Animal Farm

This talk will consider how you could tell if an elephant is content just based on watching how it behaves, and about how we decided which specific behaviours were important to look at to judge an elephant’s welfare. Discussions on how we used this information to make a tool that elephant keepers can use to judge the well-being of their elephants. By using this tool regularly, keepers can figure out if things are improving for their elephants, and they can also pick up on any problems early.

Sara Goodacre is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist based at the University of Nottingham where she leads the ‘SpiderLab’. Sara’s work includes studies of spider silks with the aim of understanding how we might use these as templates to produce materials that are useful to us. She also studies the hidden microbial passengers that hitch a ride when their spider hosts chose to ‘fly’ using their silk as sails to catch the wind.

What’s Been Happening at Wollaton? The galleries at Wollaton Hall – Nottingham Natural History Museum- have been completely refurbished. We also have a temporary exhibition of Willard Wigan’s work. What can you see in the new galleries and how was it done? Journey from the Big Bang to the Ice Age. See biodiversity across the globe and find out how small things really matter. See how collections have been displayed over time.   Sue will be bringing some real specimens from our handling collection.