• Question: What’s the rarest thing you’ve seen during your work?

    Asked by anon-190758 to Matt, Maia, Lyndsay, Liam, Dionne, Brendan on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Liam Taylor

      Liam Taylor answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      A few months ago, I visited the Arctic. In the airplane on the way down I’m pretty sure I saw a pod of beluga whales in the sea beneath! They’re completely white and are so beautiful.

    • Photo: Dionne Turnbull

      Dionne Turnbull answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      Wow to the Beluga whales!!

      I got to go to Estonia on a field trip, and we saw some amazing orchids, including a ‘bee orchid’… part of the flower looks just like a bee. It’s a clever trick to get a bee to land there and pollinate it! Sneaky tricks like this are called floral mimicry, where a plant pretends to be something else. Some absolutely stink to trick beetles into thinking they are tasty rotten meat!

      Plants aren’t as sweet and innocent as they seem… 😉

    • Photo: Brendan Marrinan

      Brendan Marrinan answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      I’m not sure I can compete with the last two answers but whilst working in Bristol I uncovered an unknown Air-Raid Shelter from World War 2 with a JCB. We weren’t expecting it to be beneath a primary school play ground, it’s amazing what is just beneath your feet without you realising.

    • Photo: Matt Bower

      Matt Bower answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      I was thinking of a plant like Dionne – on the island of Arran there’s a valley (near a water treatment works!) where a sort of tree grows that grows nowhere else in the World. It’s not very spectacular, but rare things often aren’t.
      Once, when I was inspecting a water reservoir a baby otter came to have a look at us – he was only about 5m away. Maybe not very rare but certainly special!

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