Tattoos tell research stories

A southern lapwing, great tit, budgie, pīwakawaka, Australian magpie and common myna flock together on the inked arms of Dr Juli Gaviraghi Mussoi, illustrating her love of nature and birds.

But her tattoos also tell another story: of her research.

A specialist in animal behaviour, particularly birds, Juli marks each species she’s researched with a tattoo.

“I remember first thinking I wanted a tattoo when I was around 15 years old, but obviously my parents were like ‘no!’,” she says, “but that interest stayed. I see it as an expression of who you are and the things that are important to you.”

Juli grew up in a largely rural area of Brazil where she spent lots of time on her grandma’s farm, immersed in the natural world. “Throwing myself in the pond to play with frogs”, was a favourite past time, but the idea of hanging out in their cold, mosquito-ridden habitats put her off studying them. As a biology undergrad in Brazil, she gained a scholarship to study in Canada for two semesters, where she was exposed to the field of animal behaviour, and was a research assistant for a study of mountain bluebirds.

“I fell in love with birds, and I wanted to continue working with them because they’re weird and funky, but they also have a lot of different, interesting behaviours.”

Her first tattoo represented her first independent research project, completed as an undergrad, on the southern lapwing – common in Brazil and a symbol of her home state, Rio Grande do Sul. Her short thesis looked at its behaviour in environments with and without human activity. After that, Juli started her masters degree at Lund University in Sweden. She volunteered on a research project looking at the problem-solving skills of urban and rural great tits, which led her to focus on the common European bird species for her own thesis.

A scholarship then drew her to the University of Auckland to undertake a PhD, supervised by Professor Margaret Stanley and Associate Professor Kristal Cain from biological sciences.

Her PhD began investigating pīwakawaka song and cognition, but predation of the population she was researching affected her experiments. A collaboration with researchers in Melbourne on the impact of sleep on Australian magpie cognition led her to shift focus to that topic and look at the impacts of sleep on common mynas’ communication.

The research found that common mynas sang fewer and simpler songs after a night of disturbed sleep, caused by factors such as noise and light pollution. The sounds of their calls were also longer and lower pitched, potentially affecting their social interactions, reproductive success and survival.

In keeping with Juli’s tradition, the research also made its way onto her skin, with tattoos of a pīwakawaka, Australian magpie and common myna added to her arms, as well as the subject of a pre-PhD research project: a budgie.

Juli is now a lecturer in animal behaviour at the University of Waikato but continues to supervise research at the University of Auckland into the impact of sleep disturbance in juvenile zebra finches, who learn their songs within the first three months of life. (A highly communal species, the zebra finches will probably be represented by a perching pair in her next tattoo, she says.)

And birds aren’t the only subjects of her tattoo collection: there are figs, mushrooms, insects, a gingko leaf and the beloved frog of her childhood.

“Nature is such a part of me and my research is not only something that I work with, but something that I’m passionate about,” she says. “I doubt that the tattoos will ever be something that I regret.”

Caitlin Sykes