Free webinar with Aaron Bhambra looking at the potential reasons behind the range expansion of the Noble Jewel-wasp. The Noble Jewel-wasp (Hedychrum nobile) is a recent colonist to Great Britain, recorded for the first time in 1998. This brood parasite has experienced a rapid range expansion throughout England over the past 20 years, following the […]

Free webinar with Dr Ellen Rotheray about the highly successful Hoverfly Lagoons project and introducing aquatic habitats into small spaces. The Hoverfly Lagoons project was invented in 2016 for the University of Sussex’s Buzz Club, a citizen science charity exploring wildlife gardening techniques for insects. The aim was to trial artificial habitat, essentially small water […]

Free webinar with Dr Linda Birkin exploring the importance of gardens for the wider environment in which they are nestled. Gardening success and invertebrate activity are deeply intertwined, for better or worse! Demonstrating that the beneficial side of this relationship vastly outweighs the negative is hugely important for maximising the ecological value of gardens - […]

Free webinar delving into the understudied world of Ichneumonid wasps. Huge numbers of insects are hosts to parasitoid wasps, and one of the most successful groups of wasps is the Ichneumonoidea, or Darwin Wasps. Despite the ubiquity of Darwin Wasps, they are comparatively neglected by researchers and naturalists. Dr Gavin Broad looks at research on […]

Free webinar investigating the success of 'mini meadows' and testing the ability of citizen scientists to sample and identify insects. Habitat loss and fragmentation are considered the foremost threats in pollinator decline, and in England and Wales, 97% of wildflower meadows were lost by 1984. Gardens have considerable potential for supporting pollinators, covering large areas […]

Free webinar with Dr Thomas Hesselberg exploring behavioural adaptations in cave spiders. Web-building spiders are excellent model organisms to study the behavioural adaptations to novel habitats such as the dark and food-limited subterranean cave habitat. Cave-dwelling orb spiders in the genus Meta show several potential behavioural adaptations in both their webs (which do not have […]