• Question: What is the worst thing that has happened in your experiments?

    Asked by yangtze 4 to Adam, Emily, Thad, Thomas on 10 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Thomas Clements

      Thomas Clements answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      Hi yangtze4,

      Easily by far the most disgusting was during an experiment trying to learn what happens to an octopus when it decays. During the dissection, after 3 weeks of rotting, I accidentally popped it’s stomach and ink sac which exploded everywhere, covering me and the room in foul smelling slimey goo. Think of the smell of rotting fish, gone off milk and stinkey cheese and times it by 300 and that is the smell of a rotten octopus.

      I tided up and washed all my lab clothes but when I got home I found some of the slime in my hair and I could smell it for about a week. Urgh.

    • Photo: Adam Milligan

      Adam Milligan answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      I was once working in a zoo in France studying monkeys but I didn’t speak French so I always had a dictionary with me. Well, when I was watching one monkey another monkey sneaked up behind me and stole my dictionary AND TORE IT UP AND ATE IT!!!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      Lots of funny ‘worst things’ have happened while I’ve been studying wildlife – things like falling into icy rivers (this is a bad habit of mine) and members of my research team falling through beaver dams, losing a boot in deep mud or having to be up at 4.30 am to go and study an area before the tide comes in and washes you away. It’s never very funny at the time, but hilarious afterwards!

      But I think the most sad thing that has happened was while I was helping someone with their wolf research in Bulgaria. Some of the wolves in the area had been caught by the team and had radio collars fitted – which is really hard work, catching a wolf is not easy! We were using the radio collars to track the wolves – like you might have seen people doing on TV with the funny looking aerials that make bleeping noises. It was helping us to learn more things like how far the wolves would travel and where they would travel to etc. But the local people don’t like the wolves because they think they are a danger to the sheep and goats that the people need in order to survive. So one day the wolves with collars were shot by someone. I can understand why the local people dislike wolves, but that didn’t stop it from being really sad for us.

    • Photo: Thaddeus Aid

      Thaddeus Aid answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      Because I work with computers my stories aren’t as interesting as everyone elses. When my experiments go wrong I have to figure out why they went wrong and fix the program so it won’t make the same mistake.

      The worst time was when I discovered a mistake after 3 months and had to redo it all 🙁

Comments