Moving on up

We've moved the blog and updated the website:

Please go to www.festivalbugs.org to find out what we're up to (and remember to update your bookmark)

See you there!

Down on the Farm

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.

That's the way

The Roadies launched the 2015 festival season with a successful but occasionally damp weekend at the lovely Wychwood Festival. 
A full post will follow shortly but in the meantime, here are the first festival photos!

Thanks a million to Graeme, Stefan and Jem for a fantastic festival - we're already looking forward to 2016!

Back in the Saddle

The roadies are back! And we start 2015 in a different setting. This time the experience wasn’t as loud or covered in mud as usual! No blue tent, dirty wellies or face painting, but still a great bunch of activities for the 120 year 9 Geography students from Urmston Grammar School to enjoy and learn about Food Security. The day included 5 different activities hosted by Lancaster Environment Centre academics covering different aspects of food security including: a discussion on Famine and Food, mark-release-recapture in population ecology with 'Science Hunters', a discussion on Food waste and food miles, Guerrilla Gardening with a seed bombing workshop and us, ‘Sex and Bugs and Rock 'N Roll'. The visiting students took part in all of these activities in groups of 30 over the course of the day.

We had a great team of BES Roadies from Lancaster University, including the old timers: Catherine, John and Eduardo, and 4 first-timers: Erika, Natalie, Rowan and Benita. The Roadies activity started with Catherine introducing Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll, with the BES Roadies trailer and setting the atmosphere for a dynamic, informative yet relaxed 30 minutes of good old Ecology and science busks, with the rest of the team waiting at the back of the room, primed and ready for the stampede of 30 students.


Favourites like #poogame rapidly caught the attention of the students. I think they all were amazed on how much information we can gather from staring at animal poo! We also had a stall about the importance of pollinators for food security, and at the same time students could jump across the room to figure out which UK species they are similar to.

Our posters and games on the importance of water and soil for food production stimulated a debate among students and even encouraged the participation of teachers, as they tried to figure out how to complete the puzzle by matching different food items to the amount of water needed to produce them.  It was very exciting to see teachers getting interested and taking part in the process. Several came to us with interesting anecdotes on how they approach these topics in school and even suggested to use the “Smoke on the water” poster in their class.

For us, this was a great way to start 2015. Now it’s time to put the wellies back on and hit the road. Wychwood Festival, here we come!

Post by Eduardo

Keep it Up (Swab Geldof)

Following on from the huge success of Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll in 2013 the BES Roadies returned with our beautiful blue tent to Cheltenham Race course in May for Wychwood 2014. This years' BES Roadies team saw the return of Sarah, Catherine, Iain and Kate, and first-time Roadies Eduardo, John, Matt and Phil.

For the Lancaster-based Roadies, the weekend started with a journey in a moderately packed car with our famous bees safely between Eduardo’s legs (he is the bees knees!). En route we stopped off for a romantic picnic at the picturesque Frankley services before arriving at a rather muddy festival site!

Setting up before the rain hit

Thankfully, we got both the blue tent, located in the new lush Green area of the festival and our ‘palace’ of a sleeping tent up before the monsoon weather set in. Somehow the only things to get wet in the process were the entire contents of John’s bag (oops)!

Luckily, the rain stopped overnight and after a quick run through on Friday morning we were ready to go with our activities, giveaways and busks, including the new posters and ladybird game, alongside the old favourites #poogame, bug hunts, bees and swabbing. We had a great first afternoon in the tent with so many visitors it was a struggle to get out of the tent at the end of the day. Once we managed to get away we went back to the ‘palace’ for a debrief before heading back to the festival site for food, The Real Thing and The Stranglers followed by a bit of Headphone Disco.

Aphid fishing

Over the weekend we had hundreds of keen visitors to our stall to try out the poogame, find out how gross their festival kit is and see our bees. We also had special appearances from La Cucaracha (The Cockroach) and the Ladybird, although it was a little bit too hot to wear these costumes all weekend!

As with last year, we had several regular visits over the weekend from particularly enthusiastic kids who didn’t want to stop bug hunting or chatting about ecology. One boy in particular had to be pulled away from Matt by his parents when we were enjoying dinner on the Saturday evening whilst asking "Are you having dinner in the same place tomorrow?"

Busy times at the stall

A highlight for us was dancing at Craig Charles’ funk and soul DJ set on Sunday, after which Phil and Sarah were lucky enough to meet him backstage! Other highlights included  spending our evenings in the Comedy Tent, especially the audience participation, and Matt’s extraordinary appearance as ‘The Scorpion’. 

With The Boomtown Rats headlining the festival, we were half expecting Sir Bob to rush over to the BES stall, slam his fists on the bee hive bench, and shout “Give us your honey, NOW” (like at Live Aid), Needless to say, he did not, and we didn’t succeed in our attempts to Swab Geldof.

The festival came to an end with an early start on Monday morning before the long journey back up to Lancaster, with us both playing the role of the sleeping children in the back of the car, with Eduardo keeping John company in the front!

Roadies relax at the headphone disco
Clockwise from top left: Eduardo, Iain,
Phil, Kate, Sarah, Catherine

All in all, another great weekend for the BES Roadies!

Post by Phil and Catherine

Don't You Forget About Me

We've been so busy preparing for our recent roadshow at Wychwood that we've completely neglected the blog, so here's a some brief news in anticipation of a full report and photos from Wychwood's 10th Anniversary.

Wychwood was a great success by all accounts, with lots of bug-hunts, a lively twitter-feed, some new activities and our old favourite the #poogame - we're looking forward to becoming a regular feature at the festival.

We're pleased to announce that an article about 'Sex & Bugs' is featured in the most recent issue of Planet Earth magazine. You can read and download the article here.

Finally, thanks to everyone who participated in our BES members' competition. The winners will be announced shortly!

15 Minutes of Fame

We've had some unexpected but very welcome international attention in the last week.
Sean Mattson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has written a great piece on 'Sex & Bugs', which is currently featured on STRI's homepage - a pdf of the article (in English and Spanish) can be downloaded here.

And then Christopher Buddle, of McGill University in Canada, got in touch about our recent article in TREE - he has dedicated a whole post to us on his excellent SciLogs blog Expiscor. Thanks Chris!
A preprint version of the paper is now available for download from our dropbox here.

It's fantastic to get such a positive response from people - scientists and members of the public alike - in different parts of the world.

In the meantime, we're starting to organise our activities for Wychwood Festival 2014, where we'll not only be celebrating ecology, but also the 10th anniversary of the festival itself.

Please Don't Tell me 'bout the News

We've been a bit lax with our blogging over the last couple of months, so following demands on twitter, here's a short post with the latest news.

The headline news has to be: 

SEX & BUGS & ROCK 'N ROLL in TREE

Of course, we don't mean the kind of tree with branches and leaves, but the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, where creative public engagement is featured in the latest Spotlight article. Hopefully, the article will motivate other researchers to do some fun public engagement activities!

The paper is already available as a preprint online here. The final version is scheduled to be published in February. It's behind a paywall but you can email us for a reprint.

In other news:

ROADIES' PRIZE DRAW

Spotted in Montmartre, Paris. Enter our prize-draw and
maybe you too can make it to France this year

If you're a BES member, you can win your registration to the 2014 Annual Meeting in Lille by entering our prize draw. 

In keeping with the spirit of things, every blog post title since February 2013 is also the title of a rock-, pop-, or folk song. To enter our prize draw, just list the titles of 10 blog posts with the corresponding bands. Full details on how to enter are available in the December issue of the fabulous BES Bulletin. 

Take a Bow

Big Biology Day at Stamford School last Saturday was a roaring success for all involved. We weren't entirely sure what to expect but when we got there we were amazed by the variety and quality of the stalls and activities. 

They've been swabbed!

Kids and adults alike queued up outside in the cold to get into Mike Leahy's fantastic Big Red Zoo Bus, and were then greeted with tea, coffee and a large table laden with cakes before they headed inside to test their sense of smell, make a DNA bracelet, dissect owl pellets, test how quickly their brains adapt...

Holly and Heather

We were kept really busy, despite the stiff competition, so we were glad to have help from two new roadies. The swabbing was very popular - even the mayor of Stamford wanted to try, so we can add a mayor's chain of office to our collection of microbial growth. The day's swab plates are on view here.

The Mayor and Mayoress of Stamford
test their sense of smell

It was really good to set up the 'Sex & Bugs' stall in a completely different setting and see how well it worked in a school (and without our trusty companions, The Bees). 

Swabbing the Mayor's chain of office

So our festival year 2013 ended as we unpacked the van (in the dark) for the last time. It has been a pretty amazing experience. 

This may have been our last event, but it won't be the last you hear from us!

Roadie for a day:
Dr Eichhorn gets into the poogame

Karen and Heather

School's Out

The Roadies are getting ready for the final Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll event: Big Biology Day, taking place tomorrow at Stamford School in Lincolnshire.
This year, we've taken 'Sex & Bugs' to three music festivals, Imperial University and the Natural History Museum, so this a great opportunity for us to take our activities to another type of event.

The day has a really amazing line-up and we're looking forward to seeing the other stalls and contributors. We also have competition, as one of the participants is touting the infamous #poogame!

So if you're anywhere near Stamford, Lincs., drop by for a fascinating day! 
You can download the full programme here.

Summer's End

Now the festival summer is over, we've been taking a well-earned break. This is by no means the end - we already have lots of ideas for new activities and different events but before we start planning next steps, we'd like to take a moment to reflect on what we've done this summer. So here's 'Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll' in numbers:

1 - great society to back the idea
2 - science events
3 - music festivals
7 - invitations unfortunately declined due to lack of time
12 - months from the first spark of an idea to choosing ideas for busks and activities.
10 - months to prepare from proposal to the first festival.
14 - days spent at festivals
19 - volunteers working at the festivals
~50 - bumble bees in a colony (approximately)
>5000 happy visitors to our stall!

Back in the Saddle

The 2013 festival season isn't over yet but we're already organising our return to the lovely Wychwood Festival for their 10th anniversary!

The dates are confirmed for 30th May - 1st June 2014 and early bird tickets have just gone on sale. 

We're all very excited to be going back and we're looking forward to developing new, fun ecology activities. So if you're looking for a mellow, family-friendly festival with clean loos, short queues, good music and loads of activities, come and join us on Cheltenham Racecourse!

Meet Me in the City

The 'Sex & Bugs' tent at INTECOL

The BES Roadies made a special appearance at INTECOL 2013 in London last week. 

One of the largest international gatherings of ecologists, the INTECOL Congress takes place every four years and was hosted by the British Ecological Society as part of the centenary celebrations this year.

Georgina Mace and Bill Sutherland
(outgoing & incoming BES presidents)
 identifying mushroom scents.

A mere 18 hours after the end of Green Man Festival in Wales, the stall was set up on the main 'boulevard' in the enormous Excel Exhibition and Convention Centre in Docklands, East London. Our signature blue flowery tent was somewhat dwarfed by the sheer size of the building (which has 100,000 m2 of floor space and two DLR stops) but still attracted a lot of attention.

BES presidents play the poogame.
A picture speaks 1000 words
- even when it's out of focus.

The bees are taking a well-earned break in Frazer's garden and we had swapped the usual displays on pollinators and microbes for posters describing our activities, introducing the team, and showing the amount of work involved in making 'Sex & Bugs & Rock 'n Roll' such as success. 

We also handed out some of our giveaways to conference delegates but as we've now had over 5000 visitors, we've already run out of stickers! And we're still looking forward to Butserfest on 14th September.

On Wednesday we welcomed special guest and science busker par excellence David Price from Science Made Simple and invaded the Wednesday poster session with the 'poogame' and 'magic mushrooms' to demonstrate science busking. BES presidents Georgina Mace (2012-2013) and Bill Sutherland (2013-2014) joined in the fun and tested their years of ecological knowledge with the 'magical world of mushroom scents' and 'whose poos?'.

Why peat is so important

David brought along a really fantastic busk, which drew quite a crowd. His busk not only demonstrated the importance of peat, but also showed that with creativity and showmanship, you can transform just about any research topic into a fun activity. The film crew at INTECOL filmed the show, so hopefully we'll be able to post that soon.

David's peat busk draws a crowd

With a special mention at the British Ecological Society's Annual General Meeting and a warm reception by delegates from all over the world, I think we can be fairly sure we've not only demonstrated to festival-goers that ecology can be fascinating and fun - but also shown researchers that outreach work can be really enjoyable too! 

Demonstrating plant-soil
interactions in peatlands

BES Roadies at INTECOL were: Frazer Bird, Emma Sayer, Hannah Griffiths, Will Gosling, Sarah Pierce, Tom Walker, Matt Heard, Thea Powell.