Hello everyone!
I’m Emma Kärrnäs, a PhD student that started earlier this year in the systematic biology group. Originally from an island off the Swedish west coast, I decided to move to Lund to study biology. I’ve been fascinated by nature for as long as I can remember, so I believe no one was surprised by my choice of subject.
I evidently felt at home here in Lund, since I decided to stay for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. For my master’s degree, I looked into the phylogenetic relationships of the tephritid fly genus Tephritis, as well as the different species’ use of host plants. After I finished, I worked as a research and lab assistant for six months. One of the projects included to genetically determine the closest relatives of the recently extinct Swedish population of Reverdin’s blue, Plebejus argyrognomon. I hope this information will be used to re-establish the species in Sweden in the near future.
I thought that for my PhD I ought to move somewhere else, having lived in Lund for quite a few years. However, the universe had other plans – I got an offer too good to decline! My PhD project will be to do a revision of two genera of parasitic wasps, Oomyzus and Quadrastichus, in the family Eulophidae. This will include finding species new to Sweden, and most probably also to describe species altogether new to science. This is really a dream come true! My main supervisors are Niklas Wahlberg and Christer Hansson. To resolve the relationships within these two tricky genera, I will be working with both morphological and genetic markers. I will use both material I collect myself and material from museum collections. If you have seen the small black tent outside of the Ecology building, this is an insect trap I use to get additional samples!
So, let’s finish off with something a bit more personal. On my spare time, I, maybe not surprisingly, love spending time in nature – doing photography, birdwatching and bird ringing. I also enjoy exercising and cooking – and I love trying out new flavours of ice cream in my ice cream machine.
