Fridays are the only days that I have no class in the late mornings and afternoon. Like every day, I have Spanish at 8 am (which I am taking to learn basic Spanish for hypothetical future fieldwork in Latin America). This is followed by weekly lab meeting at 9, with free bagels. At 10 or so, the Essig Museum of Entomology has its weekly coffee, attended by various museum staff, grad students, and faculty. This is often the most fun of the day, because everyone has had all of lab meeting to wake up, and there are usually good discussions. Since I have no more commitments for the rest of the day, I often do work-related travel (or start the weekend early) on Fridays. Today I went to the California Academy of Sciences.

My reason for going to the Academy was to look for specimens of the moths I want to study--the same reason I've visited the British Museum of Natural History, the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, and the Bohart Museum at UC Davis in the past few months. In this case, the Academy didn't have any of the genus I'm interested in, but they had a good sampling of Bay Area species from different genera in the same family. The moths I want to study are called Epicephala, and have exciting biology (they are both mutualists and parasites of the trees they interact with; plus they live in beautiful places like tropical rainforests and South Pacific islands) but are drab grey. Their relatives are all leaf miners (meaning their caterpillars chew tunnels inside tree leaves), which is not particularly exciting, but their wings are striped and blotched in orange, red, silver, white, and black, like miniature tigers and zebras. They only have a wingspan of about a centimeter, so you need a microscope to appreciate how beautiful they are, but there are over a dozen of these little exotic-colored moths right here in the Bay Area. A lot of the specimens I saw today at the Academy were collected on the Berkeley and Stanford campuses. Look for little squiggly tunnels inside oak leaves next time you're outdoors. The caterpillars inside will turn into exquisitely beautiful tiny moths.

I met up with Andy, who works at the Academy, at the end of the day. In conjuction with a special exhibit on California biodiversity, the Academy has free tastings of sustainable California products every Friday afternoon. This week it was oysters. The first time I ate an oyster was in Japan, where a secretary at the CER had received a bunch of fresh oysters from a friend in Hiroshima. Those oysters were huge and meaty, and tasted great with lemon juice. I concluded I liked oysters. Andy told me when we met that he didn't care for oysters, but we decided to try them anyway. These oysters were cold and slimy, and I didn't feel too comfortable saying I didn't like them to the person who was giving them away for free.

My spring break plans are taking shape: I have bought my ticket to French Polynesia for fieldwork. I fly via Honolulu to Papeete (the capital on Tahiti) and then travel the following day by boat or small plane to neighboring Moorea, where Berkeley's field station is. Hopefully I can find Epicephala moths pollinating Glochidion trees (the trees are quite common, but the moths have never been recorded from the Society Islands) as happens in Fiji, Australia, and Asia. Otherwise I may need to find a new thesis topic. It appears that a British TV crew will be down in French Polynesia at that time, and has offered to pay for a helicopter to fly me and other Berkeley researchers to a very remote area, to film us discovering new species. Hopefully I'll have Internet access often enough on Moorea to post updates from the field...