Mozambique Diary: Coconut crabs of Vamizi

In July 1937 Amelia Earhart’s plane vanished somewhere over the southern Pacific in the general vicinity of New Guinea. Neither the plane nor her and her co-pilot’s bodies were found during the massive search operation that followed. But two years after her disappearance scattered skeletal remains, later identified as those of a tall woman of…

Lungless and happy about it

Of all the organs in my body, the one that I would be most reluctant to part with (perhaps with the exception of my eyes) are the lungs. It seems that we need them more than anything else. True, we need all the other bits, but lungs seem particularly useful. Without them the brain stops working in…

Ghost hunting

I have been working in Africa for quite a while and during this time I have seen my share of iconic animals that epitomize the awesome continent’s fauna. There are still, of course, many that I yet need to meet in person – aardvark, “hairy” Trichobatrachus frog, Acridoxena katydid, to name a few – but luck…

Mozambique Diary: Red-headed flies

Two months, that’s how long I have been neglecting this blog. Some people had even sent me messages to check if I were still alive. But I am alive and the reasons for my silence were good – until last week I was in Mozambique, working at the Wilson Lab and busily preparing for the next biodiversity survey…

Dermatobia Redux

Raising two dipteran children was an interesting experience. It was embarrassing on a few occasions, when both of my arms started bleeding profusely in public; painful at times, to the point of waking me up in the middle of the night; and inconvenient during the last stages of the flies’ development, when I had to…

So long, 2014

It was an interesting, busy year, which explains in part why I have been neglecting this blog recently. I am not going to give a month-by-month account of 2014 but thought that a few highlights might be in order. That’s about it – I am looking forward to 2015, which promises to be even more…