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About Patrick Kociolek
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Patrick Kociolek
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I was born in Maryland, and attended both Anne Arundel Community College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where I graduated with a BS in Biological Sciences. I became excited about algae, and diatoms in particular, during amazing field experiences at the University of Michigan Biological Station and Iowa Lakeside Lab. I received a MS degree (Biological Sciences) from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. (Natural Resources) from the University of Michigan, where I also did a post-doctoral fellowship.
I held the G Dallas Hanna Chair in Diatom Studies at the California Academy of Sciences for 20 years, where I also was the Director of Research and Executive Director. Currently I am the Director of the Natural History Museum and Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and I teach at the University of Michigan Biological Station during summers.
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Off to Kauai!
We took off for Kauai today, via Hawaiian Airlines. The 30-minute flight was easy, and after getting our gear and vehicles together, we made it to the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the north shore
.
The Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 717 was great.
The view as we approached Lihue airport on Kauai.
We all hiked around the property, and some made it the mile-and-a-half to a small waterfall. It is stated that this watershed is one of the most pristine in Hawaii, and the algae were fantastic. Green, blue-green algae and diatoms were prevelant throughout the watershed. Once back to the main house, several folks were checking out the algae we collected earlier in the day.
The National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai.
Alison and Amy checking over samples at our makeshift lab.
The Botanical Garden owns over 1000 acres, and the grounds are well –interpreted. It is a very impressive piece of real estate, and the folks here have projects on-going in Ethnobotany, Restoration Biology and Aquatic Biology.
View from the forest to the ocean.
Taro patch being studied at NTBG.
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Colorado
Hey Patrick, What are you looking for in the samples? I am a Colorado private investigator living in Denver, but I used to live in Kauai. I love it there and hope to move back some day.
What to collect?
How do you decide what to collect? Did you have a plan or is it kind of "random"?
We have a plan!
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. We definitely had a plan. The plan was to look globally at the Hawaiian Islands, and then make sure we collected sites that might be unique to one or more islands, so that we could get some of the unique places (the Alaka'i Swamp, for example was one of those unique places). We are also interested in questions such as, "Do these deeply incised canyons that are right next to one another (such as those we visited on the North Shore of Kauai) have the same or different floras?" [our preliminary observations suggest they can be quite different]. Anyway, we are trying to keep a lot of these types of questions in mind as we explore the Islands. We just have to watch ourselves; it is easy to over-collect and end up taking more samples than we could ever study.
Best,
pat
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