Studying the eco-system close to home may be less glamorous than heading for an unexplored jungle, but it's no less important or magical. I'm Juliet Brodie, and I work on seaweeds. I think the reason I'm working on seaweeds goes right back to when I was a little tiny child aged about two, and my parents decided to enter me into a fancy dress competition. And they dressed me up as a sort of little sea creature, and I was just draped in kelp, and I stood in this corral and I bawled my eyes out, so I've had a sort of love-hate relationship with seaweeds ever since. When I was a bit older and I took up diving and found that under water, there was the most amazing world, and just how beautiful seaweeds were. The history of collecting seaweeds goes back a very very long way, and in fact some of the oldest specimens in the museum are seaweeds going back to about 400 years.


研究我们周遭的生态系统，可能不如探索未知丛林来得吸引人，但其中意义和震撼绝不逊色。 我是朱丽叶·布罗迪，我研究海藻。我想我研究海藻的原因要追溯到我儿时大概两岁的时候，有一次我的父母为我报名参加一个趣味装扮比赛。他们把我装扮成一种小型海底生物，我身上挂满海藻，站在珊瑚丛里拼命地大哭。从那以后，我对海藻是又爱又恨，稍大一点后我学会了潜水，发现海底世界令人叹为观止。那时我才知道海藻有多么美丽，海藻的采集工作要追溯到很久以前，实际上博物馆里最老的标本之中，就包括四百多年前的海藻。