstrained and liberating way to live if you're lucky enough to make it work. And you shouldn't feel tired to do one thing for the rest of your life, just following your names and your own curiosity and seeing what you're doing. That's great advice.

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Naturally speaking, there's a podcast from a school of bio-divercipation, one health and veterinary medicine at the University of Ocolezco. For more information, you can find us on Facebook by searching Naturally Speaking. You can find us on Twitter at theMS podcast or follow us on Instagram, uog, underscore, naturally speaking. And you can find more podcast episodes, blogs and information on our website, NaturallySpeaking.blog.