Profile: Andrea Kozol

"I felt I could really make a contribution to conservation by studying insects."

Dr. Andrea Kozol has loved animals her whole life, but she began studying insects by pure luck. After taking a class in animal behavior, she decided that she wanted to continue that study in graduate school. She started to study the behavior of insects, and found that they were a lot more interesting than she had first expected.

She says there are many good reasons to study insects. Not only do insects do a lot of interesting things, but they do most of them right in your own backyard. You donÕt need to go to foreign countries to study exciting insect behavior. In addition, insects don't know and don't care that you're watching them. "When you study a bird or a mammal," she says "the animal knows you're there and changes its behavior." Insects ignore people watching them so scientists like Dr. Kozol, and even regular curious people, can get a good look at what they're doing. Finally, insects have short lives and produce a lot of babies so it is easy to observe them for many generations. This means that scientists can study what affects the survival of insects more easily than that of an animal that lives a long time such as an elephant. For reasons such as these, Dr. Kozol was hooked, and has been studying and working towards conserving insects ever since.

One summer while she was in graduate school, Dr. Kozol got a job surveying the number of American burying beetles on Block Island and Nantucket Island. Her work with these beetles led to her decision to try and start a captive breeding program for them. "At the time," she says "no one was really working on invertebrate conservation. I felt I could really make a contribution." Right now, she's taking time off from working to spend with her family, but when she goes back to work, she wants to teach.

Learn more about the American burying beetle.