driving in on this highway... all the little ants are marching, red and black antenna waving

i know it's been a while since i've written, but i've been busy - ward is finally here and the research has begun! my butterflies are so cool. they have orange wings with green undersides and pink linings. they also have green fur! i'll try to get a picture of one of the soon. speaking of which i have a few more pictures on facebook. not many, but still... a couple are the painting i made for carol's door, the rest are from my field site or the drive to it. same link on the right -->

i would also like to direct you to a couple of other websites if you're interested. the first is a ny times article about the lab here. it's kind of neat because the three projects it talks about: butterflies, sparrows, and marmots are exactly what my roommates and i work on. there are lots of other projects going on here too, of course. that article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22lab.html

the second website is an article by olivia judson, the author of my textbook on sexual selection (the class i wrote the bee paper for if any of you remember that...) she's doing a series of articles for the ny times on evolution in celebration of 2009 being the 150th anniversary of the publishing of the origin of species and the 200th anniversary of darwin's birth! it's a big year for us evolutionary biologists :) judson's articles begin at: http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/darwinmania/
(thanks to bill bowman for sending me this!)

so on thursday i went to my first field site! at 11,000 ft, dustin park is our lowest elevation site. it's a beautiful steppe terrain surrounded by forest. the butterflies only fly in the open fields so i don't even have to worry about allergies among the trees! the biting flies are still bad though... we saw a bunch of male butterflies, but only 1 or 2 females, so we'll have to go back at the beginning of next week to collect the females for our project. i'm so lucky i get to work on butterflies. they are only out during the day (about 9-5 at most) so i get to sleep in and be done in time for dinner. they can also only fly when the sun is out and they can warm up, so as soon as a cloud goes in front of the sun they're gone! the fact that butterflies only come out when the sun is shining probably contributes to the fact that we associate butterflies with happy, sunny days. they really are pretty cool.

i guess that's it for now. i have a some work to do in the lab today - i need to practice using the spectroreflectometer to measure the reflectance of the wings on the males we caught the other day. yesterday i learned how to feed butterflies. it's neat - you fill a centrifuge tube (with a yellow cardboard border to look like a flower) with honey-water, then set the bug on it. you use a pin or needle to unroll the critter's proboscis and stick it in the "nectar" to get it drinking. how cute!