Profile

I’m originally from the channel island of Guernsey, now I work as a marine biologist in Plymouth (Geddon!). I went to university here for my undergraduate degree in marine biology and oceanography and stayed for my masters of research looking at things that live in and on seaweed. I play Rugby and Basketball, and i also play the drums and love to go on hikes. I have been playing a lot of games in lockdown too, mostly Warzone and Rainbow six. I am terrible at both!

I am a research assistant for the Darwin Tree of life Project. I work for the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth which is a really cool place to work as its right in the heart of the city and right on the waterfront at the same time. its also really old! My main role here is to collect, identify and process marine species in order that they can have their genomes sequenced by the wizards at Sanger.

Sometimes I feel like a Pokémon collector cause we go around searching for species so we can tick them off the list, gotta catch them all!

My main focus is on marine invertebrates, that’s species without backbones like crabs and worms.

If the Tides are good (spring tides are the lowest), I will head to the shore with the rest of the team to arrive an hour or so before low tide. We then spend a few hours hunting for species that we have yet to process or are a particular target that day, but usually something will always pop up that you didn’t expect. When we find a species that we want to sequence we pop it into a container with water in to ensure it survives the trip home.

When we get back to the lab our first job it to put the collected organisms into the aquariums to keep them happy and healthy. we have running seawater which is great as this makes it much easier to keep animals alive. if there are any tricky species which we couldn’t identify in the field we will take them and look at them in the microscope, this is one of my favourite things to do as its always amazing to see the animals close up, many of them have a real beauty to them that can only be seen when looking at them down a microscope. I also really enjoy the process of identifying animals to there species, its like solving a puzzle!

When we are ready we put the animals to sleep (unless its a seaweed obviously!) and dissect them. each piece goes into a tube and gets placed in liquid Nitrogen (-200 °C) and then put into the freezer where it awaits shipping to get its Genome sequenced!