Participants pose for a photo after surveying the vervain in the Campus Pollinator Garden for bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other important pollinators. BY VASHANNA PERSAD

What do you see when you walk through the St Augustine campus grounds of UWI? Are you lost in your own thoughts, headed to your next lecture? Watching the walkways to make sure you don't step on a crack or bump into a fellow pedestrian? So many of us walk these paths every day, from one faculty to another, under concrete buildings, and trees, and other fixtures both human-made and otherwise. But in the bustle of day-to-day life, there are entire worlds that can be missed. This was the premise behind the first ever Campus Biodiversity Week, organised by the Department of Life Sciences in collaboration with the UWI Biological Society.

From April 13 to 17, the team hosted daily activities, including guided nature walks and explorations of the teeming life that can be found here on campus, and participants were encouraged to help document plants, animals, and fungi using the iNaturalist app, and be part of building a shared biodiversity record. “Our campus has so many different species,” says Vashanna Persad, current president of the UWI Biological Society. “We really wanted to show—‘look at how much biodiversity we have here…this is here right now, and it's at the tip of your fingers’. Students should really have a little bit of awareness about this, so they can go and spread the word to their friends and family.”

The idea emerged from two interconnected events that have been a part of Life Sciences for years. One is Biological Week, which is a collaborative event between the Department, the Biological Society, and other organisations, and the other is BioBlitz, where persons are invited to a specific location to help document species over a specific period of time. Dr Amy Deacon, lecturer in the department, proposed the idea of a sort of on-campus BioBlitz during a conversation with Persad, and the idea began to blossom into what would become Campus Biodiversity Week. “We said, what about a Campus Biodiversity Week where we'd use the iNaturalist app, that the Department of Life Sciences is actually very consistent with using, to identify different species,” says Persad. “We got all of our lecturers involved.”

One of the activities during the week was a tree walk with Dr Michael Oatham, a Tropical Forest Ecologist and Head of the Department of Life Sciences, where he guided participants to visit a range of different tree species on campus, some of which are close to 100 years old and date back to UWI's predecessor, the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (ICTA). “I think that fundamental to most tropical ecosystems is these organisms, the trees, because they form the habitats for the other animals and plants that you get in those ecosystems,” says Dr Oatham. “So, my role in the Biodiversity Week was to try and introduce people to some of the different types of trees which we have on campus, because we've got a really large variety, both the native ones, which are found originally here in Trinidad and in Tobago, and also the introduced ones, the exotics, which have been brought in from around all the different parts of the world.”

ICTA has left behind a visible mark on the landscape of UWI. “Part of the role of ICTA was to research tropical plants and animals, which could be domesticated and used for agricultural purposes and production, not only in Trinidad, but also in the other tropical parts of the British Empire, as it was back then,” says Dr Oatham. “So, they would quite often pull different plants and animals from different tropical areas onto the ICTA campus, and they would research them and do all the agronomy on them, and all the production studies, and how to maximise production, and so on, here at ICTA in Trinidad.”

LEFT: A Lesser Sac-winged Bat, one of 12 different bat species known to live on campus. These insect-eaters play a vital role in the ecosystem, consuming hundreds of mosquitoes, flies, moths and beetles every night. PHOTO: BRYAN RAMDEEN
RIGHT: Dr Michael Oatham giving a tour of the campus’s diverse trees and their history. PHOTO: MICHAEL OLTON

Alongside the tree walks, the week also hosted a deep dive into marine biodiversity, hosted by Dr La Daana Kanhai, lecturer in Marine Biology and Ecology; a pollinator walk set up by insect expert Rajindra Maharaj and hosted by Dr Deacon; tours of the UWI Zoology Museum collection by its curator Zaheer Hosein and his team; a guided bird walk by Ornithologist Dr Mark Hulme; tours of the National Herbarium by curator Dr J Francisco Morales, and even a night-time walk to explore some of the nocturnal residents of the campus including Dr Luke Rostant's Bat Station and Dr Amy Deacon's Moth Station. The night walks in particular were a big hit.

LEFT: Dr Luke Rostant explaining to participants how he (and other scientists) capture and handle bats, giving them a unique chance to see species like this Great Fruit-eating Bat up close. PHOTO: BRYAN RAMDEEN
RIGHT: Biology student Elijah Vesprey handling a Tropical Racer spotted during the Night Walk. PHOTO: BRYAN RAMDEEN

“Species-wise, biodiversity night produced a lot,” says Persad. “I wouldn't have guessed that we had so many different types of bats on campus. I think that was one of the days that we had the most people come out. I was around like 40 to 50 people [editor’s note: well over 60 people were in attendance], and they were so interested to see that.”

For the students and the team involved, this pilot project was an exciting adventure in looking at the campus through a new lens, and paying attention to all of the natural wonders that exist unassumingly right next to us as we go about our daily lives.