So rich is its variety of birds, snakes, frogs and butterflies that the Western Ghats is considered a global biodiversity hot spot in urgent need of conservation.
What are the warden-owners and hunter-consumers of a game preserve to do when the frogs and butterflies and trees and worms that make up the traumatised and hungry population object to its current business model?
The visitor starts in a patch of Colombian forest, populated by poisonous frogs and butterflies, then learns how rattlesnakes and scorpions use venom not just to kill their prey but also to defend themselves from mammalian predators like opossums.
"Because, one, we can't afford to pay all these people to do this work, and two, who has the time to be on the beach every morning, doing the count?" For decades, other volunteers have been providing similarly valuable long-term population data through annual surveys of birds, frogs and butterflies.
Sure, we learned science in the elementary school classroom (with disproportionate emphasis on the life cycles of frogs and butterflies), but all encounters with practitioners of the field led us not to labs but to auditoriums, watching manic comedians in flight goggles demonstrate "experiments" that real scientists never do.
By the time I was in the fourth grade, I knew most species of frogs and butterflies in the Northeast United States.
Muddy field trips exploring nature and books read about the babies of other species - polar bears and penguins and frogs and butterflies... were opportunities not only to feel cuddly but also to introduce the moral message of caring about the larger world.
Each image -- the initial ads show an eagle, a frog and a butterfly -- is made from a label off a bottle of Stolichnaya, which uses paper rather than painted labels.
In South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, for instance, volunteers monitor and record data on everything from mangrove ecosystems to beach erosion; along with a variety of animals and insects like sea turtles, bats, owls, frogs, lizards and butterflies.
Since then, visiting biologists have conducted pivotal surveys there; in the last 20 years, 14 species new to science have been discovered, including orchids, frogs and a butterfly.
