In which science kicks caterpillar ass, and other tales

Sometimes I can go an entire day without seeing most of my fellow lab mates. I’ve been stuck at the computer in my office recently; various other colleagues are holed up in faraway microscope rooms or sequestered in the Fly Room or writing in their own offices. For this reason, the annual Lab Day Out has become a much-needed social reconnection for our group.

So this past Monday, we all caught the boat from Westminster Pier to Kew – an hour and a half’s glide on an ever narrowing Thames as official buildings, luxury flats and abandoned power stations give way to fields of buddleia, blackberry, dock and thistle. After champagne on the Green to celebrate a professorship, a paper and a birthday, we enjoyed lunch at The Botanist and then invaded The Royal Botanic Gardens under unexpectedly sunny skies.

I love Kew, and have spent a lot of time there over the years. Of course the flora is incredible.

But I often find that what’s most compelling are the quirky little things going on in the background. In a pond in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, for example, I noticed that part of the walkway was obstructed by barriers.

Looking more closely, I discovered a very elaborate set-up of a camera on a tripod, poised to take time-lapse shots of a water lily bloom, blushed pink and obviously about to open. What a wonderful idea: I wish I knew who the scientist – or artist – was and how I could see a copy of the video once it was finished. In the Temperate House, I stumbled across a swarm of huge Drosophila fashioned out of gardening objects, lurking in the overgrowth – a good omen for us.

And then further on, some odd-looking tags affixed to some trees.

Could Kew be experimenting with transgenic plants? This didn’t seem very likely. And indeed, when I got home and looked it up, I discovered that that tags were actually delivery agents for biological pest control. The cardboard, I learned, was impregnated with 200 pupae of small wasps called Trichogramma brassicae, which lay their eggs amongst harmful Lepidopteran eggs – the former of which hatch first and eat the latter. I was reminded then of all the weird and wonderful biological pest control strategies I used to read about when I was overseeing, amongst other titles, the journal Pest Management Science: strange tales of female pheromones being used to lure male insects to their deaths, or genes encoding the insecticidal proteins of soil bacteria genetically engineered into potato or tobacco plants. I was reminded of how many diverse threads of biological research are coming to fruition worldwide, and how stimulating it is to live in a time when we can see these dreams become a reality.

If only I had discovered that Kew had a iPhone App before we’d departed out the Brentford Gate.