You will get best practice training in: 🕸️Ecological network inference and analysis 🧬Molecular dietary analysis 🍽️Nutritional analysis 🪲Field entomology With co-supervisors @mjopocock and David Bohan, you will work with world leaders in network ecology and entomology! 🤩

🚨PHD OPPORTUNITY!🚨 Join us in Newcastle University to assess carabid beetle ecosystem services and foraging ecology, and develop new methods for inferring interactions between beetles and their food! 🪲🍽️💻 iapetus2.ac.uk/studentships/…

To kick off our final session on Policy and Practice, keynote speaker @Kirs10_Miller, Head of Environmental Monitoring at @DefraGovUK, tells us about the long-term progress, overarching aims and underlying data of UK monitoring and its interactions with policy! 🇬🇧🔎📝 #SusAg24

After lunch, our Pests and Predators session kicks off with an excellent keynote talk from @SamCook_IPM on integrated pest management of cabbage stem flea beetles and pollen beetles in oilseed rape! A holistic view of IPM including various emerging technologies! 🪲🌼 #SusAg24

Kicking off the Monitoring and Management session, we have @Kitson_James talking about using molecular diagnostics to identify crop diseases transmission pathways and reservoirs! 🌾🦠🪲🧬 #SusAg24

It's the @RoyEntSoc Sustainable Agriculture Special Interest Group meeting in @UniofNewcastle today! We have an exciting range of talks, posters and technology showcases in store, and the crowd is buzzing already! #SusAg24

These findings show that nutrients are likely driving trophic interactions in these spiders, elicited through adaptive prey choice. This is a really exciting insight into the nutritional dynamics of invertebrate predators in the field, only possible by integrating these methods!

Sexes and life stages exhibited nutritionally distinct preferences, with male spiders preferring carbohydrate-rich prey that females didn’t. Adult spiders similarly preferred more carbohydrate-rich prey than juveniles, which preferred more protein-rich prey.

Each of the spider groups also exhibited preferences for prey with different nutrient contents. The money spiders each had a strong preference for different carbohydrate-rich taxa – this implies that they are differentiating their sources of carbohydrate to reduce competition!

We compared these nutritional profiles to those we would expect if spiders fed randomly. Individual spiders foraged for different nutrients in greater proportions than expected, which could represent snapshots of the process of individuals redressing nutritional deficits! 🕷️💻