Name: Brynja Hrafnkelsdóttir
Age: 42
Job: Entomologist at the Research and Development Department of Land and Forest.
Your favorite place in Iceland: Hallormsstaðarskógur.
Who does the cooking in your home? Either me or my husband Gunni, usually the one who comes home from work earlier.
What did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be a veterinarian.
What book do you have on your bedside table? Actually finished it earlier this fall, but Diary from Gaza by Atef Abu Saif is on the bedside table now.
What to do this weekend? Plan to take the family to Ávaxtakarfan, which the Theater Club in Hveragerði is showing at the moment.
Do you have pets? Yes, we have Hekla and Esja, both black Labradors.
Coffee or tea? Coffee all day, always
What is your main form of exercise? Farming, hiking and then golf is added in the summer.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten/tasted? I guess chocolate covered mealworms won’t win.
Summer, winter, spring or autumn?
summer
Do you have a favorite spring bird?
Not very original but I guess it’s not just the plover.
What is your favorite swimming pool (or swimming pool) in the country?
Skógarböðin in Eyjafjörður are currently my favourite.
If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
It would be nice to go to Australia and see the insect life there.
How do you contribute to a better visitation with the environment?
Apart from this, most people try to educate people about how important insects are to all ecosystems and how harmful the overuse of pesticides can be.
What advice would you give to university students currently studying?
Good organization helped me a lot. It can be difficult to start large and complex projects and it is often better to break them down into smaller units that do not seem so insurmountable.
What is the connection of your research to South Iceland?
Many of my researches have been in the South. In recent years, for example, I have researched how several domestic insect species affect lupine in the South, the long-term effects of different reforestation methods on Geitasandur on small animals, and whether drone technology can be used to assess damage caused by beetles in Grímsnes and Skaftafelli. Part of my job also involves documenting and analyzing new and old pests of tree vegetation all over the country.
Why did you choose this research topic?
The more I get to know insects, the more interesting I find them.
What did you enjoy most about the research work?
What I enjoy most about my job is getting to know nature and seeing it from different angles than I would otherwise.
Briefly tell us about the study and its results.
In my doctoral project, I studied the effects of climate change on a domestic insect species, the pea beetle, whose distribution area was for a long time limited to the southern part of the country. To answer this, I collected pea pupae in several locations and performed a freeze resistance test on them. To investigate the effect of summer temperatures on larval growth, I compared the weight of pea larvae with the sum of summer temperatures over a period of several years. I also investigated the effect of pea beetles and other native insect species on lupine by setting out research plots where lupine was under varying degrees of stress due to insect grazing.
The main results of the study were that winter temperatures had no effect on pea moths, but survival did not decrease even if the pupae were put down to -18 degrees below zero. Summer temperatures, on the other hand, affected larval growth, but larger pea eggs were more likely to survive the winter. It is therefore probably summer heat and not winter cold that controls the spread of pea beetles in Iceland. In the lupine grazing experiment, it was found that insect grazing had no effect on younger and stronger lupins, but since the lupine had become older, it had a negative effect on its seed production.
Which researcher would you like to nominate for next month?
I’m going to nominate my partner, Bjarna D. Sigurðsson, shoe ecologist and professor at the Icelandic University of Agriculture.
Pictures are from Brynja’s private collection.