On a North Sea oil rig several years ago, an engineer noticed a strange phenomenon. A cloud of insects would descend from the sky and land on the upper reaches of the platform.
There were thousands of them, carpeting the superstructure and barely moving. They would sit there for a few hours, then suddenly they would all rise up into the sky and fly off again.
The engineer, whose name was Craig Hannah, was also a keen naturalist and photographer. He saw the same thing happening repeatedly and wondered if it would be of interest to insect researchers. This led him to the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation, to which we are both affiliated.
