BTS Lectures and Dinner –
2nd March 2024
Special Guest Lecturer: Professor Sara Goodacre
Title: Inspired by nature: Making Silks that that are ‘Smarter than a Spider’s’
Bio: Sara is a geneticist by training, and works at the University of Nottingham, spending her time researching how we can use the natural world – for example the diversity of spider silks that exist today – as inspirations for making materials to use in medicine or engineering. She also studies the things in a spider that you can’t see – for example hidden bacterial passengers that influence what a spider choses to do – in order to answer questions such as ‘what makes a spider fly?’
Guest Speaker: Dr Benjamin Kennedy
Title: TBC
Bio: leading the field in veterinary care for tarantula and inverts
Guest Speaker: Amy Freeman
Title: The island of bliss and its blue baboon tarantula:
Bio: Amy has been passionately keeping tarantulas for 2 decades. Amongst her collection resides the Monocentropus balfouri for which she has been researching and collecting various keeper experiences for a number of years paying special interest to keeping the species in a communal setting. At her lecture she will be delivering an abundance of information not only on the species itself but also on the island of bliss ‘Socotra’
Guest Speaker: Richard Gallon
Title: Tarantula Tour in Tanzania
Richard has a life-long interest in spiders which started as a 5-year-old growing up in Africa. He has been a member of the BTS since 1989 and was made an Honorary Member for his term on the committee where he edited the BTS Journal for well over a decade. He specialises in the taxonomy of African tarantulas and has described several species and genera over the years. He has travelled widely in Africa, gathering useful ecological data on Africa’s theraphosids. Richard is also the National Organiser for the British Arachnological Society’s Spider Recording Scheme, maintaining a database of over 1.3 million records. He has found 75% of the spider species known from Britain, generating over 25,000 spider records since 1995. He works in a Local Environmental Records Centre and conducts spider surveys for conservation agencies in England and Wales.
Richard’s talk will illustrate a recent visit to Tanzania, highlighting interesting theraphosids and other amazing creatures encountered there.
Summary: TBC
All the information on the 2019 line up will appear here when we have the information.
