Many people wonder what biologists do, especially those biologists not working in the medical fields. As an ecologist, I try to explain by saying that I work on the interconnectedness of living things. But how actually do I do that? As biologists, we are encouraged to examine the world through questions, as in “what is the question you are trying to answer?” That question could be how a theoretical construct fits the empirical data or something as simple as: “What is the use of a dung beetle, anyway?” Despite this urging from fellow scientists to frame our research around a specific question, most of use get into a line of questioning because we just plain LIKE the animals (or plants!). One of my problems is that I like so many different animals. I see an animal and I think, “Gee, it would be cool to work on frogs!” However, there is only so much time, so I have narrowed down my animals of choice to those that disperse seeds, mostly monkeys and dung beetles. Monkeys obviously disperse seeds through endozoochory, a fancy name for swallowing a seed whole and passing it out later with poo. But how do dung beetles disperse seeds? By finding the monkey dung and burying it, thus taking seeds along with it! The dung beetles aren’t interested in seeds, but they need to bury the poo fast to keep it for themselves, and they usually don’t take the time to remove the seeds. Thus, seeds get “planted” underground, safe from seed-chomping rodents and nasty fungi. So, I study the way that monkeys and dung beetles interact and help to move seeds around and regenerate the tropical rainforest. And I ask these questions: How do monkeys and dung beetles in a particular area contribute to forest regeneration? What is the impact of certain monkey species on seeds? What can we do to preserve this important interaction and the animals involved?

But, I have other responsibilities than just working on my monkeys and dung beetles. As a university professor, I teach, I contribute to the university community through service, and most importantly, I also have students that work on research projects and only some of those students can work on monkeys or dung beetles. Some of the other projects I work on with my students include: feral horses as seed dispersers on barrier islands (think Misty of Chincoteague!) and bat activity patterns on farm-woodland interfaces.

Over the summer, I will be posting notes to this blog about many of these projects.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Kevina Vulinec. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.