Miscellaneous Happenings

I went to Costa Rica for ten days with a class to do field work and collect some data! We were at La Suerte field station, near Limon, about a 3 hour drive from Alajuela and San Jose. It was a ton of fun. Here's a teeny sample of the photos I took!

This is a bullet ant! They call them "bala ants" -- bala means bullet. Believe it or not, this is an assassin bug :) subfamily Emesinae, the thread-legged bugs. I love these lil guys. Our teacher asked the bird group what this was, and when one of them said "a heron" she was unconvinced. (He was correct. Broad-billed heron or something like that.) Spot the sloth game! Crocodile sunning itself. Black sand beach on Tortuguero Island. The sand was HOT.

I sampled in a stream and didn't find much. There was this dragonfly larva, which my mother called a tick. This was also in the stream! It's a larva of the family Corydalidae, often referred to as a hellgrammite. A bush near the station had these gorgeous purple flowers. Probably Argia frequentula, the green-eyed dancer. There were a bunch of these Micrathena spiders EVERYWHERE! I maintain that scarabs, especially chafers, are the yellow labs of the bug world.

I saw this spider catch the poor little beetle and wrap it up neatly and swiftly!

I've been playing some Risk of Rain 2 with my younger brother and my partner. It's a lot of fun! I may have mentioned it on here before, I don't quite recall.

Either way, I'm liking it a lot. I was playing solely Huntress, but turns out I like Bandit a lot. Artificer is also pretty cool. I have every character unlocked except Rex, I think! I've only played Huntress, Bandit, and Artificer, though. I unlocked Acrid and the Void Fiend last night in the same run with my brother. I guess once you escape the Planetarium, that counts as beating the game!

It's fun to have video game time with my loved ones. I always forget how nice it is.

I purchased an audiobook to give it a shot. Turns out Google Play has DRM-free audiobooks, so you can purchase them, download them, and listen on any device without needing a special app! Thank GOD at least one place does that. Amazon's DRM is very difficult to work with, from what I understand. Screw you, Audible, I paid for the book and I want to listen to it on my own terms. Quit trying to lock me into your ecosystem.

Anyways. I got All Systems Red, by Martha Wells! It's about three hours in audio format and follows a contracted security robot dubbed "Murderbot". I'm an hour in and I'm liking it a lot. It's a series of multiple books (I want to say at least five?) so this one will probably end on a cliffhanger. That's OK. It's a trial.

I've always said that my auditory processing and concentration are not good enough for audiobooks, and for nonfiction that may be true. For fiction it seems like it might not be, though! Honestly, there's probably at least some nonfiction that also falls into that category. David Quammen's Song of the Dodo, for instance, is written in a very engaging manner. Either way, it's nice to have the chance to consume books again. I used to read all the time when I was a kid, you couldn't get me to put the book down even if it was pitch dark in the car. Now I barely even touch them. And I feel really bad about it.

Maybe the audio format will also help me to do things that I see as boring or unproductive, like taking the residue photographs or crafting! That would be pretty cool. That would actually be very cool. I would venture so far as to say that that would be awesome.

I guess it's been a bit since I wrote anything on here, huh. Woops. I'm not the greatest at keeping up with things. But I am still having fun with this.

I currently have a pot roast in the Instant Pot. It's been cooking all day (slow cooker function!!!) and it smells so good. I've been really in a cooking mood for the past few days. Since Thursday (the 15th) I have made:

• a 9x13 sheet pan of banana bars
• four (4) honey mustard glazed chicken thighs
• a pan of strawberry cobbler
• a small pan of glazed carrots that kind of turned out burnt
• pot roast (a little peppery, but pretty good) -- I'm retconning it to stew because it's pretty liquidy

Also, I saw a while ago that somebody calling themselves Dman signed my guest book. First off, I can only assume that when they say "the lay out and design [of your site] is very relaxing" they don't mean the color scheme... my mother looked at my page when I was home for the holidays, squinched up her face, and said "okay, that's straight-up color AGGRESSIVE".
Second off, hey Dman, if you're reading this, thanks for your encouragement! I'll admit I've been lax about updating recently, but I still think that it's very important for me to have this kind of space for myself. I mean, I'm not making this for anyone... there's no overarching content creation mechanism here. I'm just kind of putting this out onto the World Wide Web and making myself a little niche.

And, speaking of that, I started this site because I was hoping it would help give me the confidence to push more for change in my corner of the world. Well, a few days ago, I initiated my own public activism. Duke University in North Carolina is closing its herbarium and relocating the specimens to new homes (plural), and gave the herbarium personnel a timeline of 2-3 years to get it all moved.

Well, to start off, for a collection like that (2nd largest in the Western hemisphere, I think), 2-3 years is overnight. Then we move on to why Duke's doing this... they say it will require funding that they don't have, and that the collection "deserves to be in a facility that can house it for posterity". They see it as a "net positive for the collection in the long run".

This is probably a done deal. There is most likely nothing that will stop or reverse this decision. However, there's a chance that the public outcry that's resulting here will make other universities pause before following suit. Because it isn't just Duke that's shuttering a collection. Florida's getting rid of a whole bunch of entomological literature, quite possibly as a precursor to beginning to let the collection decay. Clemson's allowed its entomology collection to slowly atrophy, losing faculty and not getting funding. This is a part of a larger trend, and it's very worrying.

Why is it worrying? Well, it shows a shift in priorities. Natural history collections aren't flashy, they don't bring in the multi-million dollar NSF grants, they don't dazzle investors and potential students. Duke can very well afford to fund the herbarium, it just doesn't see that as a priority.

However, natural history collections are one of the few things that are truly irreplaceable. You could raze every building on campus, you could plow up every parking lot, you could take down every plaque, and all those things could be rebuilt. It would take a lot of time, but you could get them back. Once your collection is gone, it's gone. Living beings can't be replaced. Original artwork can't be replaced. A collection can't be replaced. You could make an argument that historical buildings can't be replaced, either, and I suppose that's true, but... no matter how much history a building's seen, at the end of the day it's bricks and mortar like any other. If your herbarium floods, if your ethanol collections burn, those data and those specimens are lost and you can't get them back, you can't replace them. Clemson has a white rhino taxidermied. What's the curator going to do if it's damaged beyond repair, go shoot another one? Good luck!

Also, my personal feelings... I am in a position, personally and professionally, where I can fairly easily step into a fulfilling job and career after I graduate here. I feel pretty confident in saying that would not be the case if I hadn't stumbled across the CUAC. A natural history collection isn't "just" valuable for research... it has the power to completely change people's lives. Shuttering it and splitting it across multiple new institutions is a blow in multiple ways.

On a completely separate note, it is Want Tattoo Hours over here. What do I want? Good question! I think that a dragonfly with galaxy wings would be pretty cool. Or a vine twining up my right arm. Either one would be excellent. I guess my new purchase to save up for will be... another tattoo. Which probably doesn't surprise anyone who knows me.

My partner and I recently got Risk of Rain 2 (50% off on Steam) and have been playing it. Tonnnnns of fun! It's like if you took Warframe's combat mechanics, dialed "chaos" up to 11, and flipped the "tutorials" switch to off.

I've started getting back into pen and paper journaling and it's nice. Typing is all well and good but there's just something I love about the physical feeling of writing on paper. Unfortunately digital tablets do not replicate this feeling. I have tried.

I "stole" a notebook from Mom and am starting to journal on pen and paper again. I forgot how nice it is to write things out. Typing on my computer or my phone's fine, but there's just something about physically writing down the words.

I'm nervous about the spring. I'm planning on coming up with two (just two) New Year's resolutions, and making sure they're reachable. I think one of them will relate to going outside regularly. It's good for me.
The other one will probably be related to saving money and/or cutting down on my spending. I realized that I spend a lot of money. I should uhhhhh stop doing that.

It's hard to believe that it's almost 2024. That just doesn't seem right. I mean, time is a construct devised by the devil to bring us further from God's light anyways (for the record, I am not religious; if you're xtian, I apologize for taking the name of your Lord in vain) but really, this is just ridiculous. One of the kids in Mike's class this semester was born in 2004! What the heck?!

I've started planning for the summer -- I applied for an internship at a national park to work on firefly conservation! I have an interview for that on Tuesday. If I don't get that, or if they don't have onsite housing (I am not going to commute multiple hours every day), I'll be working on the forestry commission's samples some more. The idea is to take the samples, pick 4 or 5 sites from each ecoregion, go through and ID things to ~family level (maybe genus on some things, depending what I want to look at).
Once that's done, I'll be running analyses of some kind! Right now I'm thinking about looking at either "do predators and parasitoids respond to bark beetle population surges" or "do bark beetles peak at different times in different ecoregions".
So either way, I'll be busy! I also signed a lease for next year, so that's exciting. I'll have a 2-bedroom place!

I was super resistant to taking dendrology at first. My reasoning was that I only care about the trees insofar as they've got bugs on or in them, and I don't have room in my brain for bugs AND trees.
But this semester was actually really fun! I underestimated how cool it would be to wander through the forest and go "ooh I know what that is!" rather than "yup that's a tree alright".

As for 3011 this semester... there were some students that were a delight, and others that were not. I emailed two of them separately to say that they ought to have more confidence in their own abilities, because I got the feeling they thought they weren't capable of much, and I just don't think that's true.
However, I was so incredibly frustrated with one of them. I went home and brought back ephemerid mayflies (Hexagenia specifically) and stoneflies (I dunno what family) to boost their grades, because hey, that's two whole orders! Now, the family Ephemeridae isn't called the "giant mayflies" for nothing, and a creature the size of an adult Hexagenia won't fit in one of the small collecting vials.
I handed one of them the mayfly + stonefly vial, handed him the sheet of labels, said "here, mayflies and stoneflies, that's two whole orders", and found a large vial to put the mayfly in. Told him I'd walk him through the keys to get to family on both of them.
It was just too much work for him to figure out how to fit the mayfly into his collection box.
So the way the collection grading works is, each order is 5 points, each family is 3 points, each specimen is 0.33 points, a 100% is 300 points and the max you can get is 330 points. I know for a fact that 16.66 points would have helped this guy. But oh well. As my friend said, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't beat it hard enough to make it drink.

I'm going to move blog posts from the main page to here! Right now they're under the chatbox. I'll turn that box into just a quick "State Of Things" one!
Here's a record of what was there, though.

• 01 August 2023: This is my first post here! How exciting.
  I think it's fun to have my own website. Look, Ma, no CEO! ...except for whoever runs Neocities. But they seem to be pretty cool. After all, they've got Neocities!
  I'm not really certain what I'll use the site for. Maybe I'll do some kind of blog. Like on Tumblr, only I never make original posts on there and I guess I'll never reblog other people's posts on here. So not really much like Tumblr.
  I have been having tons of fun figuring out how this whole thing works, though. The internet has so much knowledge on it. It's great! All I need are the right keywords, and then I can learn anything I want. Like how to put a background on the big quote over to the right, and make the background transparent, so that you can read the text AND see the background picture! I'm a fan of the picture. I took it this summer when I went to the Smoky Mountains with my friends. You'll have 0to be on desktop to see the big quote, though, and probably the picture too, because remarkably a large layout doesn't work well on small screens.
• 02 August 2023: Maybe I'll use it like a journal? Trouble is, I already have a journal on my phone, and I already do daily records and also daily "3 good things" in the evenings. Also, as it turns out, it's not super simple to put a "search the page" function on here, which I thought would be a good idea (for when I have a lot of posts, which will hopefully happen).
• 03 August 2023: I think this main page will be for "status updates", and I'll have other pages in the links box to the side! I added a chat box and learned how to change what elements appear on mobile vs desktop for this page. So now the site looks good on phone as well as computer!
• 05 August 2023: Current mood (09:40): hard to believe school starts in two and a half weeks! Wow.
  Update (19:19): I've added color-friendly options to all the pages except for this one, so if your eyes are bleeding at my choice of colors you can click a link and go to a less colorful option!
• 26 August 2023: School started two days ago, and I'm looking forward to this semester! Freshwater Ecology promises to be fun, dendrology has weekly field trips (just like aquatics!), and immatures (which I did end up taking) should be a lot of fun. I'm focusing on Trichoptera for my collection because I want to go into aquatic entomology and I have access to one of the best caddisfly taxonomists on the planet!
• 01 November 2023: Wow, it's been a bit! I definitely committed to doing too much this semester. Oops. But hey, I'm getting lots done! :)
• 24 November 2023: Status update! I'm currently visiting my partner and his family over Thanksgiving. It's been fun! Stressful, because his parents are... A Time to be around. But fun.

My first national conference! ECN = Entomological Collections Network, ESA = Entomological Society of America. ECN holds its meeting directly before ESA in the same place, so we went to both. It was a whirlwind, but very very fun. I went to talks about Silphidae (Silphinae now) in prairie ecosystems, the effect of landscaping with native plants on pollinators, biodiversity, and insect abundance, and (given by my friend) a talk about the Museums in Miniature project! I also went to the Penn State mixer and made some acquaintances, and ended up emailing a professor there about potential graduate studies. I don't graduate for a bit (ideally May 2025, but realistically probably December 2025) but it's probably never too early to start forging relationships.

I and my friend presented a poster on the genus Tenebroides in the beetle family Trogossitidae. We (mainly my friend, to be fully honest -- I haven't had time to devote to catching up to them) looked at specimens from our collection and came up with quantitative external morphological characters to separate species. Which was a tall task because, for many many many beetles, you have to look at the male genitalia (aedeagus/aedeagi) to make species-level identifications. But they managed it!
Last person to work on these little guys was J.R. Barron, in the 1970's; he had a key, but it wasn't very user-friendly and it wasn't very clear. Our goal was to improve upon it. I think we did a pretty good job! We're working on a publication right now.

So I went to the SCES conference in early October and won some awards. My initial thought was to use the money for holiday gifts. Which would have been a good and responsible thing to do. Instead, I said "okay... things kind of suck right now and fall break is coming up," and I got a flight to Denver to visit (and meet) one of my best friends. It was simultaneously a very good and fairly bad decision: it was a much-needed break, my friend and I got along fantastically in person, and we had a blast... but I neglected to consider that, since my partner and I have structured our relationship in such a way that the traditional "one relationship far above the others in a hierarchy of importance" doesn't really apply, flying away from my best friend might not actually be any different than flying away from my partner.