I'm pleased to announce that podcasts are now available for a recent half-day symposium my colleagues and I at the International Institute for Species Exploration organized. It's called Looking for Life: Adventures and Misadventures in Species Exploration.
Each year the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University holds a public symposium on its work and, with the Linnean Society of London, announces the winner of the Linnaean Legacy Award. This year’s symposium--held on the eve of Darwin’s two hundredth birthday--focused on the joys and pains of finding new species.
In the podcasts you can hear about new developments in SCUBA technology that allow divers to explore species on deep-ocean reefs in the Pacific, the search for beetles in the Caribbean, the Peruvian Andes, and Madagascar, a nearly disastrous expedition to Brazil to identify new plant species, and a career-long search for trilobites that took one paleontologist from the high Arctic to the Australian outback.
This year’s Linnean Legacy Award recipient is Richard Fortey, a noted paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. In addition to his highly regarded work in species discovery, Fortey is an award-winning science writer. His books include
Life: An Unauthorised Biography and
Earth: An Intimate History. He is a recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for science communication and Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. His latest popular work is a scientific memoir entitled
Dry Storeroom #1.
The Master of Ceremonies was Robert Krulwich, a correspondent from National Public Radio’s Science Desk. Krulwich won national Emmys for his ABC special on the cultural history of the Barbie Doll, and his reporting on Internet privacy. He is also the recipient of a Science Excellence in Television Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science for reporting on the human genome.
You can find more information, as well as talks from entomologist Joe McHugh, botanist Vicki Funk, ichthyologist Richard Pyle, and entomologist Kip Will, at
http://darwin.asu.edu/exploration_symposium.php
