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…
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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.…
Exhibition “30 Trails”
I am nurturing a new idea of an insect-education exhibition. The first exhibition I worked on was at the American Museum of Natural History, as David Grimaldi’s assistant for “Amber: Window to the Past.” The last exhibition I worked on as with Steve Goddard/Spencer Museum of Art and our students, “39 Trails: Research in the Peruvian…
An Epiphany: learning science from fiction writing
Scientists are extra alert to the way science and scientists are presented in the mass media, fiction and film. We are hyper-critical of representations of labs (are the machines appropriate), questions and evidence (are the bugs found on the dead girl correct for that place and season?), is a scenario really feasible (can a spider-bite lead…
South American Subsocial Beetles
Some manuscripts take a long time to gestate, some go fast. A Short Communication is even faster to write when it comes on the tail of a bigger synthesis. After Chaboo et al. (2015), my colleagues were all on alert to look for more subsocial cassys (subsocial= adult caring for one brood). Within a few…
Let’s Disco!
It began in autumn 2009. Wills Flowers, recently retired from Florida A & M University (FAMU) emailed me from Ecuador, where he was doing researcher and teaching on USAID funds. At the Pichilingue Field Station, Quevedo, Wills noticed nasty ants interfering with a beautiful blue-black adult cassidine. The plant was chopped down but the beetle was…
NSF grant news!
After a few tries, we finally landed a grant from the US NSF-EAGER program to study aspects of our arms-race model of defenses in leaf beetles! While most arms-race evolutionary models have focused on plant-insect herbivore interactions, Co-PIs Dr. Ken Keefover-Ring, U. Wisconsin-Madison, WI and Dr. Paula “Alex” Trillo, Gettysburg College, PA, will use this 2-yr award…
Field Research in Costa Rica
After two weeks in beautiful, we are heading home today. Studying and research abroad is an intense experience, more so when traveling with with 14 undergraduate students from the University of Kansas and Washburn University. Our field course focused on Zingiberales plants and their arthropod communities and we visited sites near San Jose, on the coast at…