Jon Fisher
All Stories from Jon
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Scaling Sustainable Agriculture
To feed the world in 2050, we will need to grow roughly 40% more food. To be sustainable, we need our farms to survive and keep producing food, while also protecting the environment that we rely on to sustain us all.
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Camboriú Conservation Field Test: How Much Data is Enough?
With a bit of thought and planning, conservation projects should be able to save time and money with lower-resolution data in some cases, and in others identify where the extra cost is important and necessary to make the right decision.
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Do the Rumble-Rump with Peacock Spiders
Meet the tiny spider with one of the wildest mating displays in the animal kingdom. Jon Fisher takes you into the realm of the peacock spider and its unbelievable "dance moves."
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Everyday Nature: How I Came To Love House Centipedes
I’ve been called a lot of strange things in my life, but I never thought I could be called a nematode-lover. I certainly never envisioned a day when my wife would start referring to house centipedes – those terrifying huge invertebrates that seem to have a million legs and run at top speed – as our “honored guests.” We’re definitely not “bug people,” so what turned us around? As an ecologist, I can appreciate that even unlovable critters serve valuable functions in nature like decomposing organic matter and keeping the populations of other organisms in check. Then again, I never thought the indoors had room for biodiversity or strange “guests.” Living in the aptly named “eco-house” in college (where a dirt floor basement and holes in the walls contributed to hefty populations of slugs, moths, flies, and more) forced me to get used to it, but it certainly wasn’t my ideal living situation. So you can imagine my unhappiness when I discovered several years ago that I’d moved into a condo chock full of house centipedes. Then the ecologist in me started wondering why they were there, and what would happen if I successfully got rid of them.
