She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. A syzygy is a link between two words of two or more consecutive letters. By compiling syzygies, Carroll linked unlikely endpoints. Life is like a game of syzygy. Just as yokes of letters make improbable connections between words, yokes of species make improbable connections between habitats, ecosystems and continents.
Biological syzygies can affect human welfare in amazingly complicated ways.
Take raisins and raspberries, for example. Grapevines in California are attacked by grape leafhoppers in whose eggs a species of wasp breeds. Because grape leafhoppers reproduce only once a year, the wasp, which must breed more often to survive, uses raspberry leafhopper eggs when grape leafhopper eggs are not around. In vineyards with raspberries and thus raspberry leafhoppers, grapevines rarely suffer much damage, because there are enough wasps to keep grape leafhopper numbers down. In vineyards without raspberries, and thus without the wasp, chemicals must be used to control grape leafhoppers, raising the cost of growing the grapes and producing raisins.