New Scientist Live takes place in London Excel each year and has tens of thousands of visitors each day. What better place to show Moss Safari to youngsters and their families. This blog explores some of the highlights and my observations about doing Moss Safari at the event. The most frequent question I got was, “Is that ordinary moss?”
What happened
VITTA education kindly hosted Moss Safari on their fantastic stand. We arranged to do two Live Moss Safaris each day, however, I ended up doing several in between. A bit of a rolling program!
A lot of families came through on the first two days and they were drawn to the microscopes.
The love of tardigrades
In this audience, more youngsters knew about tardigrades than at usual Moss Safaris. Kids often surprised parents with their knowledge of these microscopic creatures. Once we found live ones, people returned to watch them moving on the screen. On Sunday, we were less successful at finding a tardigrade. We had repeated visitors to see if we had found them. It wasn’t until the last hour, we found an active tardigrade. Here it is in the centre of the video below.
Kids and microscopes
Capturing people’s imagination and curiosity about microscopes and moss are key aims of Moss Safari. At New Scientist Live, parents, teachers and children were perhaps already keen on science. However, there was no shortage of curious kids and adults wanting to know what was in the moss and to look for themselves.
The intriguing question for me, was the number of adults and children that asked if the moss I was using was ‘ordinary moss’. The answer is yes. Moss from anywhere will have at least some of the Big Five animals and a whole host of other organisms in it. Whether the moss is from the inner city or out in the countryside, moss hots its own micro-ecosystem. That’s what makes Moss Safari so accessible.
Next year
New Scientist Live has four big stages with big screens and fantastic speakers. I would love Moss Safari to feature on one of those stages. I applied this year, but didn’t get an invitation. I know I’m up against big names and there are several great talks. I will try again this year, so watch this space!
Acknowledgements
Thank you to VITTA Education for hosting Moss Safari on their stand, supplying the posters, fliers and stickers. Special thanks to Wendy Ford, Andy Lloyd and Mark Fentiman for their hard work over the weekend and continued support of Moss Safari.
The microscope I was used, supplied by VITTA Education, was the BMS Trinocular Microscope and the camera.
The full range of DuraLab microscopes are here.
Moss Safari kits are available here and Moss Safari Expedition Guidebook, shown below.
Moss Safari 