Open eyes and open mind: Can you teach the role of inquiry in ecology?

Many ecologists have discovered fascinating research projects by spending time in the field with open and inquiring mind and eyes. An inquisitive attitude can be encouraged; one example is the OTS course exercise, sending students into the field to generate a list of 50 questions about what they had observed, and then developing some of those questions into potential projects. Observations in one ecosystem may lead to new questions in another ecosystem. I’ll give an example of how learning about a tropical ant-plant interaction as a graduate student led to an ongoing 45-year long research project in the Rocky Mountains.