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Description
I am lucky enough to bounce between research projects as I wait for graduate school to start in August. This time I'm assisting with a demographic study on the Big Island of Hawaii, looking at population size, movement, and disease presence in endemic forest birds. Hawaiian honeycreepers (like the Iiwi) have been mostly wiped off the islands due to a combination of hunting, habitat destruction, introduced predators, and (more recently) disease. The largest populations still thrive in high elevation koa and ohia forests where it is too cold for the avian malaria vector (the mosquito) to successfully reproduce. There is evidence however, that lowland populations of certain species are developing disease resistance and making something of a comeback.

Description
I am lucky enough to bounce between research projects as I wait for graduate school to start in August. This time I'm assisting with a demographic study on the Big Island of Hawaii, looking at population size, movement, and disease presence in endemic forest birds. Hawaiian honeycreepers (like the Iiwi) have been mostly wiped off the islands due to a combination of hunting, habitat destruction, introduced predators, and (more recently) disease. The largest populations still thrive in high elevation koa and ohia forests where it is too cold for the avian malaria vector (the mosquito) to successfully reproduce. There is evidence however, that lowland populations of certain species are developing disease resistance and making something of a comeback.