How can you explain four years of research in one minute?
‘ You can’t. That’s why I only talked about the highlights of my fieldwork: marking acorns with chips and tracking them down, and the theory behind this. Also, it wasn’t a real pitch. The Quest guy edited it and turned it into one minute.’ Were you filming for long to get that single minute? ‘One hour, but we actually spent most of that time looking for acorns. There are enough oaks on campus but it turned out to be a bad year for acorns. We recorded my story in five minutes – that went very quickly.’ Is your PhD progressing that well too? ‘It’s going fine. I’m now in my final year and I’m writing my first article. I’m getting some surprising results I really didn’t expect. For instance, it turns out wild boar aren’t good at smelling acorns at all.’