Female hamadryas baboons may be vulnerable to a form of domestic violence from which they feel unable to escape – even if they have the opportunity.

Most large papionin monkeys – a group including macaques, baboons and mandrills – rely on wandering males to disperse genes through the population. But studies suggest that gene flow through populations of hamadryas baboons () in north-east Africa is mainly through females – even though males keep tight control of them and punish wanderers through vicious biting.

In 1968, biologist Hans Kummer suggested that females move when they are – but only now have biologists observed such abductions. Mathew Pines at the Filoha Hamadryas Project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, witnessed three abductions between 2007 and 2009.

Each time, the original male embarked on an often bloody rescue mission to locate and retrieve the female. at the City University of New York, Pines’s co-author on the new study, speculates that abduction is not considered a “fair” way to gain a new female, and so the loss isn’t accepted by the original male.

The rescue missions were helped by the females, who willingly returned to the rescuer despite a history of violent treatment by that male. “The bond is so strong that a female will run to her male when she is frightened, even if he is the source of the threat,” says Swedell.

She sees parallels with battered person syndrome, a psychological condition in which victims of domestic violence believe they are unable to escape their tormentors.

Journal reference:

Uta Jurgens sees red whenever she swims the breaststroke. Backstroke is lavender, butterfly sky-blue. Jurgens, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, has a form of synaesthesia in which the mere thought of a dip in the pool conjures up different colours.

According to , also at the institute, the discovery suggests that the traditional view of synaesthesia as a phenomenon directly triggered by sensory stimuli needs an overhaul. “More and more research is suggesting that synaesthesia is not just triggered by sounds, smells, sights, or, as in this case, splashing around in a pool, but by the ideas and concepts that these sensory inputs evoke,” he says.

In 2009, Hazem Toutounji, a national swimming champion for Syria, told Nikolic that each swimming style was bathed in a distinct colour in his mind’s eye. Jurgens, a graduate student of Nikolic’s, and a keen swimmer, admitted that her trips to the pool, too, were awash with colour.

Book of many colours

To test their claims, Nikolic and colleagues showed Jurgens and Toutounji, plus a group of non-synaesthete volunteers, four black-and-white photographs of swimmers performing front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke or butterfly. Their task was to find the exact colour that the photos evoked in a book containing more than 5500 colours. A month later, Nikolic repeated the test. By assigning each colour in the book coordinates in a three-dimensional “colour space”, he was able to calculate that the difference between the colours chosen on the two occasions was 8 times smaller for his synaesthetes than for non-synaesthetes.

Nikolic then performed a second experiment, known as a Stroop test. His team showed the group the same photographs with each photo printed in a different colour. The subjects were asked to name the colour of the photo as fast as possible. Both Toutounji and Jurgens took significantly longer to name the colour when it did not match the one evoked by their synaesthesia.

The dates to 1812, when a medical student described the colours he saw when he heard music.

Since then, several forms of synaesthesia triggered by concepts rather than sensory information have been discovered. Some individuals associate colours with different days of the week, while others see the colours they associate with the number seven when presented with the numbers five and two together. In 2006, Julia Simner at the University of Edinburgh and Jamie Ward at University College London, both in the UK, showed that inducing “tip-of-the-tongue” states in certain synaesthetes floods their mouths with the taste of words they cannot yet say.

Nikolic suspects that all forms of synaesthesia are triggered in part by concepts, rather than sights, sounds or smells, and that many more forms of “ideasthesia,” as he calls it, await discovery. “Any concept, be it freedom, quarks or travel to the moon, could act as a trigger,” he says.

, who studies synaesthesia at the University of California in San Diego, disagrees. Many forms of synaesthesia – such as flicker-sound synaesthesia, where flashes of lights produce sounds, and touch-emotion synaesthesia – where textures evoke emotion – “appear to be little-influenced by semantics”, he says.

Journal reference:

WORRIED that someone is snooping on your email account or tracking your movements? It could be your significant other keeping tabs on you.

About 1 in 3 female students questioned in a survey said they had broken into their partner’s email. Fewer men said they had done this, but men were more likely than women to use hidden cameras, spyware and GPS tracking to monitor their partner’s activities.

at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and her colleagues asked 804 undergraduates to complete an anonymous online survey in which they were asked whether they had used technology to spy on their partners on more than one occasion. Of those who reported their gender, about two-thirds were female.

Among these women, 34 per cent said they had broken into their partner’s email more than once, whereas only 14 per cent of men admitted doing the same. The survey also found that women were more likely than men to check their partner’s Facebook activity and cellphone histories (Computers in Human Behavior, ).

Among men responding to the survey, 3 per cent admitted hiding a camera in their lover’s room, while 5 per cent regularly used online cellphone trackers to monitor their lover’s location. “Only a small fraction of men used GPS technology in this way, but we were still shocked,” says Burke.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the UK-based cyber-security firm Sophos, is less surprised. “Many guys are gadget freaks, and if they have decided they wish to snoop on their partner then it’s all the more ‘fun’ to use technology to do so.”

A small number of men and even fewer women said they had resorted to spyware. Two per cent of men installed software on their partner’s computer that let them view their screens remotely in real time.

We’ve chosen this project as one of the great engineering milestones of the recent past. Tell us which engineering project you think will have the biggest impact on human life in the next 30 years and win the trip of a lifetime

Tiny threads of carbon are revolutionising our lives. Because of them, planes fly faster, cars are safer, and tennis stars hit faster aces. Carbon fibre is costly compared with steel and aluminium, but it is stronger and lighter.

As a result, it is found in an ever-widening range of products, from space shuttles, Formula One cars and firearms to electric vehicles, fishing rods and loudspeakers. It can even be wrapped around the legs of ageing bridges to make them more earthquake-resistant.

Carbon fibre is up to five times as strong as steel, yet half the weight. Its remarkable qualities result from the way it is made. Carbon fibres form when certain organic polymers are carbonised – heated to temperatures as high as 3000 °C.

The atoms vibrate fiercely, driving off hydrogen and nitrogen. What is left behind is a 7-micrometre-thick fibre composed almost entirely of carbon atoms. Manufacturers twist tens of thousands of these fibres into threads which they then weave into fabric.

From here, the fabric can be used to make products of wildly different shapes by embedding it in resin to make a composite. This versatility is another of carbon fibre’s advantages. The shapes are stiff, light, corrosion-proof, tear-resistant and heat-resistant.

The use of carbon-fibre reinforced composites has expanded explosively since the 1970s. They are, for example, displacing aluminium as the most common material in commercial jets, which benefits both the environment and the passengers, says Anthony Kelly, emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge’s department of materials science.

“The lighter weight provides greatly reduced fuel burn and a side advantage is that high humidity in the passenger cabin is possible because composites do not corrode like aluminium,” he says. Carbon composites account for at least half the weight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A350.

The first commercial carbon fibre may have been created by American inventor Thomas Edison. He carbonised bamboo strands to make filaments for his early light bulbs. Yet the usually astute entrepreneur did not realise the structural significance of these threads, which were later replaced with tungsten wire.

The modern era of carbon fibre began in 1958 when Roger Bacon at the Union Carbide Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio, reported the first graphite ‘whisker’. His fibre had a tensile strength – a measure of the stretch a material can withstand without breaking – 20 times that of steel.

The fibre was also very stiff, with a Young’s modulus – a measure of its elasticity – more than three times that of steel. But, astonishing though the material was, it was too costly to roll out commercially.

In 1964, Bacon and two colleagues unveiled a far cheaper option, made by carbonising strands of rayon. Although strong, it was not as stiff as steel.

Meanwhile, scientists elsewhere had found a more effective solution. In 1961, Akio Shindo at the Government Industrial Research Institute in Osaka, Japan, created carbon fibres from polyacrylonitrile. The fibres’ tensile strength was three times that of rayon-based fibres.

In 1964, Willie Watt and two colleagues at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, UK, used polyacrylonitrile to produce an even stronger material. “He wasn’t the first person to make a carbon fibre, but he was the first to make a truly effective one,” says Kelly.

The secret to Watt’s success was his multiple-stage heating process. After warming the polyacrylonitrile to 300 °C, which causes it to form stable, ladder-shaped chains, he raised the temperature to 700 °C. This drove off the hydrogen atoms.

Finally, Watt hiked up the temperature to 1300 °C in the absence of oxygen, causing the chains to expel nitrogen and fuse into ribbons. On a fibre’s surface, these ribbons lie parallel to its axis. But inside the fibre, they fold into hairpins and interlock, strengthening it.

Today, 90 per cent of all carbon fibre is made from polyacrylonitrile. Watt died in 1985, but lived to put his discovery into practice – golf practice, that is. According to his obituary in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Watt’s carbon-fibre golf club added a good 20 metres to his tee shots.

THERE is no getting around it: embarking on a PhD is a daunting prospect. You’ll be committing three years of your life, or longer, to study your passion in minute detail. When you have finished you will be a world expert on anything from the velocity of ultrasound in cheddar cheese to the . Hurrah!

Three years is a long time, so what about the stumbling blocks you could run into along the way – situations that you couldn’t possibly have envisaged when deciding which project to choose? To pre-empt these pitfalls, and show you how to deal with the ones that catch you unawares, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” has talked to those in the know to ensure you sail through all the way to your viva.

What if
 I’m getting no recognition?

On 1 April 1948, a PhD student named Ralph Alpher published . Such a major discovery so early in his career should have meant instant scientific superstardom. Yet Alpher’s contribution to the study was quickly forgotten because of a prank by his supervisor, George Gamow. Gamow added the famous physicist Hans Bethe as the third co-author, not because Bethe was involved but because his inclusion would turn the author list into Alpher, Bethe and Gamow – a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. The joke cost Alpher his fame, with Bethe and Gamow remembered as the paper’s authors.

While most supervisors would think twice about playing a prank on their students, almost every PhD student has a story about the time they felt they deserved to be acknowledged but weren’t. In the first year of his PhD in genetics, Sam Johnson (not his real name) conducted a study in collaboration with a high-profile microbiologist from a different university. “I wrote up my findings as a paper and put it on my supervisor’s desk. Five months later, the microbiologist calls me up, furious. He wants to know why there is a two-page spread in żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” about our research and why my supervisor is featured in the article, taking all the credit,” says Johnson.

According to Julia Newth (not her real name), who recently completed her PhD in biochemistry, PhD students should expect to be cheated of recognition by their supervisors at least once or twice. Diplomacy is the best way to tackle the problem, Newth says. When she felt she deserved to be lead author on a paper, she made her case to her supervisor calmly and in private. “Your supervisor may have their own reasons for choosing someone else, and you need to hear these,” she says. “If you did more work than anyone else and deserve to be first, you can only hope that they change their minds.”

If a civilised discussion with your supervisor fails to resolve the problem, you should try to get objective advice from someone else, says Janet Metcalfe, head of Vitae, an organisation devoted to advancing the careers of research staff and doctoral researchers. “One of the first things you need to do is get a sense of proportion. These issues are rarely one-sided. You should find someone who is at a similar level to your supervisor, preferably in a different department, who will listen and advise you on the best way to solve the problem.” If they can’t help, try your student union adviser or postgraduate officer.

What if
 there’s no one to talk to?

Going from an undergraduate degree or a master’s where you attend lectures most days of the week to a solitary, lab-based PhD can be a shock. It is all too easy to feel isolated, especially if you have moved to a new institution, or even a new country. According to a by the organisation dedicated to improving the learning experience of students while at university, just 49 per cent of postgraduate students feel integrated into their department’s community (see “Room for improvement”). “I think the hardest aspect of a doctoral degree is the sense of isolation, that you have to do it on your own, which can make you question whether you are capable,” says Metcalfe. “This is why having support structures [like mentors or societies you can join] and a sense of community is so important.”

But if your supervisor doesn’t have time to give you feedback, you’ll feel lonely in your work no matter how many friends you have or how well you know the university you are working at. “It’s a kind of intellectual isolation,” says Newth, whose supervisor rarely turned up for their meetings. “Most of our meetings happened because I heard him talking or coughing in his office. I would run over and ask him a few questions about my work. That was pretty much all of the feedback I ever got,” she says. “As a result, I wandered along with no input for months and months, utterly unsupervised.”

Having a good understanding of what is expected from each party is one way to avoid communication problems, says Metcalfe. She recommends that students and supervisors have an honest discussion about what lies ahead early on. “Most students put more thought into buying a house than in thinking through whether or not they are cut out to do a PhD. So when they start their doctorate they have unrealistic expectations of what their supervisors will do for them.”

“Most students put more thought into buying a house than they do into whether they’re cut out to do a PhD”

Check out your supervisor’s schedule to see how much they are likely to be around. If they are jetting off to international conferences twice a month, try to find other colleagues in the lab or department who can help you when the supervisor is away. “For the PhD student, the supervisor will be the most important person in their lives over the next four years. But that feeling is clearly not going to be reciprocated by the supervisor,” says Metcalfe. “It’s best that a student learns this in their first week, rather than later on.”

If something really is going wrong, know your rights. Most students are too scared to complain about their supervisors, says John Wakeford, head of the , which runs seminars for doctoral students and their supervisors. “There’s far too much deference towards supervisors. Students are terrified of rocking the boat. Thankfully, there’s a trend now for students to act more as critical customers and to seek compensation for mistreatment.” Wakeford recommends that you don’t wait until you fail your viva to complain about your supervisor. “That is a big mistake. Many students don’t realise that you can’t appeal against a fail on the basis that your supervisor failed to provide support.”

What if
 I run out of money?

Unless you are sponsored by a company to carry out research that will make them a lot of money, chances are you are not much richer as a PhD student than you were as an undergraduate – despite no longer having a penchant for Pot Noodle three nights a week. So, what happens when you get to the home stretch of your PhD and realise the pot is empty?

“Most PhDs are only funded for three years, which is ridiculous because almost all postgraduates take four years to finish all of their experiments and write up their results,” says Newth. Her funding ran out six months before the end of her fourth year. “I did try to find more funding, but there isn’t much available for PhD students in their fourth year.” As a result, she was forced to take out a loan. “If I was doing it all again, I would only apply for PhDs that are funded for four years. More and more PhDs are funded for this length of time, so this is a real option.”

There’s a simple way to avoid running out of money: finish on time. “Running out of funding is hellish and it can actually damage your chances of employment,” says Wakeford, who runs workshops for new PhD students. “Students think they’ve got all the time in the world, so I get them to calculate exactly how much time is left before their funding runs out. After they subtract weekends, holidays and football matches from a three-year PhD, they tend to find out that there are just 500 days left.” Wakeford tells students to decide on what date they want to finish and write it in big letters on the kitchen wall. “I tell them to book a holiday for the day after, so that there’s no way out, and you know what? It works.”

“Subtract holidays and weekends from a three-year PhD and there are only about 500 working days left”

What if
 I feel like a phoney?

While procrastination is a major problem among PhD students, self-doubt can also stymie progress. If you spend a lot of time worrying that you are not good enough to be part of the lab team, that someone will discover you are an intellectual phoney despite your having an academic record that suggests otherwise, you could be experiencing ““. Newth knows what it’s like. “I don’t think I will ever feel as though I’ve ‘made it’,” she says, despite having just been awarded a substantial grant. “I think I got it based on my publication record, great references and interesting project proposal, but I somehow still feel as though I’m going to be ‘found out’ – as if I don’t deserve any of it.”

A supportive network of supervisors and colleagues can banish many of the insecurities that come with doing a PhD, says Adam Wilke (not his real name), a postdoc criminal psychologist. “I work in a very rapidly evolving field, so I’m always scared that someone else will publish my research before me, or that they will publish a study that contradicts my research”. Wilke deals with this fear not by pushing other researchers in the field away but by collaborating with them. “Luckily, my supervisor is very supportive. He tells me that I’m still learning and that there will be plenty of time in the future to make ‘original’ contributions. For now I should focus on building up a network of collaborators.”

What if
 I fancy my colleague?

Working long hours in a small research group inevitably leads to some PhD students striking up romantic relationships with each other. There are no rules against it, but becoming an item with one of your colleagues can make others wary of you, says Simon Barker, a PhD student at Newcastle University who works in the same lab as his girlfriend, as well as running a with her. “Although we’ve never had any domestic scraps at work, some people are shocked that we spend so much time together.” He can see how a relationship in the lab could backfire. “I can imagine that if you are new to the relationship, working with a partner could be distracting to other people.”

Newth’s experience of love on the job isn’t as positive as Barker’s. Tongues started wagging when she got together with a fellow delegate at the party on the final night of a conference. “I don’t regret it but I blush every time I see him at a conference, which is a few times a year. Word spread pretty quickly, and my colleagues are constantly joking about it. I would advise people to think twice about letting loose at conferences,” she says.


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Stories abound about women being refused maternity leave because their funding would run out before they returned. Universities need to do more to convince women that raising a family and being a scientist are compatible, says Rachel Tobbell at the , a government organisation that aims to promote gender equality. “Many women decide in their late 20s and 30s that the long, inflexible hours and financial insecurity associated with the early stages of a research career are incompatible with having children. You can’t pick up the kids from school and be at the lab bench at the same time.” Men also feel the pressure of juggling a research career with being a hands-on dad, with some choosing to work flexible hours; but it is the women that tend to walk away before they get to fill the senior positions, says Tobbell.

Help is out there for parents who decide to stay. The Royal Society’s are intended for young researchers who need flexibility because of parenting responsibilities or health issues, while the offers grants for those who have had a break of more than two years.

Most graduate researchers enjoy their PhDs, even those who have met problems along the way. Things may appear problematic initially, but they will probably improve as you become more confident and knowledgeable about the subject. “Doing a PhD is like banging your head against a wall,” says one student who is about to submit his thesis. “Over time, you learn where the softer parts of the wall are.”

Fakery is sometimes inevitable, says Chris Palmer, the veteran wildlife film producer who is lifting the lid on his industry

You’ve made many wildlife films. What’s the most blatant trickery you’ve been involved in?

When you watch the IMAX film you think you’re seeing wild wolves as they roam freely across remote landscapes. In reality, we rented the wolves from a game farm in Montana and released them from cages just before we shot each scene. There was a warning in the credits but I doubt many people saw it. In fact, a lot of the supposedly wild animals you see on TV live in game farms, which charge photographers over $5000 to take an animal to a local beauty spot.

What other tricks do film-makers use?

One classic trick involves hiding jellybeans in carcasses. If you see a bear feeding on a dead elk in a film, you can be pretty sure that the bear was hired from a game farm and is looking for sweets hidden in the carcass by the film-makers.

What proportion of wildlife programmes contain staged or non-wild elements?

It’s hard to put a figure on it, but far more than most people realise. It’s virtually impossible to make a wildlife film without some fabrication, manipulation or audience deception. Staging – making something “natural” happen artificially – is a short cut used to film otherwise inaccessible events. David Attenborough’s BBC documentary Wildlife Special: Polar Bear showed a mother bear supposedly giving birth in the wild. He later admitted that the scene was shot in a zoo.

The sound in most wildlife films is not recorded live, as it’s too risky to get close enough. The sounds are usually added in post-production.

Is this fakery always justified?

Sadly, most wildlife film-makers don’t have the money or the time to hang around indefinitely in the wilderness waiting for wild animals to show up. To make dramatic, exciting footage they sometimes have to stage scenes or mildly harass wild animals. If the film carries a strong conservation message, then I think that’s OK. If it doesn’t, then I don’t think the manipulation and harassment are justifiable.

“Crocodile hunter” was a controversial figure long before the accident that killed him. What’s your verdict?

Mixed. He inspired thousands of young people to revere reptiles, which is great. But he also taught a whole generation that it’s fine to jump wild animals, stress them out and get in their personal space. That’s not OK. We need to leave wild animals alone, not make money out of harassing them.

You’ve been in the industry for over 30 years. Why did you decide to spill the beans?

It’s high time that an insider stands up and says “Wait. What we’re doing is wrong and unethical.” I’m 63 years old, and my career is coming to an end, which is probably for the best as many people have turned against me since Shooting in the Wild appeared. The other day I got a letter from a film-maker who runs a game farm. He called me “the lowest kind of bottom feeder”. He is understandably angry. I am threatening his livelihood.

Computer game developers use sophisticated algorithms to inject real physics into virtual worlds – painstakingly mimicking the way that light reflects off objects, for instance. But there’s something unrealistic about the citizens of those virtual worlds: their clothes barely register a crease or crumple, no matter how much running and jumping they perform. That could soon change, thanks to software which ensures that a game character’s clothes ripple and ruffle realistically as the action unfolds.

of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in SaarbrĂŒcken, Germany, and his colleagues began by generating a 3D laser scan of an actor in costume, and manually added a simple virtual skeleton. Next, the team recorded video footage of the actor moving, and uploaded it into a program that tracks the actor’s silhouette through each frame. By comparing the 3D scan with the sequence of silhouettes, the software identifies which parts of the actor’s outline deform most freely, indicating that they are covered in loose cloth.

The software then calculates how the actor’s virtual skeleton beneath the clothes moves through the sequence, and analyses how it collides with the clothing. Lastly, it applies that information to a second skeleton, which has been designed to be easily controlled and animated. When the animator manipulates the virtual double to act out new sequences not performed by the real actor, its costume moves and crumples realistically. “If the double is wearing a chiffon skirt in the original sequence, it will swish realistically in all of the new sequences too,” says Stoll.

According to Stoll, the results are extremely realistic. When he and his team showed 52 people a video of a woman dancing in a skirt alongside a reconstruction that his software had produced, the majority of viewers said that the reconstruction was “almost the same” as the original.

Tailored results

“This is exactly what people like me want,” says , a software developer who produced digital effects for the film The Matrix and is based at computer graphics firm in London. “I want to be able to capture the fundamental nature of an actor’s clothing, but also have the freedom to change the way he or she moves.”

That freedom is important in computer games, where the time and money costs of painstakingly animating computer-generated clothes are high. Using the new technique, computer games developers could quickly and cheaply dress the characters in their games with clothes that swish and sway realistically no matter how the character moves through the game.

But to truly fool the eye, Lomas would like to see a more sophisticated version of the software reconstruct more challenging items of clothing, like buttoned jackets and well-tailored suits. “Right now, no one is going to trust a computer graphics expert with no experience of fashion to design a virtual suit,” he says.

The work will be unveiled in December at the computer graphics conference in Seoul, South Korea.

Although there’s nothing to stop her clients throwing her reports in the bin, Shackleton’s recommendations are rarely ignored. Companies and governments approach Environmental Resources Management in London, where she works, to find out whether the green credentials of businesses they are thinking of buying or funding are up to scratch. Shackleton may find herself talking to workers on an oil platform one day, scrutinising waste-disposal techniques in a factory the next or, most recently, recording biodiversity on a Brazilian biofuel plantation.

“It’s an awful lot of responsibility and you’re always worried that you’ve missed something,” she says. There are other challenges, too. Sometimes the site managers don’t want to cooperate, or speak a different language. Work trips abroad can take strange turns. On a trip to Ukraine, the airline lost her baggage and she turned up to a meeting wearing jeans. “Luckily there was a power cut so we talked in the dark,” she says.

Shackleton has no masters or PhD but she does have experience. After graduating with a degree in geography from University College London, she temped for a building company called Multiplex Constructions. “Every day I had to turn up at a construction site and do odd jobs,” she says. Undeterred, she asked the company to let her work as an environment coordinator during the construction of Wembley Stadium. “My job was to check that all of the timber they used was sustainably harvested,” she says. “I would also wave my finger at people lots – tidy this up, sort this out!”

Gaining such hands-on knowledge is not the only way to become an environmental consultant. A more direct path would be to do a masters in environmental management or technology.

In the magazine article, we mistakenly referred to Lagos as Nigeria’s capital.

Perhaps surprisingly, Guyett is neither a PhD student nor a professor – she is a penguin keeper at London Zoo with a degree in animal behaviour science from Lincoln University. When the Institute of Zoology advertised for an assistant on the expedition, she won the place, probably due to her penguin-handling skills. In her care at the zoo are 36 black-footed penguins and a single rockhopper called Ricky, an inquisitive specimen with yellow facial feathers. Every so often, he honks like an old man trying to stifle a sneeze. “He’s really the star of the show,” says Guyett. “Because he’s hand-reared he’s really friendly towards humans, so we let visitors come right up close and play with him.”

Not all of the penguins share Ricky’s good nature, however. Sometimes a pair of penguins will evict another pair from a nest box by pecking at their rivals’ beaks and chests. When such fights have ended, Guyett patches up the penguins’ wounds and gives them antibiotics. She also ensures the penguins don’t contract avian malaria by feeding them anti-malarial drugs, and cleans their wooden nest boxes to prevent deadly fungi taking hold.

It’s a labour-intensive job, but one of the perks is that you get to name the penguins when they’re born, she says. It’s impossible to identify a penguin’s gender without carrying out an analysis of its DNA, so the penguin keepers often get the names wrong. “We’ve got a male called Caroline, and a female called Diana who likes to switch mates each season between two males called Buffy and Angelica,” she says. “It’s like a soap opera in here.” One day she hopes to return to Antarctica, but in the meantime she couldn’t be happier: “Work never feels mundane.”

“We have a male called Caroline and a female called Diana, who likes to switch between Buffy and Angelica”