 My name's Lisa Jameson. I'm an applied entomologist at Plant and Food Research. So we're trying to control pests on fruit that we export overseas and to reduce the number of pests on fruit after they've been harvested. I was actually at University studying marine biology, thinking I would get a job counting dolphins and a zodiac cruising around the coast and then reality hit, I guess. And I started going for related jobs. We'd take a crayfish and insect, the similar concepts. So I applied for an entomological position working with bugs and insects. There's a lot of challenges, especially working with bugs. For example, if you're trying to find out what affected post-harvest treatment has on a midge, there's different types of effects. So it could kill the midge or it could make the midge sterile so it can't reproduce. So you have to know how to rear that midge or breed it so you can follow it through its life cycle for a few generations and find out what the effect of the treatment has on that midge. So we have a lot of challenges in babysitting insects and rearing them and trying to nurture them and build up colonies of them. I got interested in science because I was always looking at creatures on the beach or in rock pools. Never really one to sit on the beach and some bathe more looking in holes and grooves and rocks and what's in the water. The coolest thing about our work is trying to find other ways to reduce chemical pesticides. So we're looking at things like high pressure washing to remove the pests and pesticides from the fruit. Some pretty cool UV light technology that controls pests and diseases. We're looking for low toxicity, few against things that are naturally found on fruit anyway. The most important skills are the willingness to try new ideas, patience so that when things go wrong you can repeat them until you get things right. And thinking outside of the square, some of the exciting findings are just trying to work out what causes particular damage on fruit. For example in lemons we had a rind spotting problem and trying to find out whether that was caused by a pest or a disease or climate and so we did a range of trials and found out that a little moth lays its eggs on the rind and then the larvae bore straight in, ruptures an oil gland, causes the spot and the larvae essentially die. That was a good finding. Quirky! Some of the insect behaviour was really quirky.