By Kristen Weiss In a few short days, I will be heading to Micronesia with several USC staff and faculty members, as well as 26 bright, enthusiastic USC undergraduates. This trip is the culmination of a semester’s worth of anticipation, in which the students were trained in scientific diving skills, the physics of diving, and [...]

Every year we take an outstanding group of USC undergraduates through full American Academy of Underwater Sciences Scientific Diver training and then travel with them to the Micronesian Islands of Guam and Palau for investigations of marine and coastal ecosystems.  On the American Territory of Guam we look at the effects of overfishing, terrestrial runoff, [...]

Their chorus of pant hoots gave them away in dramatic fashion. The chimpanzees we’d been looking for were nearby, and we knew exactly where to find them. Though farmland and trees blocked our view, we could hear that the chimpanzees had arrived at a particular fig tree laden with ripe fruits. As ripe fruit specialists, [...]

As time goes on and as I had expected might be the case, the Bush-crows continue to surprise and perplex me both in their character and peculiarity. This is hardly surprising, however, considering the historic and still very current confusions surrounding the species. Catching birds has proven to be very successful and the sample of [...]

Helped by the excellent staff of the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society my stay in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, was relatively brief whilst formalising research visas. The city, home to a number of UN offices and the base of the African Union, is vibrant and thronging with people and I quickly got to grips [...]

On April 9th, our expedition team made its way to Puerto Viejo Sarapiqui, a small town on the Indian river at the far northern edge of Costa Rica. Here we would catch a river boat to travel deep into the southern region of Nicaragua where we would be rejoined with the tribal elders whom we [...]

Our host Rafael from Rios Tropicales warned us that he was taking us pretty far off the grid to show us how his team is implementing a massive reforestation program in Costa Rica. What he should have told us was that we would be enduring an off road, three hour ride by tractor followed by [...]

Located in the Tropic of Cancer, Ethiopia sits as a huge corner stone in the Horn of Africa, the easternmost projection of the continent. In this, the historic land of the Berbers, Ethiopia is renowned for its independence and depth of culture, the only African nation (at the time Abyssinia) alongside Liberia to retain national [...]

Recently, a dear friend came to visit us here in Uganda, so we decided to take the opportunity to visit Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, home to one of the world’s only two populations of mountain gorillas (Gorilla berengei berengei). The other population lives in the Virunga Massif, a volcanic range that straddles Uganda, Rwanda, and [...]

Our team spent the day working with Dole working on one of the company’s sustainable banana farms. While we have been plagued with rain and equipment problems, the Central American weather cooperated today and, after an hour of tech throw down, we acquired a satellite and went live for our daily broadcast. We were late [...]