The ecology of electricity: pollination, parasitism, and predator-prey interactions
17.12.25
Leader
Dr Sam England
Date
17th December 2025 7:30 pm -
In this talk, Sam England will take us on a journey through the often unnoticed ecological role of electrostatics in nature. He will discuss recent discoveries on how electrostatic forces attract pollen onto butterflies and moths, allowing them to be more efficient pollinators; how the charge of tick hosts like cows, dogs, and humans, pulls ticks across air gaps to make them better parasites; and finally how many insects can detect static electricity, using it to sense the approach of their predators, and how this electrostatic sense may have driven the evolution of extreme morphology in some clades.
Dr Sam J. England is an ecological physicist and entomologist, currently based at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Germany, but previously studied for his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol and his master’s degree in Physics at the University of Exeter. He is fascinated in researching all of the ways that animals and plants capitalise on the laws of physics in unexpected ways.
This will be a Zoom talk. The login link will be circulated in the Bulletin and via email.
