How do you show something nearly invisible?
Communicating science is an important component of the projects supported by Artsprosjektet (Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative), and one we as scientists enjoy – who doesn’t like to inform others about the cool things we study? That is basically what writing scientific papers is, after all!
But to communicate outside our niche audience of other scientists who have a deep background knowledge of our chosen organisms is to tell a different story. In writing, we can do so with the aid of images, like we do on our @NorDigBryo Instagram account – Mali’s excellent scanning electron images enable us to see details that are invisible to the naked eye.
But how to show and tell in person, and especially to kids?
If you are working with starfish or crabs, the solution is often to simply bring the animal – getting to touch and hold and talk about it is a great way to learn! But what to do, when the animals are tiny, and maybe don’t look all that much as animals at first glance?
I (Katrine) signed up on behalf of NorDigBryo to participate at the University Museum of Bergen’s stand at One Ocean Week in Bergen. I then had to come up with a way to show and tell about moss animals that could work outside, in (likely) Bergen weather, whilst competing for people’s attention with my excellent colleagues who were there with sharks, jellyfish and colorful polychaetes – not to mention all the other booths at the festival!
Here's what I ended up with:
I created a little booklet with facts and activities (including a word hunt you can play here! In it I had a “key” to tell apart two of the most common species of moss animals that people may encounter; Membranipora membranacea and Electra pilosa.
I had brought some dried specimens from the museum in case I wouldn’t be able to get hold of live colonies – but the lovely people from “Passion for Ocean” let me hunt in their aquaria for live bryozoa, so I had some to show – thank you for that! People (especially the kids!) were really quick to spot the differences between the two species, it was fun to see it “click” when they realized what to look for.
For hardware, I simply brought magnifying glasses. Easy to use, and something many will have at home. (Unlike a stereomicroscope, not to mention a SEM!).
But I did also have images of how the animals look REAL up close, and some AI-generated images of what DallE suggested a moss animal could look like. Cute, but not *quite* the reality!
This sparked a lot of conversations with kids and adults about how we look at something, what we look for, and how different techniques and tools help us understand which species there are – and why we should care about that. I’d say it was a successful event, all the booklets were given out, and I would estimate that I spoke to more than 150 people.
It was a lot of fun, thank you to everyone involved in making it happen!
-Katrine
The Norwegian version of this post is available here (the blog for the invertebrate collection at the University Museum in Bergen)