Last week, I wrote for ScienceNOW about a way of estimating how many species of arthropods there are in the tropics. Arthropods are bugs, basically – insects, spiders, and other crunchy things. Entomologists throw around numbers for this – sometimes as high as 30 or 100 million, usually more in the a-few-million range. The paper I wrote about tries to come up with a better estimate, using a method called uncertainty modeling that you can read about in my story.

Entomologists base all of these numbers on beetles. Basically, they’re coming up with some kind of number – don’t ask me about units – that describes to what extent beetles specialize on a tree species. Like, do beetles generally eat the leaves (buds, pollen, whatever) of only one species, or can they eat stuff from a lot of different kind of trees? You do a bunch of field work, come up with a number for that, then wrangle it through an equation that corrects for things like the fact that not all beetles are herbivores or live in trees and not all arthropods are beetles.

This meant a lot of math. This is some of what I had to puzzle out so I could write the story:

Hello, universe? I quit ecology. I am a journalist now. I understood there would be no further math. (Ok, this was actually kind of fun.)

Art: I scanned a little section of my written-on copy of the paper.