"I love beetles, but I kill a lot of them, in the name of science. The beetles I work with are called carabids, or ground beetles. They are predators of pretty much all crop pests, and also eat weed seeds. There are around 350 species of carabid in the UK, around 30 are common in farmland, they range from about 3mm to 3cm (not as big as the huge beetle I will have on stage), and vary in their environmental tolerances and predation.

• My work is picking apart the factors that govern which species live where in farmland, and how we can influence this to get more of the key predatory species in the crops, where we need them. Such things as field margins, beetle banks, reduced tillage…(I will skirt over these but explain enough for a general audience to understand)
• The way I sample beetles is pitfall traps. These kill the beetles. Which is necessary for four main reasons 1) they do eat each other: you would end up with one big fat beetle in a long trapping period, which wouldn’t tell me very much 2) some species are hard to tell apart, except under a microscope, and you can’t tell beetles to sit still. 3) we can store dead beetles, and someone else can check them and learn more 4) we can use bits of the beetles, grind them up, get their DNA, and do analysis of their populations, or get the contents of their stomach and find out exactly what they’ve been eating.
• There are other upcoming techniques which may reduce the need to sample in this way: camera traps, and eDNA (environmental dna) but each of these has drawbacks so far, and is not comparable to past data.
• My sampling doesn’t cause much of a dent in beetle populations, on the whole, and, In the end, I will use the data to save more beetles than I’ve killed."

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