Wed March 28 - To São Tomé: I left the Sunset at 10AM packed for my first expedition to Africa. At SFO I met Jim Shevock, the CAS bryologist and Miko Nadal, a SFSU/CAS grad student studying lichens. After three flights, two layovers, 34 hours of travel, and no sleep we arrived in São Tomé at 06:00 (Fri March 30). We tried very hard to stay awake to readjust to the new time zone, we all failed and passed out shortly after we arrived in our rooms.

This Wednesday, March 28^th I depart from SFO to join Dr. Bob Drewes’ expedition to the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe. The islands are in the Gulf of Guinea situated on the west coast of Africa and lie directly on the equator (Figure below). The objectives of this trip are to collect limpets, forams, and an elusive shrew. As far as I am aware, no limpets have ever been recorded from these islands. The forams (foraminifera – a single celled eukaryote with a calcareous test (shell)) are being collected for a phylogenomics project with Dr. Jere Lipps. The shrew is being collected for a biogeography project with UCLA undergraduate student Eden Maloney and Dr. Drewes.

This new blog for the California Academy of Sciences’ Center for Comparative Genomics (CCG) is intended to keep its users and friends up to date on the latest CCG news, events and expeditions.