Students from the Dos Ríos high school collect the sample jar that holds insects captured in the Malaise trap. The Dos Ríos students check the traps weekly. Photo by J.B. Forbes.
The ongoing work to document all the multicellular flora and fauna in ACG as part of the overall BioAlfa project was recently featured in Grow magazine, a Gingko Bioworks publication that exists to tell the unfolding story of synthetic biology. Written by Bill Allen, the author of The Green Phoenix, which documented the early history of how ACG came to be, the article highlights the work of Dan and Winnie and the quest to create a complete biodiversity library for ACG and ultimately, all of Costa Rica. It features students in the small community of Dos Ríos, on the rain forest side of ACG, who work with the GDFCF Science Team to collect insect specimens near their school and send them to the University of Guelph, Canada, for DNA barcoding. It’s not every science class in the world that can ask: Will we discover a new species today? Here in ACG, it’s a real possibility, and it is all made possible thanks to funding from the Keidanren Nature Conservation Fund, the Comb family, New England Biolabs, and Cell Signaling Technology, as well as all our individual donors. You can read the article here.
Where it all started! Dan and Winnie in their house in ACG. Photo by J.B. Forbes.