My name is Logan Luce; I am a senior biology major at the University of Minnesota Morris. I am taking a developmental biology course from P.Z. Myers, a man who moonlights as a horrible amalgamation of scientist and atheist, blogger and firebrand. P.Z. has decided to have all of his developmental students start blogs, presumably for the purpose of mocking the diminutive number of hits that we can eke out of the internets. He has hinted that the final exam will be crashing a poll.
A bit about me and the name of this blog: I am primarily interested in ecology and evolutionary biology, and am fascinated by insects and dinosaurs. If you assume that my interests are the same a prototypical 8 year old boy, you would be close to the mark. A naiad is the larval stage of an insect in the orders Odonata, Ephemeroptera or Plecoptera. These insects exhibit incomplete metamorphosis, so the larvae appear similar to the adult except for the lack of fully developed wings or genetalia. Unlike the larvae of other some related insects (such as grasshoppers) naiads do not live in the same environment as the adults that they later become. A naiad may begin as a badass killing machine that hunts in the bottom of a lake, but it will become a badass killing machine that hunts in the sky. Development from a naiad involves moving from freshwater into the air, losing gills and gaining wings, while still maintaining a similar sort of form. As an undergrad that hopes to become a grad student doing cool research on neat bugs someday, I commiserate with the naiad. I don’t want to change too much, but I’m looking foreword to moving to a new environment and the possibility of gaining wings...
and 360 degree vision...
and the ability to hunt and kill on the fly.
(That's what grad school is like, right?)
