Farmers Weekly Magazing: November 2008

By Debbie James

As Sarah Beynon sets to work with plastic plates, cups and a container of washing up liquid, she could pass for a Blue Peter presenter as she explains with real enthusiasm the task at hand.

In fact her great ambition is to one day become a wildlife television presenter and, as she skillfully constructs her insect pitfall traps on farmland in Pembrokeshire, you sense that she could well become a next generation David Attenborough.

Sarah makes the process of drowning creepy-crawlies in anti-freeze sound such a gentle affair that images are conjured up of beetles queuing in orderly lines ready to throw themselves into the deadly concoction, all in the name of science.

"I can't even bring myself to squash a fly so this part of what I do is difficult but if I know that it is going to contribute in some way to improving populations of the species then that certainly helps,'' she says.

The reason for the little plastic cups embedded in the soil is to collect data for a study this farmer's daughter from Pembrokeshire has embarked on to monitor the impact of cattle wormers on populations of the dung beetle. The Oxford University biology graduate has been awarded a scholarship to carry out extensive research on this subject.

For part of the year she can be found in the entomology department at Oxford University and for the remainder she works from her lab at the family home in the Pembrokeshire countryside.

Sarah's lab - or posh garden shed as she likes to describe it - is kitted out with microscope, test tubes and dozens of trays of perfectly preserved beetles, gathered from the four corners of the earth. She has a long way to go before collecting every species because there are 350,000 different kinds.

Sarah has been fascinated with bugs all her life. Her parents recently unearthed family video footage that showed Sarah hunting for insects in the garden. In fact she loves all animals and regularly helped her father, John, exhibit his championship herd of Welsh Blacks, when she was growing up on the farm in St David's.

"I think my interest in nature was sparked by my maternal grandmother,'' says Sarah. "She was a font of all knowledge. We used to go walking on cliff paths and everything had an importance.''

She knew she wanted to work with animals but felt she would make a hopeless farmer because she couldn't bring herself to sell any of the stock. So when the opportunity to combine her love of agriculture, science and insects came up she grabbed it.

It was while Sarah was doing some freelance entomology work for Pembrokeshire farmer, Roger Mathias, that she saw the potential for embarking on a study of the dung beetle. She had been researching the ground beetle population on Roger's farm at Furzy Mount, Camrose, and lthe impact of ivermectin wormers on these insects.

Her initial study involved counting populations of dung beetles in the dung of cattle who had been dosed with ivomectins either once a year, several times or not at all.

"I discovered that there were four times the number of dung beetles in the dung of cattle that hadn't been wormed,'' she explains.

Dung beetles are very efficient converters of dung to fertiliser by making balls out of the dung and burying it before the females lay their eggs in it. Without the beetle, the un-degraded dung of 12 cattle would cover an acre of land in a year. "From a farmer's point of view the dung beetle is hugely important,'' says Sarah.

She will now be trialling different wormers on Roger's cattle, collecting the dung from the different groups and create artificial dung pats in fields at her home.

Before starting this project, Sarah had spent six months in South America working alongside a top beetle scientist and hunting for insects. She handled all kinds of weird and wonderful species but the one creature that still has the power to make her shriek is the spider.

"I have always been terrified of spiders which is ridiculous because it only has two more legs than the creatures I deal with every day,'' she admits. "But if a big black spider suddenly scuttled across the floor it would have me leaping on a chair.''

It really is hard to believe Sarah has an aversion to the spider when you see her gently pick up the very scary looking Goliath beetle that shares her lab. This species of beetle is one of the largest insects in the world and is native to the Congo but it wasn't there that Sarah came by it. "I bought it on Ebay from someone who keeps Goliath beetles as pets and sells any extras to fund his hobby,'' she says. She in fact has a breeding pair and pots of grubs she has hatched from the female lurk in her lab.

Perhaps one of the reasons why many of us recoil from insects is the fear of being bitten. But Sarah is living proof that this is unlikely to happen. Despite handling thousands of insects the closest scrape she has had is being secreted on by an irate blister beetle. "It caused a nasty blister on my arm but there's nothing to show for it now,'' says Sarah.

She is unlikely to come across anything quite so unpleasant while researching in Pembrokeshire but you never know. "I get very excited by the prospect of discovering a new species. I collect so many that it is likely that I will find something quite rare.'' And just in case that eventually does arise, she never goes anywhere without at least one urine specimen pot in her bag.

© Debbie James 2008.