Abstract
I will present an overview of my work on cognition in jumping spiders, arguing that these animals are excellent models for studies on cognition due to their visual, active, and predatory lifestyle. Due to their need to leave a nest to explore their complex surrounds for food and mates, which are detected and classified visually at a distance, these animals exhibit not only navigational prowess, but also spatial ability that seems to include forward-planning in their decision-making. The sophistication of their behaviour is similar to that seen in some mammals, yet they have a fraction of the ‘brain power’. It is for this reason that jumping spiders allow us to explore, in depth, hypotheses pertaining to the evolution of cognition, and the trade-offs between speed (Kahneman’s ‘thinking fast’) and accuracy (Kahneman’s ‘thinking slow’) that animals make when making decisions. I will attempt to persuade the audience that social or habitat-based hypotheses thought to drive selection for advanced cognition may be no less important than the ability to accurately detect objects from a distance, and that vision is unique in this respect.

Abstract
There is little doubt that the human colonisation of remote oceanic islands has resulted in the extinction of a large number of species, some directly hunted for food, and others as a consequence of the transformation of island ecologies. Most evidence comes from vertebrate palaeontology, supplemented by data on land snails and occasionally other taxa like plants. Indeed, land snails are among the most impacted taxa, suggesting that indirect environmental pressures resulting from human colonisation are as important, or more important, than direct human predation. If this is the case, then what happened to the insect faunas which shared the leaf litter, rotting logs, water ways, and vegetation of these remote island ecosystems? In this talk I will introduce research exploring this issue with examples from the Mascarenes (Indian Ocean) and Polynesian region. Prehuman insect faunas from swamps and sinkholes include a wide range of taxa that are regionally extinct, or restricted to much higher altitudes today, where these are present on high islands. The extent of these likely extinctions means that there are potentially thousands of extinct species of insects across the Indo-Pacific, most of them lost over the last 200-1000 years. What caused these extinctions? Are they biased to certain taxa? Did they occur more widely than the presently studied systems? This talk will have some answers and hopefully, prompt many questions.

Abstract
Insects make a significant contribution to the productivity of crop systems through diverse roles including pollinators, predators, and decomposers. While pollination by honey bees is recognised by the public as an important service, less well known is the vast diversity of insects that play a role in pollinating the world’s crops, let alone the myriad of other insects that contribute directly or indirectly to crop production in other ways. I’ll share the experience of our pollination team at Plant & Food Research, where we worked first to quantify and promote the role of diverse pollinators, and how this has led us to look beyond pollination to the other key ecosystem services provided by insects in orchards, and how managing the orchard environment (including native plantings), can support populations of beneficial insects.