As Nate alluded to, we’re crazy busy at the panda base (breeding video to come soon!) but I wanted to write a quick post about how our project was featured on mircroryza.com and zooborns.com today.
Microryza is an innovative new “crowd funding science” platform that allows researchers to post their projects and get small donations from . . . well . . . anyone! Once you back a project and it is completed, you get a shiny publication of the results. We posted our panda project on about a week ago and then zooborns saw our baby pictures and wanted to help us out. Today they featured our project on their site. Yay!
As if that wasn’t enough, I got an awesome update from a highschool tour group, rusticpathways.com, who brings high school students to the panda base periodically. Their group leader, Conner Stowe, has asked me to help make the trips more researched based and so I help with the students while they’re in Ya’An to introduce them to conservation biology and my panda project. I’ve been interviewed, photographed, and video-taped for these trips and thoroughly enjoy engaging the students. Conner wrote,
“I wanted to say thanks for being so great with the students! I see so many students, and some of them just want a trip to China, some just want to play with pandas, and some you can truly have an impact on. I just think it’s cool for you to see in some of their reflections that what may just seem like a couple of silly questions or little moments, can really be a spark that leads to something life changing in these formative years where they’re trying to decide on educational and career goals!”
Here’s a link to the project from the Singapore group who was just here, which mentions me.
Guess I’m a role model now 😉
-Meg