Blogs

How Lloyds Banking Group Change Managers helped to ‘Make a Difference’:
On Friday 13th June, a group of London GCM from Lloyds volunteered their Day to Make a Difference and descended on the Natural History Museum in Central London.

Focussing on tiny worlds, one group worked with Jovita and Edgley to help digitise our Thomas Comber diatom collection. Another group took part in a learning workshop to sort and identify microscopic sand shell samples (i.e. foraminifera).

A quick post to show off our first 'My species' samples collected by our current V Factor volunteers from their local areas. The samples will be left for one week to settle in preparation for creating a slide and hunting diatoms next week during V Factor! Fingers crossed for lots of microscopic goodies....watch this space!

I'm not entirely sure this is exactly what dieticians and ‘detoxers’ have in mind when they think of a 'diatom diet' but I have absolutely no doubt that they are 100% more delicious!

It’s a far stretch from our imaginations to see a campaign by WWF to ‘Save the diatoms’ in place of the ever so cute and much adored panda, for example, however much credit is due to these tiny photosynthesising single-celled organisms as they account for over 1/4 of the world’s oxygen alone. (One study showed that: tropical rainforest fix c. 17.8%; savannas 16.8%, the cultivated areas: 8%; diatoms 23.5%).