Hi and welcome to this post which is part of my series on the Sparks exhibition currently hosted at Esplora in Malta until the end of August 2017. You can read the rest of the series by viewing the Sparks category.
The exhibition has three themes, one of which is Citizen Science. Well really that’s also the theme of the whole exhibition!
The idea behind citizen science is that anyone can ‘do science’, you don’t need to be a scientist. There’s a whole spectrum of citizen scientists – some are running huge science projects of their own, while others are much less involved but contribute in small but meaningful ways to science projects being run by others (who may or may not be professional scientists).
The first story in this theme is about Doreen Walther and the Mosquito Atlas. Doreen is a biologist and the head of a lab in a German agricultural research centre, and she set up the Mosquito Atlas project in 2012. There are two main parts to the mosquito project. The first part is to track what mosquito species are found in Germany, where and how many, and also see if they are carrying diseases. The second part takes place in the lab, and involves breeding different kinds of mosquitoes and studying how they can transmit diseases.
In my previous post about Pieter van Boheeven, we saw how he is trying to crowdsource the discovery of a new antibiotic – he’s hoping that by having a bunch of citizen scientists looking in unusual places, they might find something new and useful.
Doreen is also tapping into the power of crowdsourcing, but instead of asking participants to look for solutions, she’s asking them to perform data collection for research. In this case, involving the actual collection of mosquitoes!
I work with the public to monitor dangerous mosquitoes. -Doreen Walther
Research scientists working on a project are often working with or for an institution (like a University) and are physically in one place, together. If the project calls for collecting data from various locations, then the researchers have to travel to those locations to do field work, and if long distances are involved, then that quickly gets expensive and uses up precious funding.
The Mosquito Atlas project gets around this by asking citizen scientists who are already in those locations to do the data collection instead. This is a lot cheaper than sending researchers on field trips all over Germany, and it also gives better coverage.
There are of course some downsides to this approach. One of them is that you’re asking people who are not researchers, or even scientists, to do something scientific, and they might get it wrong. One safeguard against this in Mosquito Atlas, is that all the identification and processing of the mosquitoes is done by actual scientists back in the lab – the citizen scientists just have to capture the mosquitoes and send them in by post.
What about the capturing though? Again, the Mosquito Atlas project addresses this by providing very clear instructions for mosquito hunters on how to capture mosquitoes without damaging them, and how to kill and ship them. Shipping costs must be paid by the citizen scientist, but in return, the project will reply back to the person via email, with information about the captured specimens.
I like how the mosquito hunting guide also explains the scope of the project, and encourages participants to avoid “the senseless killing of insects” – instead, it explains, only capture mosquitoes, and that this is for the greater good (aiming to prevent the transmission of diseases by mosquitoes).
The Sparks exhibition includes a map showing some of the mosquitoes that were sent in to the Mosquito Atlas.
I love the mini stories, such as how the date of a capture led to insight about a particular species being frost resistant, or how a family sent in no less than 20 mosquitoes caught while on holiday.
You can also view the actual Mosquito Atlas map online!
The children’s letters look adorable – citizen science projects like this one are a great way to introduce children to the concept of scientific research (and hopefully sow the seeds of life-long scientific interest).
The exhibition also features the Spanish smartphone app called Mosquito Alert, which people can use to report mosquitoes and send in photos of them.
We have similar reporting projects available in Malta – here’s your chance to jump in as a citizen scientist (and get the rest of your family to join in too!) Maybe you could even start your own…