|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
||
 |
|||||||||||||
| Claudia Alejandra Medina U. | |||||||||||||
 |
| There is a long history behind my current interest in beetles and
in entomology. As an undergraduate student, I had the opportunity to admire
the most common and fascinating Colombian dung beetle, Oxysternon conspicillatum.
This beetle is abundant in the rural areas, where it is easy to appreciate
its behaviour around a pad of dung. With the encouragement of my father
I did my first field observations on the behaviour and labours of this beetle.
Having been motivated by this I started to read about diversity and ecology
of beetles, particularly those of African Scarabs. At that time, I became
aware of the immense diversity of beetles in the world, and the disproportionately
small number of people working on them. I also knew that in Colombia, as
well as in other Latin American countries, there are not many entomologists
dedicated to the study of taxonomy of Neotropical beetles. Since then, I
decided to study entomology and my continued commitment is to work as much
as possible on the taxonomy and systematic of beetles. In the beginning of my career, I did some work with other groups of insects (mainly ants), and small studies in ecology and diversity of dung beetles of Colombia. However, I love working on taxonomy and systematics and I am really committed to the scarab tribe Canthonini. Now, not surprisingly, I am here in Africa. I am enjoying being in a beetle's country. My e-mail address is cmedina@zoology.up.ac.za |
Back