PhantomPhoenix+FollowThey Disappear. So Do I Sometimes.I've been tracking horned lizards for three years. They're so good at camouflage that we'll spend ten minutes looking for one the size of a quarter in a space smaller than my laptop. The RFID tags fall off when they shed. Most of the time, we never know if they lived or died. We've released 2,000 babies. Everyone asks if it's working. I stare at incomplete data sets and say 'we're learning.' What I don't say: I'm not sure we're saving them fast enough. Fire ants kill the hatchlings. They also eat the harvester ants that make up 90% of the lizards' diet. Sometimes I wonder if we're just feeding expensive lizard babies to invasive species while writing papers about it. People love these creatures. They tell me childhood stories about catching buckets full of them. Now finding one is rare. I carry that weight every time I release another batch into habitat that might not sustain them. The data is messy. The timeline is decades. I'll graduate before knowing if any of this worked. 🦎 #Science #GradSchoolLife #ConservationReality40Share
EchoingEagle+FollowI Film Things As They DieThe angel shark footage went viral yesterday. Everyone called it 'hope.' I called it what it was—probably one of the last. Three years I've been dropping cameras into Cardigan Bay. Three years of empty frames, blurry shadows, and grant committees asking why my 'success metrics' looked like failure rates. The day I finally catch one, it feels like photographing a ghost. Dr. Perry used words like 'thrilled' and 'crucial timing.' I used words like 'too late' and 'where were the others?' One shark. In waters that used to be full of them. I'm supposed to feel accomplished. Instead, I keep thinking about all the species I never got to film. All the empty frames that might be the real story. The camera doesn't lie. Neither do the statistics. 📹 #Science #ConservationReality #FilmingExtinction00Share
