Ecologists
get down and dirty for Glastonbury
Mud and music aside, portaloos are a perennial preoccupation
for festival goers. Visitors to this year's Glastonbury, however, will be
enjoying compost toilets, and thanks to a team of enthusiastic young ecologists
festival goers will be able to dig a bit deeper into the workings of the
compost loo.
The ecologists from Lancaster, Cambridge and the Open
University will be bringing their stall – Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll –
to Glastonbury for the first time this year. Over the past two years they have
wowed the crowds at Wychwood, Larmer Tree and Green Man with the fun side of
ecology.
Festival goers who drop round to Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n
Roll will be able to discover why compost loos pong less than their chemical
counterparts, and why you need to take a scoop of sawdust with you when you use
the waterless dunnie. A series of jars containing different materials will
illustrate how long things take to decompose and how important microbes are to
the process.
Continuing with compost, the stall will be hosting a terrarium
containing soil, a cow pat and some native UK dung beetles to reveal why we're
not knee-deep in the tonnes of dung that animals produce each year. During the
course of the festival, visitors will be able to monitor the beetles' progress
as they bury the dung.
Rounding off the dung theme, festival goers can play the
ever-popular 'Whose poos?' (the #poogame) by matching 3D rubber replicas of
animal poos to pictures of the correct animal.
Dr Emma Sayer, an ecologist from Lancaster University, came up
with the idea for Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll for the British Ecological
Society's centenary celebration in 2013 as a way of making research accessible
to everyone, and encouraging researchers out of the comfort zone of the campus
and into the mud-splattered crowds of music festivals.
“You don't need a lab coat or a PhD to enjoy science,” she
said. “Ecologists love going to festivals and we're certainly used to muddy
fields. We're really passionate about what we do, so having a bit of fun at
music festivals is a brilliant way of sharing our enthusiasm for ecology.”
Other activities to delight festival goers include 'Magical
mushrooms', which uses smell pots to test visitors' sense of smell and
demonstrate the surprising aromas that different fungi produce, and 'How gross
is your festival kit'.
“We'll be inviting people to take a seat on the 'swab throne'
and pick an item of clothing or festival gear they'd like us to swab,” Emma
explained. “We plate the swabs on agar gel, label them with the visitor's name
or alias, and culture them for a few days. Then we take a photograph of each
plate and post the images on the festival 'Hall of Shame' where people can
download images of their very-own festival bacteria.”
Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll is just one activity in a
national set of events to get everyone to come and take part in the Great
British Summer of Science to celebrate 50 years of world-leading environmental
science funded by NERC.
