It’s been a year and a half since Chrissie joined the University of Waikato faculty and with all the chaos getting teaching and research underway there’s been no news updates in all that time!

Despite the immense challenges that 2020 and Covid19 has brought, we are very excited to show off the newly emerged Invertebrate Behavioural Ecology lab. New initiative support from the University of Waikato means we could equip the lab with new benches, shelving, microscopes, and a freezer. All ready for lots of exciting new research!

The lab is already housing several hundred Dolomedes fishing spiders as part of Simon Connolly’s PhD research and will soon see the addition of giraffe weevils and peripatus as part of Michaela Lambert, Lara Mills and Brody Chapman’s MSc projects.

We are also excited to be hosting Joseph McCormick, an MSc student working with Tanya Latty and Tom White at U Sydney, who is starting his experiments looking at social information transfer in ants.