It sounds odd but true, to travel to a renowned playground to collect beetles. It was in December 2003 that I found Eurypepla calochroma on a small tree, Cordia sebestema, that was planted in the parking lot of the Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center. This tree has attractive dark green leathery foliage, bright orange tubular flowers, and…
Month: October 2015
Javeta beetle pest of date palms (Phoenix species)
The first email came on 25 December 2014 from my collaborator, Dr. KD Prathapan of Kerala Agricultural University, India. He and his students had found that week a large healthy population of Javeta pallida, an Indian endemic species, on indigenous wild date palms. Over the course of this year, we collaborated by mail to document the…
Publishing the ‘Beetles of Peru’ project
Gosh, what a day, a milestone. I toured the printing facilities of Allen Press, a publishing house based in Lawrence, KS, since 1935 (http://allenpress.com/company/history). It is the publisher of many journals, including the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society, which I am the Editor for in 2015 (I am the transition between Roy Beckemeyer who…
Students for 2016 field program
Although my field course in Costa Rica runs in January, there is a long period of preparations before we board the flight on January 2. First, I got the approval to run the program, then worked with the Office of Study Abroad to plan the itinerary and select field sites for the research. After finalizing…
A passion for orchids
I had my orchid phase in Trinidad, amassing a large collection of native species that were donated to the Emperor Valley Zoo before I migrated to the USA. This paragraph from Joan Didion’s (1979) novel, The White Album, expresses how orchid-lovers can view their plants: “I didn’t know orchids then, now they’re like my children.…