My blogging pace has slackened recently, but I promise it’s not because I’m not doing stuff. On the contrary, I’m doing so much stuff that I haven’t had time to post anything here. So here are a couple of quick updates: in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on processing and analyzing the data from my fieldwork in Miami. In this case, “data processing” means listening to many hours of my own recorded voice saying things like “dewlap……pushup…….dewlap…….” – I’m transcribing the dictated behavioral records that I took while observing territorial male anoles responding to tethered intruder males. The analyses of this experiment and my other data are still underway, but some of results look like they might be interesting. I’ll post more when I know more!

A strawberry poison dart frog (Dendrobates pumilio) photographed at La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica.

In a few weeks I’ll be off to Virginia to visit family and friends, then I’ll fly from DC to Perth, Western Australia (3 planes and way too many hours). Perth is hosting the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE) meeting this year, and I’ll be presenting some of my work on strawberry poison dart frogs (Dendrobates pumilio), which I conducted with Nate Dappen and Yoel Stuart. Nate will also be at the conference, presenting some of his work on the Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis).

Last week I posted a link to a short video I made after witnessing an amazing mass emergence of termites in a Miami city park. The video features the inimitable music of my friend Dan Warren. In addition to being a musician, Dan is also a heck of an evolutionary biologist. He’s currently a postdoc at the University of Texas in Austin, and you can read about his adventures in the field with fish, sperm, and other interesting swimming things at his blog, Science As A Verb (highly recommended!).

Finally, I got a new camera this week: the Canon EOS 7D. I decided a few weeks ago that I had too many cameras, and they weren’t really fitting my evolving needs (video capture, compact size, etc.). So I sold my Canon 40D and 1D Mark IIn, and I’m replacing them with the 7D. The 7D has a good AF system and high frame rate for action shooting, and can also shoot HD video, like my Canon 5D Mark II. I’m going to run the new camera through its paces this weekend, and I’ll try to post some samples next week!