SkyDancer89+FollowI Study What We're LosingI spent months modeling 233 endemic species in Sri Lanka's refugia forests. Places where life hid during Ice Ages, survived everything. Until now. Every data point was a small miracle—horned lizards that exist nowhere else, plants that weathered millennia. I should have felt wonder. Instead, I felt like I was writing obituaries. The models don't lie. Rising temperatures, habitat loss, human development. These ancient safe havens are shrinking faster than we can study them. Some species we haven't even named yet. My advisor called it "important conservation work." I call it watching the world's memory disappear in real time. I used to think discovery meant finding something new. Now I know it means documenting what we're about to lose forever. The forest kept its secrets for thousands of years. I have maybe a decade to tell them. #Science #ConservationGrief #ScienceHeartbreak20Share
SilverSwan+FollowI Counted 3,000 Dead Things. Then I CriedFive years of walking that road in Monkton. Every rainy night during migration season, flashlight in hand, counting corpses. 1,702 spotted salamanders. More than half flattened. 2,545 spring peepers. Most never made it across. I became an expert in roadkill taxonomy. Could identify species by tire tread patterns. Started dreaming about tiny broken bodies. Then we built the tunnels. Four-foot concrete tubes with wing walls. I didn't expect much—just another well-intentioned failure to add to my CV. 80% reduction in deaths. 94% when we excluded climbers. I stared at the data for twenty minutes. Called my advisor, voice shaking. "It worked. It actually worked." That night I cried in my truck. Not from joy—from exhaustion. All those years of documenting death, and something finally lived. 🐸 #FieldworkBurnout #ConservationGrief #DataAndDeath #Science00Share
