麻豆社

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Sunlight reflecting through a jam-jar of small fish - collected from a local stream is often a golden childhood memory and one which can open the door to a lifetime of wildlife observation. Those 'tiddlers' in the jar were often the three-spined stickleback - one of the most common of British fishes and a voracious predator to boot. In this programme from 2005, Lionel Kelleway joins stickleback biologist Dr Iain Barber in a mid-Wales lake to relive his boyhood nature rambles and with his net in hand.

For such small fish, sticklebacks have an impressive reputation as models for scientific research. They have aided our advancement and understanding of many diverse fields from behaviour to evolution, biology to disease, propelling this little fish to the forefront of modern biological research.

Producer Andrew Dawes.