Falling in Love May Take a Lifetime of Research
ALBUQUERQUE — Glauco Machado’s plans for his future were not working out the way he had hoped.
It was 1996, and he was an undergraduate in São Paulo, Brazil. He knew he wanted to be a biologist and to study amphibians with a professor who specialized in their behavior. Then the professor died in a car crash.
An adviser was essential to starting a research career, but no one else at his university worked on amphibians. He was bereft. For a field biologist studying behavior, the animals that are the subjects of study may turn out to be lifelong companions. The young biologist had already given up on tortoises, his first love, because there were none nearby. Now amphibians were out. What was he to do?
A friend and fellow biology student reminded him that his real interest was in studying behavior, not a specific animal, and told him about a cave with large numbers of a relatively unstudied order of arachnids (spiders, ticks, mites and other creatures that people commonly call insects, but are not), easily observed, with a wide range of behaviors. The creatures in question were harvestmen; the most familiar North American member is the daddy longlegs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/science/for-scientists-falling-in-love-is-a-lifetime-of-research.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120626