We are a national of animal lovers, which is why nature conservationists – from marine biologists to apiarists (that’s bee keepers to you and me) – have been highly successful at enlisting the nature-loving crowd to help with their scientific studies. If experts want to track the migratory patterns of sharks, establish the relative health of the garden bird population or try to establish whether our bees are dying out, they can call on an army of enthusiastic, amateur volunteers.
This inevitably means that today’s research scientists need to be as adept at consumer marketing as they are at zoology. There again, maybe they are simply swapping one set of animal behavioural skills for another.