ECR Spotlight – Michael (M.J.) Harrap

ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Michael (M.J.) Harrap is an author on ‘ Bumblebees learn to use antennal and tarsal taste to predict the presence of nectar rewards in flowers’, published in JEB. M.J. conducted the research described in this article while a research associate in Prof. Geraldine Wright's lab at The John Krebs Field Station, University of Oxford, UK. M.J. is now an academic staff member in the lab of Prof. Andrew Straw at the Institut für Biologie 1 at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, investigating what sensory information is available to pollinating insects, how they use this, how it shapes their behaviour, their fitness, their evolution and that of organisms they interact with, such as flowers.