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I am making only slow, tedious progress on writing, but I AM making progress. There isn't much more to say on the subject than that.
This week, I finally opened up one of the jars of strawberry-rhubarb jam that we made to give away as holiday gifts last November/December. It is so delicious. I'm glad I was able to keep a jar.
Meanwhile, I hope you will read this article about things taking place at the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica, most especially what biologists are observing about the impacts of climate change in the reserve area:
https://www.theverge.com/24137380/forest-restoration-costa-rica-guanacaste-conservation-tree
I met Dan Janzen in 2004, during a tropical field biology course on my first summer in grad school. When we visited him I think I was dealing with so many chigger bites I could barely think.
Here are some of the bags of caterpillars and leaves he was studying at the time:
At that point, there were only limited connections between what certain caterpillars looked like, and the moths and butterflies they would metamorphose into, in tropical environments. So he was engaged in a long-term project to collect caterpillars plus whatever leaves they were feeding on, to then wait for them to metamorphose to draw that connection.
I also recall him dreaming about a day where it would be possible to take a small DNA sample from an insect and genotype it on the spot to figure out the species. In theory, we've reached that achievement by now. But in practice, what's still left to identify?
His house there was incredible, full of biological curiosities stacked helter-skelter, and to this day I regret I did not take any photos of it. You can get a small sense from one of the photos in the article.
The linked article is worth reading for the sake of thinking about how to appropriately engage in conservation efforts: something we can't expect to do perfectly, but need to continue doing as best we can.
This week, I finally opened up one of the jars of strawberry-rhubarb jam that we made to give away as holiday gifts last November/December. It is so delicious. I'm glad I was able to keep a jar.
Meanwhile, I hope you will read this article about things taking place at the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica, most especially what biologists are observing about the impacts of climate change in the reserve area:
https://www.theverge.com/24137380/forest-restoration-costa-rica-guanacaste-conservation-tree
I met Dan Janzen in 2004, during a tropical field biology course on my first summer in grad school. When we visited him I think I was dealing with so many chigger bites I could barely think.
Here are some of the bags of caterpillars and leaves he was studying at the time:
At that point, there were only limited connections between what certain caterpillars looked like, and the moths and butterflies they would metamorphose into, in tropical environments. So he was engaged in a long-term project to collect caterpillars plus whatever leaves they were feeding on, to then wait for them to metamorphose to draw that connection.
I also recall him dreaming about a day where it would be possible to take a small DNA sample from an insect and genotype it on the spot to figure out the species. In theory, we've reached that achievement by now. But in practice, what's still left to identify?
His house there was incredible, full of biological curiosities stacked helter-skelter, and to this day I regret I did not take any photos of it. You can get a small sense from one of the photos in the article.
The linked article is worth reading for the sake of thinking about how to appropriately engage in conservation efforts: something we can't expect to do perfectly, but need to continue doing as best we can.
