1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?
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How do lineages of species cross between major life zones? For example, from land to sea. We have been looking at marine, estuarine and freshwater snakes in Southeast Asia to explore this question.
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2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?
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To assess the species richness and local abundances we catch snakes using traps, nets and hand collecting surveys at night.
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3. Where do you study biodiversity?
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Aquatic snake diversity reaches its peak in the shallow seas, mangroves and swamps of the Old World tropics. So... That is where we go to do our studies.
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4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?
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Our work includes biological inventories, the mapping of geographic ranges for each species. These data are fundamental and essential to any conservation work.
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5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?
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Marine biology was my primary interest in college and later I became interested in marine snakes and their evolution and ecology.
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6. Describe important collaborations for your scientific endeavors (describe your work with other researchers, organizations, or scientific groups, local or indigenous peoples, etc.)
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Collaborations have been essential to our work. Research Associates, Daryl Karns, John Murphy and Bruce Jayne have been actively involved over the past 10 years. We have many Thai, Malay and Singaporean collaborators also. If we have space we should include a page of credits and acknowledgements.
For information on our research see our Aquatic Snake Website
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