Profile

I am 24 years old and currently living in Didcot (just outside of Oxford). I live with my boyfriend and our 3 pet rats, Loki, Gimli and Nubbin.

As a side hustle, I am a dog sitter which allows me to enjoy the benefits of having a dog, without the long term commitment. After my studies, I am not sure where I will be living and working or whether a dog would be able to come with me… so dog sitting will do for now!

Here are a few of my happy customers:

I love swimming (open water or in a pool), scuba diving and snorkeling. Whilst at school, I competed nationally in synchronised swimming competitions.

I listen to metal music and have been going to Download festival for the last 6 years.

Fruit and vegetables that are grown by farmers are often sprayed with chemicals that kill insects that are feeding on the food. These chemicals can kill other insects that are not damaging the food, like bees and ladybirds. Beneficial insects like pollinators and predators can actually help the food grow more successfully – So we don’t want to harm them!

Some chemicals can also harm larger animals and can run into lakes and streams where they cause further damage.

But, we need to be able to use some form of protection for the food because 40% of fruit and veg can be lost to pest insects that are eating the crop.

I work with an alternative to chemical insecticides, insect-killing fungi.

Click here to watch an amazing/ gruesome video of insect-killing fungi in action! 

I usually get to work for 9am. I work at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology which is a large building full of scientific researchers!

I have lots of plants growing here in our ‘GRODOME‘ which are used in experiments. I usually use aubergine plants because pest insects find this particularly tasty.

I use the greenhouse whitefly in my experiments. This is a very small, white insect that eats over 300 different types of plant, spreads viruses and kills lots of important crop plants grown by farmers.

I also have lots of different insect-killing fungi species. These are grown in Petri dishes in a warm and moist room. I can collect the infective particles (spores) produced by the fungus by washing dishes with a watery solution.

Once the whitefly are on the aubergine plants, I spray them with with millions of fungus spores.

I will leave the sprayed plants for a couple of days before counting the percentage of dead whitefly in each leaf.

You can tell the difference between a dead and alive whitefly because they usually change colour.

Here you can see whitefly nymphs (baby whitefly!). A healthy nymph will be green but they may turn hot pink if infected with a certain species of fungus.

This process will help me find the most effective fungus to kill the whitefly which can be used on our food crops instead of chemical insecticides!