a primate and an angiosperm

The coolest thing happened at work today. Use your imagination a bit here, 'cause I'm not going to actually tell you the organisms involved.

I was talking to a grad student about this animal she did a project on. And we were chatting and I asked, so, what are the pressures on this animal? (It's endangered. What animal isn't.) And she said, it totally depends on the crop of this one plant. In a bad year, the people in the villages around the national park are more likely to go poaching.

And that plant is the topic of the other story I'm working on this month! These are two stories that I had no reason to think were related, and I hadn't even started reporting the plant one, then suddenly the woman I'd called about my other story was telling me all about the villages where they grow the plant. Apparently these villages smell fantastic.

It was totally cool.