Profile

Since I was really young I’ve always been interested in animals. I started with British wildlife (especially creepy crawlie things) and dinosaurs and quickly developed a fascination with those animals that many people hate, such as snakes, lizards, spiders, scorpions, and many insects. In fact, when I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time playing in woods and both watching and catching all kinds of creatures, many of which I took home and kept as pets (not that my mum knew!). The more I’ve seen, the more I’ve added to the list of animals I think are cool, and I now try to work on many different groups including reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and insects.

Nowadays I am lucky enough to call this same childish interest work 🙂 . I have a bit of an obssession with evolutionary trees (or ‘phylogenies’), which are a bit like family trees for species, and I use these to ask all sorts of questions about how animals evolve. For example, I look at what it means for an animal to have some chemical defence (e.g. a venom, poison, or skunk stink) – does it behave differently because it does not have to hide from predators so much? Or what about camouflage and warning signals (like the stripes of bees or the beautiful colours of poison dart frogs)? How do they evolve and affect the evolution of animals?

I am also interested in the idea of ‘convergent evolution’, or ‘convergence’. This is where the same thing evolve separately in different groups of animals, such as flight in birds, bats, and insects, or yellow and black stripes in bees, wasps, and hoverflies. What features are convergent, what causes this to happen, and how can we measure it? Some of my work involves creating methods to measure convergent evolution and then using these methods (along with others) to answer these types of questions.

Although these are the main things I’m working on at the moment, I do have many other interests too. I have done research into how to look after animals, animal nutrition, the evolution of intelligence, and how living on an island might influence the biology of animals. There are a lot of different questions that I would like to answer in time, but alas we can’t do everything at once! There is a little more information on my work here: https://liverpool.academia.edu/KevinArbuckle

In my spare time, I love music of all sorts – from classical to punk to cheesy pop. I play drums, guitar, and bass, as well as occasionally write some songs and (even more rarely) poetry. On top of this I also enjoy salsa dancing and bachatta (another type of Latin dance), and keeping all sorts of reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates.

A typical day is hard to describe. One of the great things about science is that each day is different, so I rarely get bored. One day I could be poking some caterpillars in the lab, the next I could spend most of the day searching the internet for scientific articles (or pretty pictures) to get some data, and the next I could be getting the computer to work for me by doing some analyses and (hopefully) getting some answers to interesting questions. Of course, most days are fuelled by caffiene to a greater or lesser extent 🙂