‘We have no time for heels and make-up’: A Wknd interview with forensic entomologist Paola Magni

Australia’s ‘bug whisperer’ is known for helping crack suspicious-death cases using evidence provided by insects. ‘My job stinks,’ she says, laughing.

Growing up in Turin in Italy, Paola Magni yearned to have a pet.

The building she grew up in didn’t allow any, but she realised that as long as the creatures she adopted were small and discreet, she could get away with it.

One of her first pets, then, was a snail that lived in an empty chocolate box. She graduated to spiders, much to her mother’s displeasure; then hamsters (by this time her building had amended its norms).

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