This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
The field season is starting! This means that for the next several months our Expeditions blog will be full of wonderful reports from the field, written by researchers, educators, students and writers, as they navigate around our planet and discover new wonders of the world.
The first such series is starting today. Over the new few weeks, almost every day, we'll be getting dispatches from Borneo, where Dr. Wayne Maddison is looking for jumping spiders.
Wayne Maddison is a biologist who studies the diversity and evolution of jumping spiders. When he was thirteen years old in Canada, a big jumping spider looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and he's been hooked ever since. Jumping spiders hunt like cats, creeping and pouncing, and the males perform amazing dances to females. His fascination with the many species of jumping spiders led to an interest in their evolutionary relationships, and then to methods for analyzing evolutionary history. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is now a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Scientific Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. He has taken it as his mission to travel to poorly known rainforests to document the many still-unknown species before they are gone, and to study them and preserve them in museums for future generations.
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Dr.Maddison arrived to his field site today and we established that he has the ability to get online. Thus, the very first, introductory post is already live over on the Expeditions blog - see Spiders in Borneo: Introduction. Then keep coming back every day for new posts!