Music in my head

I have always wanted to be a musician. Not that I have any particular musical talents (and never learned to read music), but my fascination with sound was definitely one of the reasons for becoming an expert in the taxonomy of orthopteroid insects, nature’s preeminent musicians. Few things are more pleasant to me than sitting…

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Footprint Cave, Belize

It has been a long while since the last update to this blog, mostly because of my hectic travel schedule (in fact, I am typing this on a shaky train ride). But it has been an interesting time, with lots of great photo ops. Last week I joined Alex Wild, John Abbott and Thomas Shahan…

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Mozambique Diary: The fat coneheads of Gorongosa

A few years ago I was at the Museum of Natural History in London to examine several type specimens of African katydids. One of them was the holotype of a conehead katydid Lanista africana, a species described by the infamous 19th century entomologist Francis Walker. (Stories abound about the quality of his taxonomic work, such…

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Mozambique Diary: The Cat mantis

Arriving in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique at this time of the year, when the grasslands are bone dry and green has all but disappeared from the color palette of this immense ecosystem, I did not expect to see too many insects. Sure, there will always be ants and a bunch of grasshoppers, but the…

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A song of ancient Earth

Those who have been reading this blog with some regularity may have noticed that I find virtually all organisms equally fascinating. But some are more equal than others, and few animals and plants excite me more than phylogenetic relics. These are the last remaining members of lineages that were once dominant, or at least species-rich,…

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Empusids

In about a week I should be back in Mozambique and this blog will likely get more interesting. We have an exciting project developing in Gorongosa National Park, one that is bound to generate a lot of good data and influence biodiversity science in the country for years to come. More about it soon. But…

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