Profile

I live in Cardiff, UK and I like learning about insects, spiders and other things that people often forget to look at! I even have pet millipedes which I love to watch as they munch on cucumber. I love music and spend a lot of time playing guitar and strange instruments, particularly instruments from other parts of the world! I love watching films and particularly like Star Wars (but not so much the new ones)! My pronouns are he/him.

At the moment, I’m looking at the things in spiders’ tummies to find out what they eat, and I’m trying to work out how they choose that. If we know how they choose their meals, we might be able to get them to help us to protect our crops from the insects that want to eat our food!

In the past, I’ve worked with the little insects that live inside trees. When trees get old, their insides can become this squelchy smelly soup which a lot of insects love to live in. I used to reach into that soup and pull insects out to look at them – sometimes I would have to stick my whole arm into the smelly tree soup!

At the moment, I’m spending most of my time writing, which isn’t very exciting to talk about! When I was collecting my spiders though, I would get up early and go to a farm near me. I would look all over the fields for spiders and when I would find them, I sucked them up using a special kind of straw to have a closer look at them! The straw has some mesh in it to step the spiders from going in my mouth, but the mesh came off a couple of times! Spiders don’t taste nice!