Did you know that one in every four animals is a beetle?
Beetles are among the most diverse animals on Earth. Some are shiny and colourful, others look like tiny tanks. The smallest are less than 1 mm long, while the largest can be bigger than your hand! Even though often overlooked, beetles are everywhere: in forests, on flowers, under rocks, inside mushrooms, and even underwater, carrying bubbles of air with them like tiny scuba tanks.
I’ve always loved creepy crawlies, but I never imagined that passion would take me to the other side of the world. My story is not one of those that starts with “I’ve always known what I wanted to be”. Honestly, I changed my mind constantly! As a child, I never liked dolls, but I loved organising “land snail races” and searching for moths at night. Later, I became obsessed with astronomy, then philosophy and literature. I originally wanted to study psychology at university, but somehow ended up studying wine production instead. By the end of my degree, I realized I didn’t want to make wine for a living, so I moved into climate change ecology. After university, I got the chance to work on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean studying insects and spiders. That experience eventually led me to project I work on today: researching beetle conservation in the lush wet eucalypt forests of southern Tasmania.
My work involves bush-bashing through dense remote forests, setting insect traps, and spending hours at the microscope identifying beetles. Every tiny beetle tells a story about how forests change, recover, and survive — and sometimes, discovering those stories feels a bit like being a detective in the natural world.
