Julián Monge-Nájera (born June 6, 1960) is a Costa Rican ecologist, scientific editor, educator and photographer. He has done research with the following institutions: Universidad de Costa Rica, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and Universidad Estatal a Distancia. His scientific work has been featured by The New York Times; National Geographic; the BBC; Wired; IFLoveScience; The Independent (London) and Reader's Digest, among others. He is a member of the expert panel that sets the environmental Doomsday Clock; Onychophora curator in the Encyclopedia of Life; and team member of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Scientific career Monge-Nájera was the Editor of Revista de Biología Tropical/International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation for more than 30 years, but simultaneously published nearly 200 scientific articles and more than 20 books on a variety of biological topics and other areas.
Early work: mollusks and insects Early research focused on tropical freshwater turtles but soon Monge-Nájera moved to freshwater snails (Physidae). He described the vertical movements of the snails in the water column, embryo development and the presence of internal trematode parasites and of oligochaete worms on the snails' body surface. His study of invertebrate ecology always centered on the evolutionary origin of adaptations that allowed mollusks, velvet worms, and insects to inhabit particular places. After his early study of freshwater snails, he turned to terrestrial snails and how they could become agricultural pests after their original forests habitats, where they were rare, were cut down. Monge-Nájera's book on how to control terrestrial and aquatic mollusks of agricultural and medical importance has long been the only one available for tropical species. He published a detailed study on Hamadryas butterflies that analyzed their use of trees as territories and the why and how of sound production. This study solved some questions that had been made but left unanswered by Charles Darwin in his Journal of Researches and in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. His discoveries with butterflies were mentioned in National Geographic Magazine and The Reader's Digest With several colleagues he summarized previous knowledge on sound production by butterflies and described the basic ecology and field behavior of several species. With H.F. Swanson, he reported that daily records of the Red Admiral butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) taken for more than 8000 consecutive days identified demographic patterns that can be missed in studies with less detailed observations. In a copublication with I. Hedström, Monge-Nájera also found that larger fruit flies, which appear to have more sexual partners, are more frequently infected by sexually transmitted fungi. With Ramírez and Chavarría, he found that fig wasps follow simple rules instead of complex calculations when defining the sex of offspring. His work with Z. Barrientos found that even though the individual species change, the guild distribution within insect communities is similar among highland paramos of several countries, paralleling a phenomenon previously recorded in marine islands.
Living fossils and biogeography In the decade of 1990 he published several works on the behavior, ecology and biogeography of velvet worms (Onychophora), a rare type of "living fossil". His studies included extant onychophorans and fossil species that lived in marine Cambrian communities. These studies were mainly coauthored with B.Morera and Hou Xianguang. Monge-Nájera is among those scientists who do not believe in a "Cambrian Explosion" and he published an ecological reconstruction of a Chinese Cambrian community that was surprisingly similar to extant shore communities. His 1995 work set more than a century of disconnected findings inside an evolutionary framework that explained the possible origin of the basic physiological, morphological and behavioral characteristics of the Onychophora, and also produced the first phylogeny that included both extinct and extant species. Contemporary work included some of the earliest experimental studies using these animals and identified the range of light frequencies that they can see. He also produced two reviews that summarized the advances and limitations of historical and ecological biogeography.
Urban ecology and air pollution As a researcher of the Urban Ecology Laboratory at UNED (Costa Rica), Monge-Nájera has studied air pollution, long term vegetation change in cities, urban corridors and landscape quantification. Using tree trunk lichens as bioindicators, he reported that air pollution decreased after lead was eliminated from gasoline, explaining how topography and wind patterns disperse pollution in predictable routes and developed a new technique that reduces costs in pollution monitoring programs; the method allows citizens (including school children) to identify health risks in their communities. His long term vegetation change study found that after a century, habitat conditions can actually improve thanks to bioalphabetization, and identified changes in the dangers faced by Roman ruins. He also proposed detailed routes for urban corridors to improve cities for plants and animals that live in them, and was among the first ecologists to recognize that road mortality caused by vehicles is much higher among insects and other invertebrates than among mammals. With Zaidett Barrientos he developed a quantitative method for landscape analysis that complements remote sensors at a very low cost and allows quantitative measures of changes through time, and published a route map for ecological restoration of the central region of Costa Rica.
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