As you most likely read on the blog and noted by our steady stream of #eowilson tweets, the eminent biologist Dr. E.O. Wilson visited our Raleigh neighborhood last Thursday.
Prior to his official commitments leading a Global Town Hall with high school students and ceremoniously cutting the ribbon to open the new Citizen Science Center in the Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Dr. Wilson toured the Earth Observation and Biodiversity Lab, our home away from our NC State home!
It was a thrill for the Your Wild Life team to share our exciting public science projects with him: Arthropods of Our Homes, School of Ants, Armpit Biodiversity and… the upcoming “Searching for a new species… on your Head!” This new project – a quest to understand the evolution of Demodex forehead mites – will be launching SOON! Dr. Wilson helped us kick things off for this project by letting us sample his very own forehead. We learned that this wasn’t the first time someone looked for mites along his brow line. He once tried self-sampling using a dull razor blade! Fortunately, our research assistant Megan had a much kinder and gentler approach.
Check out the whole day’s events documented (including photos and videos) in our Storify below:
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