As a self-proclaimed beach bum and avid sailor, Riccardo Papa always checks the weather. An evolutionary biologist at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Rio Piedras, who studies the genomics of butterfly wing colors, Papa has a weather app on his phone that tells him when it’s safe to sail, paddleboard, or surf. So when Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico over the weekend, he had known it was coming for a couple of days.
Papa wasn’t too worried, but he went through the steps already familiar to him from Hurricane Maria just five years prior. The first was to make sure his close family was safe. Unlike with Maria, when he and his family had to flee their home to stay with family farther from the coast, Papa figured it would be safe enough for them to stay at their home near the shore. He reached out to everyone in ...
