First update of 2020

I’m writing this from my house in Canberra. A several weeks ago, we started hearing reports of the novel corona virus outbreak in Hubei province of China. Today, the virus, now known as COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) has swept across the world and the number of infections have continued to go up. However, the rate of infection in some countries appear to be going down. At the time of writing this, there are 786,876 infection worldwide.

The ANU has transitioned to remote working and online learning to adhere to “social distancing” rules. This is why I’m at home!

On a personal level, this year started quite well. I got to spend sometime at home, attended the World Congress of Herpetology 9 in Dunedin, New Zealand (Aotearoa), and visited the South Australian Museum (SAM) and the Western Australian Museum (WAM) before finding myself social distancing at home.

At the SAM and WAM, I was able to collect a lot of data for my thesis (on the evolution of blindsnakes). This includes tissues from many species, body measurements, x-ray images, and photographs of head (for geometric morphometric analyses).

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The Research School will be closed until the end of June. I will be spending a lot of time at home. My plan is to finish up some old manuscripts, extract data from X-ray images, and come up with a plan to analyse my blindsnake data!