The Biodiversity of Beer
Beer is, perhaps, the oldest fermented beverage known to humankind; and after water and tea, it is the third most popular beverage in the world. These days beer is made from a few key ingredients: water, barley, yeast, and hops. Yet it wasn’t always so. In its thousands of years of history, beer has been […]
A tiny speck of an island packed with biodiversity!
A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Lady Elliot Island at the extreme southern end of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) about 80 km off the Queensland, Australia, coast. Lady Elliot Island is a coral “cay island”; a small, low elevation, sand island on top of a coral reef. A few weeks ago, […]
Putting together the biodiversity puzzle
I became an ecologist for the love of being out in leafy forests and wide mountain vistas. I was never thrilled by the idea of staring into a microscope for hours on end. But it’s amazing what a scientist will do to fill in just one little piece of the biodiversity puzzle. Oak savannahs […]