• Question: What's the strangest thing you've ever done in your job?

    Asked by becca373737 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 24 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Well, I guess that the strangest one was to live on a tiny desert island for a whole year, with occasional trips outside to buy food and water and send some letters to my boyfriend. Most of the time there was at least another scientist or assistant there with me but I also spent some time completely alone. There was no electricity and I am not going to get into details on how strange does it get to use the “toilet” or have a shower. It was beautiful there and I did some very interesting research on the seabirds but it really was a strange time and it changed the way I thought about life! The good news is that the boyfriend waited for me and I did get to marry him 🙂

    • Photo: Joanna Bryson

      Joanna Bryson answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I don’t know — what’s “strange” differs by people, and you get used to really weird things. So for example I used to work with robots in a building where the other people in another lab ran experiments with rats. I would see them there late at night always putting the rats in their swimming pool to see how they swam around, and I thought “geeze, what do you do if a rat can’t figure out what direction you want it to swim in? How can you ever tell it?” Then one day I wound up at a party with those guys (I didn’t know them well) and I found out they were all wondering about me “geeze, how can she sit there typing things for a robot that never does anything?” (Once a robot works, you are done, it will work forever. So you hardly ever see robots actually doing anything in science labs since mostly people are working on things that don’t work yet.)

      The other thing I did that I thought was normal but wasn’t was I got to go visit a guy who worked on orange-breasted parakeets. I thought this was excellent, because it turned out these animals can learn from each other faster than any other animal in the world, even people! So I told all my friends, but since I work in a computer science department, they thought it was really strange to be interested in SPECIFICALLY orange-breasted parakeets.

      I also once went to a whole conference on bacteria social behaviour — I bet you might think that’s strange. But bacteria actually do quite a lot of things for each other.

    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      I once spent a week making rucksacks for iguanas!

      My friend was doing research on iguanas and wanted to attach radio-trackers to them. The harnesses he had kept falling off so I designed an made little rucksacks that we could then attach on them out of an old pair of combat trousers!

    • Photo: Suzanne Harvey

      Suzanne Harvey answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      I guess following baboons around the jungle with a microphone every day is pretty strange in itself, but it’s one of the most important parts of my job!

      I also had to varnish chimp tools to preserve them once, they’re basically sticks that chimps have altered by fraying the end into a brush, so that they can get honey from bee hives without getting stung. My housemates found it very odd that I had sticks hanging out on the line to dry…

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