Fairfield, Illinois, USA

I'm a physician on disability for CFIDS. Now I teach Biology at a community college and facilitate some lifestyle training classes (See chiphealth.com)

I "discovered" macro photography of insects in 2005. I found that sitting beside a flower waiting for bugs was fun, especially when I stumbled onto BugGuide so I could justify it to my wife as making a contribution. :) 2006 was a ecstasy of exploration and discovery in my backyard. In 2007 I hooked up with AllLeps and collected moths at my garage light while creating a photographic inventory.

Now it's 2008 and what do I do? I've bought a student pinning kit and have started fumbling through the process of learning to pin lepidoptera specimens. Southern Illinois is so poorly documented and many of our images cannot be ID'd to species name because we have designed our nomenclature around characteristics that can not be seen in living organisms. Paradoxical to me, but reality.

Overall, the dream I am chasing is to be able to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to make a contribution to our understanding of ecology. We know so little about the life stories and interactions of most of the species we glibly name. It seems that our focus as a scientific community has been so consumed by reconstructing the past to support the evolutionary metastory that we are ignoring the necessaty of understanding the current dynamics of the living world.