I’m Ben, and I like heavy metal, sports, and turtles.

My first interest in ecology came when I was young and lived on a farm near Mayfair, Saskatchewan which was only a mile down from the crooked trees. At the time, nobody really offered an explanation as to why the trees grew like that, so I was left to my own imagination which led me down a path to study the natural world. In my youth during some free-time, I could often be found looking at rocks and throwing them into dugouts, catching frogs, tadpoles, grasshoppers and trying to keep them as pets to my parents displeasure.

Now, as an adult, I am in the final phase of my undergraduate majoring in environmental biology with aspirations to further get a masters in the future (not right away). My biggest interests include facilitation and spread of invasive plants, riparian ecosystem functions, parasitology, and of course, wood-boring insects. With Troutreach, I am working with Monochamus spp. (otherwise known as the deadly white-spotted pine sawyer beetle) studying larval sounds as a means for early detection and wood-boring insect identification. Apart from these few fields, my interest in biology extends to pretty much anything living and breathing throughout the environment.