Message in a Box

                When people ask me what I do, I reply, “I work with frogs,” which is true, but it leaves out salamanders, other components of the amphibian food web, undergraduates, graduate students, and other research scientists, not to mention exciting research questions that can cause the mind to sizzle.  And in response, I usually get some bizarre question from them about an amphibian on their land that sounds like a tale out of a Dr. Seuss book, but with less rhyming.  This week in my seminar on communicating science with the public, we are all trying to boil down our field of research to a simple “message box.”  The message box is the research statement equivalent of packing up your house to move: Ideally, you label the box with something like “Kitchen—pots, pans, potholders, wooden spoons,” which gives you a good idea of what’s in the box (and where it should go) without providing extraneous details like “Kitchen—frying pan, 2 qt sauce pan, 3 qt sauce pan, 4 qt pot, 6 qt soup pan, potholders made by Mrs. Hamilton, 15 wooden spoons, ladle, 3 whisks, and salad tongs."  Even worse would be a message with so little information that you may know that 20 boxes belong in the "Kitchen," but you'd be hard-pressed to locate your can opener in a digestive emergency.  (Alas...my own work description suffers from the can-opener in a box in the kitchen problem.)  My research objective is to understand how human alteration of habitat in various ways impacts amphibian communities, all of which has implications for global amphibian population declines.  There are lots of interesting details, but I’m boiling in my 6 quart soup pan today, and here’s what is left:

                For now, that is my message, and I’m sticking to it.