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Biodiversity Blog

 

BACKYARD BIODIVERSITY: Mediterranean gecko

586px Mediterranean house gecko Photo: ZooFari (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.) Mediterranean gecko? What? But we’re in Texas! While these are an Old World species, native to Southern Europe and North Africa, Mediterranean geckos have been introduced to many areas of the world, including Texas. They are common around Austin. You’...
Meet Eric Abelson

Meet Eric Abelson

Eric Abelson is a Research Scientist in the Department of Integrative Biology. He works closely with the Biodiversity Center.     Tell us where you came from before UT, and what you studied. After receiving my Ph.D. from Stanford University, where I worked on wildlife behavior and conservation ecology, I went on to two post-doc po...

PART 2: Life in the Middle of the Pacific Ocean

pic6By Ryan Rash    Rainbow after a light rain with great frigatebirds and boobies flying overhead. In my previous post, I compared our life in quarantine now to what I experienced on Johnston Atoll, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where I worked on an invasive species control project through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ...

BACKYARD BIODIVERSITY: Dandelions

640px Taraxacum officinale 001   Photo: H. Zell (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.) Some make wishes while blowing their seeds into the wind. Others eat them or use them in medicine. And others frown when they see them popping up on their lawns. These are dandelions, probably a plant that just about everyone can identify,...

PART 1: Reflections on Isolation from the Middle of the Pacific Ocean

pic2by Ryan Rash   View of Johnston as we were first arriving.  I was a volunteer and then research assistant at the Biodiversity Center’s Ichthyology Collection for a couple years, but moved to the Central Pacific to work and live for 6 months on Johnston Atoll, a one-square-mile island National Wildlife Refuge with a total human pop...