New paper on habitat preferences of the cave spider Meta bourneti

by | Nov 18, 2021

I have a new paper out in Arachnology, where I used the UK Spider Recording Scheme data on observations of the two cave orb spiders in the UK; Meta bourneti and Meta menardi to investigate whether the former as a possible invasive species showed more plasticity in its...

Biomimetic silk conduit review paper with a high school student

by | Sep 29, 2021

In the last year, I have become involved in a couple of interesting little online literature/design research projects with high school students through the Cambridge Centre for International Research. In these projects, a gifted high school student follows a 14 hour...

Special issue on Spider Ecology and Behaviour

by | Jul 7, 2021

I’ve recently been appointed Section Editor for the journal Insects (which have just been awarded a new impact factor of 2.769) and have now been asked to act as guest editor (together with Dr Dumas Galvez from the University of Panama and the Smithsonian...

New paper: The challenges of conducting research belowground

by | May 3, 2021

Shortly after I first became interested in the web-building behaviour of cave spiders, I began a collaboration with two early career Italian scientists, Dr Enrique Lunghi and Dr Stefano Mammola focussing not only on spiders, but also on the wider aspect of conducting...

Editorial board member of Insects

by | Apr 27, 2021

I’m very pleased to have been appointed editorial board member on the open access journal Insect (IF = 2.2) in their Section Board for ‘Other Arthropods and General Topics’. Insects is general journal covering all topics relating to entomology...