In 2020, as we saw borders closing, our work forced into many of our homes, and distance brought between many of us and our friends, families, and communities, there was also opportunity to find ways to stay connected with other humans and non-humans. One way we at FIRE Lab, along with Asha Sahni, thought to […]
Art Up A Mountain
On a freezing Sunday morning in mid-November, I set out with Steph to walk Nant Tawe Fechan, from Tafarn y Garreg to the Tawe’s source high on the Brecon Beacons, making art as we went along. Technically not mountains, hills, but that’s a matter of elevation. We wanted to try out a few different art […]
From Swansea to Solihull
Happy Friday readers! Yesterday, I swapped my usual routine of researching freshwater invertebrates, to teaching them to primary school children this week. For this, I visited Sharmans Cross Junior School (Solihull, West Midlands), who hosted a water day for their year 5 group (ages 9-10) so that the students could learn about how our precious […]
Exploring our lives through poetry
A few weeks ago Tara and I lead a group activity exploring poetry during Journal Club organized by postgraduate students in our Biosciences Department. Sat alongside a local stream, the idea of the activity was to get us all thinking about poetry, and using it to communicate about our work, daily lives, and associated encounters […]
#FishInThePost: Common Roach
This week’s #FishInThePost question linked to the common name of the fish species that we had in mind, and to a common name for a common insect. Our question was, ‘which Welsh freshwater fish has a common name the same as an insect that people also eat?’ James Stovold was the first to guess the […]
#FishInThePost – Lemme know Minnow
On Thursday we tweeted this week’s #FishInThePost question: ‘Me being one of Wales’ smaller freshwater fishes, is it not impressive that I produce up to 1,000 eggs in a breeding season? Which Welsh freshwater fish am I?‘ Winning guess by Pepijn for this week’s #FishInThePost! We had several great guesses, commentary, and puns about which […]
The quest for dam data – #DamOrNot 2/2
In last week’s blog post, I wrote about #DamOrNot, a weekly game I host on Twitter, and shared definitions and imagery of different infrastructure we commonly encounter in the game. This week I’ll work to address a few questions that came through on Twitter. A few of these questions came from Michiel Jorisson, an active […]
#FishInThePost – European bullhead
Yesterday we tweeted our weekly #FishInThePost with a special Christmas twist: The answer was very quickly delivered by @jessica_minett, who correctly identified the answer as the European bullhead (Cottus gobio). The meaning behind our festive pun stems back to the work of Smyly (1957), who identified that bullheads fixate on a single rock known as […]