How Not To Write A Grant Application

I have just completed one of my favourite and one of the hardest assignments I've done at university. Now it's submitted and out of the way, I'd like to talk about it.

The module in question was about tropical rainforests, and the assignment was to fill in a grant proposal for the Royal Geographical Society. Fake, of course, they weren't forcing us to go on an expedition, but it was the actual form we had to submit. We had complete freedom, we could do it on whatever we liked, the only requirements were that we had to do something new and it had to be related to rainforests. The lecturer was Dr Mika Peck, and after telling us a series of horror stories from his previous trips, told us the one piece of advice that would shape my entire project: take that one thing that you've always wanted to do but never thought you could, and do that. 

For me, that meant one thing - crocodilians. For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with crocodiles. This stems from watching Steve Irwin as a child, and a deep love for dangerous animals. If it can kill you, it's fascinating. Steve Irwin is the reason I am where I am today, studying biology at university and working towards a career in ecology. I remember the day my mother told me he'd died. I was inconsolable for days, set the wallpaper on the family computer to a picture of him, and refused to let anyone change it until the day the computer finally died. When I started uni, I printed out a picture of him which I stuck above my bed, and now I have upgraded to a funko pop figure of him stood on my desk. Don't worry, I still have the picture. It's stuck pride of place on my fridge. For my 21st birthday (I'm still 21 now), my parents got me an experience at Crocodiles of the World, the UK's only crocodile zoo. They do lots of really cool conservation work, as well as providing a safe home for rescued abused crocodilians. Fun side note - they also have komodo dragons, another insanely deadly creature I absolutely love. Ten out of ten, absolutely worth a visit. I'd never seen a large crocodilian before, only the odd dwarf caiman in an aquarium. The feeling of walking into a room and seeing a pair of massive American alligators swimming over to me was transformative. It was just me, the keeper, and my mother, but it felt like I was the only person in the world. Everything I'd spent my childhood watching was here in front of me, and that was just one room. Everything about that day was incredible, and the work I did there was brilliant. The species I worked most closely with was the false gharial, Tomistoma schlegelli. Ironically, the only animal that hurt me was a tiny little turtle the size of my thumb, who decided my hand was the ideal snack and became fixated with it. The tomistoma is a glorious creature - I'll attach a picture of me holding my new best friend. Note the slim snout - this is the most obvious difference between them and (most) other crocodilians. This baby is about a metre long, but adults can grow up to around five metres.

So when Mika presented this project to us, my mind immediately leapt to my besties the tomistoma. I wasn't even out of the seminar room before I'd hastily googled their habitat and confirmed that yes, they do live in the rainforest. There was my link. I thought the hard part would be finding a specific question, something new, but this turned out to be relatively straight forward. The tomistoma is one of the least studied crocodilian species in the world, and their range is restricted to a few spots in South East Asia. Biased by my work with baby tomistoma, I settled on my project: a study of tomistoma nesting habits in the wild. I knew that most crocs were fierce mothers, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that tomistoma simply don't care. You can walk up to a mother by her nest and, rather than becoming aggressive, the mother will simply run away and watch from a distance as you pick up her eggs and poke about at her nest. Bad news for the vulnerable tomistoma eggs, but good news for my expedition.

After doing my research, I hit the first of many roadblocks. Was this idea even plausible? There were so many issues with my original idea, the main one being rarity. Finding an adult tomistoma is challenging enough, and most previous expeditions were lucky to see one. When it comes to nests? Even rarer. My plan was to find nests, record details on the size and number of the eggs, and fix camera traps above them to monitor adult behaviour and watch how many hatch. Of course, this wouldn't really be possible if I couldn't find any nests to begin with. The other main issue was that I had no way of telling when these eggs would hatch. How would I know when to retrieve my cameras? And what would happen to the cameras in the meantime? I only had a limited amount of time in the field due my - albeit theoretical - budget, so I couldn't just hang around until all the nests hatched. It would be completely unreasonable to assume I'd find enough nests to make a statistical comparison and that all the nests would hatch while under surveillance. Yeah, no. Time to rethink my plan. 

The last population survey I found was over a decade ago. Okay, so maybe I could do that and compare the results? Yeah, that could work. But why, why do we need another? A key fact about tomistoma is that they are incredibly sensitive to disturbance, so much so that they will abandon an area for decades after a fire. Well, disturbance has very definitely increased in the last ten years. So what if I compared populations in protected areas vs non-protected areas? Focusing on human disturbance, this would be lower in protected areas in which people's activities such as fishing are restricted. Bam. That's my project, and that's something that's possible. Again, let's refer back to the point that sightings are rare. One thing I noticed was that the literature acknowledged that tomistoma are largely nocturnal, but they all went out looking for them in the day. That's what I'd do differently, and that's how I'd find more tomistoma.

So there we have it. I had my idea. Job done right? Wrong. Now comes the logistics. This part was the hardest by a long shot. 

I needed some in-country connections, and luckily I was allowed to make them up. At first I wanted my expedition team to be all women, but upon looking into the cultures of the areas I was visiting, I decided this wouldn't be the safest idea. A group of young women wandering about in the dark isn't very safe wherever you are in the world, and especially not in an unfamiliar area in the middle of the forest. I settled for a 50/50 split. For my two in-country team members, I was determined to make them believable. I spent hours searching local universities to find courses to put them on, and crawled over the internet to find accurate names. Creating my other English teammate was a lot easier, as I whacked him on my course at my uni. I christened him Irwin Spock, after two of my scientific idols. If I were to do it again, I'd call him Irwin Backshall-Spock to incorporate my other one. Steve Irwin, Steve Backshall (I find it hilarious they're both called Steve), and Mr Spock from Star Trek. I'd like to imagine Spock's unpronounceable Vulcan first name translates roughly to Steve. 

I had originally planned to visit three broad areas which are hotspots for tomistoma. These were the Jambi province of Sumatra, and West Kalimantan and Sarawak which make up the island of Borneo. It was a broad area and a lot of work, but that's what I liked about it. I'd cover the main parts of their entire range and provide a comprehensive, albeit theoretical, analysis. This was all fine and dandy until it came time to calculate the budget. I'd need a lot of flights - from England to Sumatra, Sumatra to Kalimantan, we'd drive up to Sarawak, and then flights back to England. The cost was ridiculous. I can't remember the exact figure, but I blew practically the entire grant on the flights alone. I wasn't fussed about the environmental effects because it was only a theoretical trip. I was forced to make the tough decision to cut Sumatra from my trip. 

The timeline was a recurring problem. In total, I planned to visit 16 rivers, and planned to be in the field for around 50 days. This was fine - I put this to the back of my mind and moved on with the project. It then came time to produce a Gantt chart detailing an exact break down of my time in the field. Very quickly, I realised I'd miscalculated. How I managed it I don't know, but I'd somehow missed about two weeks out of my plan. There was absolutely no way I could stretch my budget to add an extra two weeks in the field, but if I just cut out a few rivers, I could make it. Instead of 16, I'd have 12 rivers, and that should still be enough. Hopefully. So, I recounted, went to fill out my Gantt chart, and almost hit my head against the wall. I'd gone wrong again. I recounted, ending up with a different number of days. This time I'd learnt my lesson, and counted again just to make sure. It was a different number. I counted again, and again hit a completely different number. By this time, I had almost run out of room on my OneNote page - quite a feat, given mine go on forever. For some reason, paper didn't occur to me, and the only thing I could think of to write on was my arm. I wrote down my entire timeline on my forearm, covering the whole thing in my mad scrawl. At this time, I was sat opposite my friend, who looked at me like I was insane, but it worked. It worked! My timeline fit, and I only had to add two days to my stay.

Transport within the country posed another problem. Ordinarily, I'd have been able to chat to my in-country co-workers, who would have a much better idea of how to navigate their country. Given I'd made them up, this was impossible. Google Maps was my only friend, and even then not a very good one. Roads are a lot less common and accessible in Borneo, and Google Maps often could not find me a route between my precious rivers. Without this, I had no idea how long travel would take or how much it would cost, and this didn't even take into consideration areas that could only be reached by boat. Okay, I'd have to find a way to estimate it. The best way I could think of to do this was to measure the distance on the map and calculate a rough estimate on time from that. I was holding my tiny ruler up to the screen to try to get a measurement, and the map dramatically lurched away. I'm incredibly fortunate to have a touch screen laptop, but in that moment I was not glad of it. God knows my measurements were probably atrocious, but at least I got some (hideously inaccurate) estimates. 

There were a few other areas of the budget I struggled with too. Food costs were one. Unlike a typical holiday destination, the internet was not able to tell me how much I should budget for food per person per day. I ended up stumbling across some sort of data analysis on average food costs, doing a lot of frustrating maths, upping the figure a bit to be safe, and running it through a currency converter. Kalimantan and Sarawak are part of two separate countries - Indonesia and Malaysia. I had to repeat this process to get an estimate for the other country. I also had to calculate how much to budget to hire local guides and equipment. To do this, I googled the minimum wage in each country, guestimated how many hours of work I'd need, upped the figure a fair bit, and converted it into pounds. I hope the effort I took to be as precise as I could will be reflected in my grade! (P.S. Mika, if you're reading this, I hope you appreciate the lengths I went to!)

The final struggle was the risk assessment. After all the horror stories I'd heard, I wanted all my theoretical bases covered. The diseases were easy enough to write about, all the information being rather easy to find. The wildlife, on the other hand, was a lot harder. I spent a few hours researching all the things that could potentially kill me in the Bornean rainforest. I'm ridiculously arachnophobic, so my partner had the fun job of researching venomous spiders for me. He reported back that there weren't any in Borneo, so if that's wrong it's not my fault. The tomistoma were easy enough to deal with too - I equipped my team with big sticks. Poking a croc in the face with a long stick is usually enough to deter it, especially if it's as timid as the tomistoma. The main threat to my imaginary team turned out to be the sun bear. Nocturnal, vicious, and will attack without provocation. Great. The solution I found was bear pepper spray. I had no idea this was a thing, but apparently it's quite effective. My team would probably have been woefully unequipped in reality, but my risk assessment was already three pages long and I hated the idea of giving us guns. 

So there you have it, a summary of the struggles of my first grant application. The word counts were very strict and limited, which I don't do well with, but I managed. I know I'm biased, but I feel I deserve a good grade for it. 

After my uni exams, I'll be posting content a lot more regularly. I've pieces planned I'd like to do on the cordyceps fungus and evolution in response to urbanisation among other things, so keep an eye out for those in the near future. To stay up to date, I'd recommend following my Twitter, @SerenAisling.

In the meantime, my partner @TomElliot232 is just finishing up a post on black holes which will be published right here on Atom and the Ant.