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The Life Scientific: Rebecca Kilner

Discovery

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Getting a PhD on Burying Beetles

After six years of globe trotting, you decided to wrap up your field work in Australia. But it also meant you stopped studying birds to study burying beetles. And once you embraced burying beetles, you started looking into a mystery that seems to have stumped scientists for some time. To do with this antimicrobial fluid that the beetles produce, can you just explain to me why it's so important? Yes. So anything that breeds on meat is going to face the challenge of the microbial rivals that also want to breed on the meat. It's clear when you observe the dead body that the beetle makes into the nest, you'd very seldom see it colonized by fungi during the course of

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