Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
Every year, the South Sound, WA celebrates its prairies with Prairie Appreciation Day where visitors tour the gorgeous prairies and participate in activities to learn about prairie plants, pollinators, and more. This year, Prairie Appreciation Day was cancelled but, we’re still celebrating virtually! Instead of in-person activities, the virtual celebration is a blog with posts […]
This January, most members of the Tufts Pollinator Initiative (TPI) traveled to Costa Rica as part of Tufts University’s Tropical Ecology and Conservation course. In this course, students spend the fall semester preparing a proposal and planning a research project for the tropics. Over winter break, the students visit the tropics to carry out their […]
I have the pleasure to be a part of the new group, the Tufts Pollinator Initiative (TPI). Our group was recently funded by the Tufts Green Fund to make Tufts University a better place for pollinators! To learn about our initiative, check out TPI’s first blog post (written by yours truly) here!
Back in June, The Xereces Society held a #PicturePerfectPollinator photo contest. In honor of National Pollinator Week, I entered a photo accompanied by a pollinator fact each day. Just recently, it came to my attention that my photo of a male Puget blue butterfly getting a snack from oxeye daisy was selected as an honorable […]
Being a small, squishy, slow-moving caterpillar is tough. Caterpillars are a protein-packed snack for carnivorous insects such as wasps and spiders, some ants, and birds. For my post-doc, I’m studying an ant-caterpillar symbiosis. A “symbiosis” is an interaction between two organisms of different species. Insect pollinators and plants, clownfish and anemones, us and the microbes […]
This past week I attended the First Annual Protecting Pollinators in Ornamental Landscapes Conference in Hendersonville, NC. When it comes to protecting pollinators, a lot of research focuses on honey bees, pathogens, pesticides, and the current state of agriculture however, most of us encounter pollinators in the ornamental landscape (i.e. urban environments, backyard gardens). At […]
Providence Pollinator Lab 