I’m Kirra and I am a third year in EEB. I spent the summer with the Philpott Lab studying dung beetle ecology. Academically, I am interested in microbes, plant pathogens, agroecology, Indigenous plant knowledge, and evolutionary relationships. For fun, I like cooking vegan food with friends, sewing, and digging for worms.
See the abstract to my presentation for the 2022 EEB Fall Undergraduate Research Fair
The project’s aim is to observe how landscape and land management impact dung beetle abundance and diversity on Central Coast pastures. We were able to get an understanding of the respective populations at different sites by setting traps, catching insects, then counting and identifying individual species. On top of that, the project explores the relationship between dung beetles and soil’s microbial and carbon content. I focused my individual project on doing a literature review on the ecosystem services that dung beetles are observed to provide on grasslands.