New Year’s Day I arrived on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), a natural reserve in the Panama Canal and one of the most extensively studied tropical forest ecosystem in the world. For the next two weeks, I will be working closely with researchers using the Smithsonian Tropical Research Instituted (STRI) facilities. My focus will be on catching, photographing and illustrating katydids.

This is my second year to the island. Last year I finish a basic guide to the subfamilies of katydids on BCI. Also I created a quartette of katydid illustrations to show the convergently evolved suites of traits also known as syndromes. See previous post.

This year I am focusing on creating a guide to the twenty most common katydids with a focus on species that are easily confused. While at the same time I will be gathering research for a larger tropical forest habitat piece. Exciting times.