First Name: Renan is the 4581^st most popular name in the USA, so that means per million head of population, 19.94 men will be a Renan. Not enough people know this, nor do they know the name means Fresh or Luxuriant.

Last Name: In Turkish the name Ozturk means: Pure; a genuine Turk. Ozturk is therefore a vastly preferable surname to Melez which means Mongrel.

As a young man, Renan would often say: “Spiders are my life”, as he watched them climb, spin their rope-like webs and move deftly over improbably smooth surfaces. As a talented young artist he would often paint beautiful pictures of the poisonous, soulless beasts; vile creatures he’d call: “My special friends”.

And as a biologist he’d search everywhere for them, even though such work involved strenuous physical activity, required living in primitive conditions and suffering all kinds of appalling weather.

Then one day as Renan was, in the interest of science, pulling the legs off several arachnids, a light bulb went on in his head: “I love spiders, I love to climb, I love to suffer for long periods in bad weather and I love to paint, surely Monsanto has a job for me?”

It appears he was wrong; go here to see where the path led him next ……

The Kamchatka Project: Explore to conserve …

This sort of mission is the best of both worlds; a trip which will be great in its own right but with a larger purpose also firmly in mind. Before going on to see what the lads are planning, maybe it’s worth having a read on where they’re going ……. it sounds a great area, so here are some facts just to set the scene.

The Kamchatka Peninsula …….

Where it is: It’s a 1,250-kilometer long peninsula in the Russian Far East which lies nine time zones east of Moscow and is twice the size of the UK.

Who lives there: Basically not many, the majority of the 402,500 inhabitants are Russians but there are also about 13,000 Koryaks who are the original crew who have been there for millennia. Some anthropologists have speculated that a land bridge connected the Eurasian and North American continents during Late Pleistocene era, so the Koryaks were likely to have been part of the migration for people en-route to North America.

More than half of the population lives in the town of Petropavlovsk - Kamchatsky and the peninsula contains the Volcanoes of Kamchatka region, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Need an umbrella? Yes. The region receives up to 110 inches of rain per year (that’s 9 feet!), the summers are cool and winters are seriously harsh even for the 16,000 bears that live there. And it’s definitely got some salmon too and that’s where the guys come in, go here to see what they’re planning and it looks great  ……