Everything I Know I Learned From Hermit Crabs
I’m a university scientist reaching the end of my career, and recently calculated that I’ve had 115 co-authors on research papers over a 45-year period. Clearly partnering with students and colleagues was a signature element of my research style, but…
The One Room Schoolhouse
It was a red brick former one-room schoolhouse, standing forlorn and isolated at the edge of a swatch of Midwestern prairie. I was similarly lonely, having just arrived in Lawrence, Kansas to take up graduate studies, with no place to…
Fragments
Poetry and science may seem to have little in common, but they do share one trait: building from fragments. I’m collaborating with a wonderful poet, Renee Sarojini Saklikar, on the Honey, Hives and Poetry project, in which we’ve been reading…
From There to Here
(Yucatan cenote, Photo credit: rodolfoaraiza.com / Foter / CC BY-ND) Here’s the first piece of writing I published, back in 1974, in the academic journal Cytobios, from research I had done as an undergraduate student at Boston University: Melatonin (5-methoxy-n-acetyl…
Mouthparts of the long-tongued bees
At one point early in my career I was recognized as the world’s expert in the labiomaxillary complex of the long-tongued bees, at least among the half-dozen or so entomologists for whom bee mouthparts mattered. I achieved this obscure recognition…
Valuing Valuation
I learned ecology tramping around the salt marshes of Cape Cod in the early 1970’s, where I was a graduate student in the Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At that time the word “ecology” was mostly accompanied…
The Road Not Taken
We all have our life-fork stories, those crossroads where we could have gone one way but chose another. I was reminded about one of my road-not-taken moments last week, at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) meetings in Portland, Oregon.…
Corporate Influence
I enjoy congruence, when seemingly random bits of information on similar subjects converge. Novel ideas are often inspired by news nuggets from diverse sources that connect by a common thread. Today’s blog about the influence of corporate contributions on academia…
Unintended Consequences
Most of us are aware by now that antibiotics are overprescribed for human use and overused in animal feed to increase livestock weight. The consequences are tragic; disease-causing bacteria develop resistance when repeatedly exposed, and many antibiotics have become ineffective.…