DQ Blog

In February of this year I turned 65.  Ugh.  It seems catastrophically old.  Five years earlier, I had invented a cheerful motto to assuage the sting of turning 60, which seemed bad enough: “Sixty: Too young to quit skiing, too old to go bald.”  I couldn’t use that...

The wildebeest genome is an extremely efficient recipe for turning grass into meat.  Wildebeest may not be the smartest animals on four hooves but you've got to give them that.  And the greater Serengeti ecosystem is where this grass-to-meat transformation manifests...

I flew into Bangalore, at the invitation of my old friend Ravi Chellam, to participate in the Student Conference on Conservation Science, held there during the first week of August.  It had been ten years or so--I don't recall exactly, but too long--since my last...

Greg Dwyer is a mathematical ecologist, based at the University of Chicago, who studies outbreak populations of forest insects.  His work involves trying to understand the extreme boom-and-bust cycles of species such as the gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar), which...

I've been living what feels like a Dream Vacation this summer: attending some of America's foremost rodeos.  In August it was the Omak Stampede in central Washington.  A week later I was at Crow Fair, in the town of Crow Agency, Montana.  Now I'm here, along with...

Lots of field time in the Congo for me this year.  The forests are wonderful; the people are likable; the cities, the logistics, and the politics are . . . ugh, challenging.  As you probably know, there are two countries known loosely as "the Congo":  the Republic of...