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I’m Breda Zimkus.
I’m a biologist here at the
Museum of Comparative
Zoology. I’m a former
EOL Fellow. I am now a
project manager for the
cryogenic facility here
at Harvard University.
So I study African
amphibians, mostly small
brown frogs, which includes
going into the field and
collecting them, taking them
back into the lab and
doing morphological analysis
and DNA analysis.
I’m mostly interested in
patterns of diversification
across Africa, and I use
frogs as a group to study
speciation and how animals
have diversified across this
landscape that’s vast and
includes many different
types of habitats and ecologies.
First learning basic
information about species
will help us define areas
that are important in the
world for conservation,
so if we don’t have the
basic information about a
species, than we really
can’t make any conservation
decisions about them.
Most of the areas that I
go to are areas that have
never been surveyed
before for amphibians.
So, I’m often going into
areas that are hard to
get to, and no-one’s been
there before or no-one’s
done any survey work
before. So, usually it requires
multiple modes of transportation
and a lot of assistance
from the local people.
I love being in the field;
it’s really the best part
of being in a biologist.
You’re in an exciting area
of the world, and you’re
possibly finding things that
are new to science.
It’s always challenging,
but always worthwhile.
It is exciting to find
something new to science.
You feel like you’re adding
information that will be
useful in conservation,
and it’s exciting to be the
first person to discover this.
I found a few new species
of puddle frog,
Phrynobatrachus chukuchuku,
from Cameroon, and that
was a word from
the local language.
The first thing I do after
I publish a new species
is to put that information
into the African amphibian
LifeDesk so that my
African colleagues and
other researchers have
the information so that
they can go into the
field and identify that frog.
As a Rubenstein Fellow,
my primary goal was to
get the African amphibian
LifeDesk up and running,
to begin inviting members
and getting different biologists
involved in my project,
and my goal, which was to
write almost 400 species
pages for African amphibians.
When I originally started
I said, “Well, I just have
to write one species page
a day, I can do that,” and
then I found out how
difficult it was to make
a comprehensive species page
and include all that
information from all these
different sources, and it
was maybe on week three,
and I was already behind.
And then I had a meeting
with my mentor and he was,
you know, he was impressed
at how many species pages
I had already written, but told
me that the only way that
I was going to reach my goal
was to get collaborators
and students to contribute,
so it kind of was like a
breakthrough when I
realized I couldn’t do it
myself and I had
to find other ways.
And we put together
a letter introducing the
LifeDesk after I had
set it up and it was
basically established. So we
sent this email out to
about 50 colleagues to just
introduce the LifeDesk,
ask them to be members,
so that was the first thing;
and we did get a lot of
people to become members.
And then, from there, it’s just
been slowly making more
contacts, and people at that
point were hearing about
the LifeDesk, so people were
approaching me and asking me
if they could become a member.
So, student participation was
really important. I had people
from Harvard’s herpetology
class write some species
pages, and from there one
of the students had such a
good time writing the species
pages he decided to be
a summer intern. I also had
the Smithsonian advertise a
internship position on their
website, so I had multiple
interns remotely working for me,
and from there we would
communicate via email
and Skype; and they would
do different projects for me,
whether it was helping with
the taxonomic classification
or writing species pages
or uploading photographs.
Don’t get discouraged.
Let me know if you have
any problems and we can chat...
People from all over the
world were participating
in the LifeDesk.
I think the most important
word is ‘collaboration,’ and
take help wherever you
can get it, whether it’s a
student who really is
interested in what you’re
working on or there’s a
resource that’s no longer
under copyright and you
can have a student help
you upload it. There is a
collaborator or colleague
that might have hundreds
of photographs that that
person doesn’t have the
time to upload them
themselves, but they’ll give
them to you. Really, take
everything you can get
from as many places
as you can get it.
There is definitely always
room for contributions.
I really do feel like having
basic taxonomic information
for species is really important.
The African amphibian
LifeDesk and EOL will never
be finished; there’ll always be
room for contributions.
We’ll never know everything
there is to know about
a species. We can always
add more information about
behavior, ecology, morphology.
I feel like being in
control of this African
amphibian LifeDesk and
running it really has made
me more well-known in
the community that I work
in, so people now turn to
me when they have questions
or if they want to help.
So, it really has kind of leaped
me up to another level
that I wasn’t at before.