I recently made one of those decisions which, although pretty normal for a lot of academics, meant uplifting my life in New Zealand and moving to Singapore. I finished my PhD almost 2 years ago now and have been lucky to get several postdoc positions, one at the University of Auckland (where I did my PhD) and a shorter stint at the Australian National University (playing with fiddler crabs in Darwin).

(left to right) 1. Male Forsteropsalis harvestmen eating a fly, 2. Male Pantopsalis cheliferoides harvestmen, 3. male Uca elegans fiddler crabs jostling for a burrow

These opportunities allowed me to get publications from my thesis out, make some new collaborations and delve into new research areas. The time had come, however, to head off and do something different and so I jumped at the chance to take up a research fellowship at the National University of Singapore. Although exciting, this has meant that my husband and I had to make the decision whether to do this together or live apart for the next couple of years. We decided (after much discussion & ultimately sacrifice on his part) that he would come along too & so he quit his job, we packed up our house, put all our belongings in storage and off we went to Singapore!

Strolling around Kent Ridge Park

So here we are, a few weeks into our new life living in a country the same size as my old city but with a LOT more people. The upside is that living in the tropics means there is a pretty incredible amount of wildlife to see, even in a little city park or on campus on my walk to work in the mornings. I’ve been having fun ticking off the birds on campus using this handy website & this great app of Singapore birds. I even found out today there is an app for the snakes of Singapore which is great as we have already spotted three snakes while out and about. I’ve also realized that birding is a great way to make friends – on the weekend we met a Singaporean bloke called Philip who gave us all the latest gossip on where to see an orange headed thrush (you take the track at Bukit Timah with the stairs, turn left, then go straight and you should see a bunch of other birders with their tripods). He also told us how to find this super cute baby Spotted Wood Owl at Pasir Ris Park which we spotted snoozing up high in a tree near the beach (turns out we need a better zoom lens).

Anyway, before anyone mistakes me for biologist working on charismatic megafauna, I should mention that I’m actually here to work on jumping spiders (Salticidae). As anyone who has a love for jumping spiders will know, they are renowned for their incredible diversity in colour and their charming courtship behaviours.

I’m going to be exploring a few different questions, but the main aim is to trace the origin and evolution of UV-colour in male jumping spiders and to compare this to how females use male colour to make judgments on male mate quality. Daiqin Li’s group ­­has already done a fair amount of work in this area already, which is actually really exciting for me as I spent a lot of time during my PhD working out the very basics of giraffe weevil ecology. Here I can jump in and build on all the great stuff already done and hopefully get stuck in to some bigger picture research such as using phylogenies to map the evolution of colour & its use in mate choice.

In the meantime, here are a couple of pics we’ve taken when out exploring the local parks on the weekends – still need to get a macro lens so mostly larger animals so far!

(left to right) Female laced woodpecker, Clouded monitor lizard, Painted bronzeback snake