Allergic to science

Tags

allergies, field biology, Field work, nature, prickles, research, science, thistles

I am still(!) excited for the gradually warming temperatures and the promise of little green shoots stubbornly persisting through the harsh cold snaps we’re still having.

Spring is one of the worst times of year for my allergies, as it is full of tree pollen.  Some of the earliest flowering species depend on wind pollination, and they therefore have A LOT of pollen.  Now, you might be thinking that it’s ironic for a field biologist (especially one who studies pollination!) to be allergic to pollen, but the fact of the matter is that it is very common for field biologists to not only have the usual hayfever allergies, but also to develop very serious allergic reactions to their study species.

In my particular case, I’ve been working with a species of invasive thistle for five years.  During the field season, we have to tie little baggies around each and every flower head of the individuals in our study to make sure that we are not accidentally dispersing the seeds of the invader.

A colleague in the middle of bagging some thistle flower heads to prevent dispersal.  The thistles get A LOT bigger than this, some up to 2 meters tall.

And during the heyday of the season, when plants can produce hundreds of flower heads every week, it is a full time job to make sure they are all bagged.  During my worst season, I was out at the field by dawn and worked until sunset every day for 18 days straight, trying to keep all of the flower heads bagged while also doing my research.  Some days I ran out of daylight before I could get everything done.

Hundreds of bagged flower heads.

And of course, while you’re tying little bags to hundreds of flower heads on thistles, you’re bound to get pricked thousands of times a day.

Prickles!

So by now I have developed a serious allergic reaction to my own study species!  Even when I am just out for a fun day hike, if I brush up against thistles, I break out in a rash of red bumps.  If I reach out to inspect a thistle flower head, my whole hand swells.

I have heard of researchers developing allergies to the ants or mosquitoes that they study too.

One of the downsides of being a field biologist, I suppose.

Feeling weathered

Tags

field biology, Field work, nature, rain, sailing, stories, story telling, unpredictable, weather

My weatherly predictions for spring were way off…It’s still well below zero and snowing here…Oh well!  It reminded me of another time when a friend was famously mistaken about the turns of weather.

One year, during field season, I was working with an eclectic group of field biologists.  It included a city boy who had never done field work before, an ornithologist from Arkansas, and an ex-sailor.  I’ve told stories about the first two, but I was inspired today to talk about the third.

Her name was Emma, and she had just finished spending six months as a sailor on the high seas, doing whatever it is sailors do these days (I’m imagining climbing up the mainsail and swinging around on ropes, but she complained of having to shower in salt water and bad sun burns).

Emma used to brag that, as a sailor, she could predict the weather down to the minute.

One day, she and I were out weighing baby birds in the nest.  The sky was ominous and dark, with roiling clouds and distant rumbles of thunder.  I glanced at Emma, and she squinted at the sky.  We were a good mile from the field vehicle, and not keen to get caught in a sudden downpour.

“I’d say we have a good 20 or 30 minutes,” she said confidently, giving me a sailor’s wink.  We finished our work in a matter of seconds, put the birds back in the nest, took one step out onto the trail, and BAM!  The heavens opened up and it just poured.

I’m not talking a drizzle here, either.  We were instantly soaked, and buckets and buckets of water were streaming down from the sky.  We had to shout to be heard over the sound of rain pounding the earth.  “Twenty minutes, eh?!” I shouted at her.

She just shrugged, and we headed back to the field vehicle, shouting sailing ditties at in disharmony as we slogged through the mud.

How to pollinate an American Chestnut (and your sinuses)

Tags

American chestnut, awkward, ecology, field biology, Field work, pollen, science, story

When I worked for the American Chestnut foundation a few years ago, one of my primary jobs was to pollinate isolated surviving trees.  (If you don’t know the story of the chestnut, you can read about it here.)  These LSAs (Large Surviving Americans) are all at least over one hundred years old, having persisted in spite of the fungal blight that made their species ecologically extinct.

They tend to be gnarly old things, with huge cankers developed by their immune system to help combat the fungus.  But they’re beautiful to me, because they’re stubborn, and I admire things that just don’t give up, no matter how many times they get knocked down.

Developing chestnuts.

Anyway, because these trees are rare, they are often isolated from each other and therefore cannot produce viable nuts without help from us humans.  Because we want to promote genetic diversity (and hopefully the persistence of the species), the fathers from which we gather pollen are carefully selected.

These are female chestnut flowers, mature after the male catkins have senesced.

Chestnut trees are monoecious, which means that they have male and female flowers on the same tree.  However, the male flowers develop before the female flowers are mature, to prevent self-pollination as much as possible.  That allows us to run around collecting male pollen early in the summer, and then to revisit the same trees when their female flowers have developed with pollen from distant trees.

After we pollinate them, we bag the flowers to make sure they don’t receive unwanted pollen.

The difficulty in this whole process is that because the trees are old, they are tall, and their flowers are hard to reach.  We were lucky enough to have a local power company loan us their massive bucket truck, which we used to access flowers 80 ft (25 m) above the ground.

My friend Deb in a bucket.

So picture this: you are in a small bucket, 80 ft above the ground.  It is swaying in the wind, and so are the branches that you are trying to reach.  You have a makeshift 13 ft (4 m) pole made of bamboo, duct tape, and a clothes hook, with which you can snag a nearby branch.

Very high off the ground!

Pulling it close, you tie the branch with a rope to your belt.  The tension is strong enough to pull you up on your tiptoes, and there is a delicate balance between holding the branch in the bucket and getting flung out of the bucket yourself.

My view from a bucket truck.

This was just a normal day in the field for me back then.  Without thinking a thing about it, I balanced on my toes and reached into my carpenter’s belt to get a film tube full of pollen.  But just as I opened it, the wind tugged at the branch and I slipped.  The tube of pollen exploded in my face and I ended up inhaling a teaspoon full of chestnut gamete.

Twenty minutes later, when I had to meet a wealthy donor, I was still sneezing and crying, my nose running obnoxiously.

I make such a good impression sometimes.

The “How to tell if you’re a crazy field biologist” Quiz

Tags

ecology, field biology, Field work, fun, humour, naturalist, nature, outdoors, quiz

A while back I wrote a post on how to tell if you’re a crazy cyclist, and I thought it would be fun to do a similar quiz for field biologists.  Now you don’t have to be a field biologist to fill a lot of these criteria…naturalists and nature enthusiasts, basically anyone who loves to be outdoors, will fit a lot of the descriptions.

1.  Not easily bugged  Insects are omnipresent in a field biologist’s life.  They are a fact of nature.  Yes, even in the snow.  If you find yourself unperturbed by arthropods, give yourself one point.  If you don’t mind creepy crawlies crawling or creeping on your skin, give yourself two.  If you’ve even washed dead insects out of your hair at the end of the day, give yourself five.

2.  Parasitized  If you spend a lot of time outside, you are guaranteed to pick up an unwanted visitor (or five, or fifty).  If you’ve plucked at least one species of ectoparasite off your body at the end of the day, give yourself a point.  Give yourself two points if you’ve picked off more than one species after a day in the field.  Give yourself five points if you’ve flicked said ectoparasites at your friends over a cold one at dinner.

3.  Weathered  Field biologists tend to be obsessed with the weather.  We’ve been through it all, rain, hail, sleet, snow…and we’re constantly discussing what the weather will be like in five minutes and in five days.  If you’ve ever had a conversation purely about the weather (past, present, or future) that lasted longer than 15 minutes, give yourself one point.  If you have a weather website bookmarked, give yourself two.  If you check the website more than ten times a day, and/or can tell when it is going to rain by sensing that subtle temperature drop preceding it, give yourself five.

4.  The two shelves paradigm  Field biologists are remarkably good at carrying lots of heavy equipment in the field.  Any field biologist worth his/her salt knows that there are two shelves on the (standard) human body that can bear a lot of weight: the shoulders and the hips.  If you’ve ever carried more than fifty pounds of equipment (to include bags of soil of course) into the field, give yourself a point.  If you’ve ever had a binocular strap tan, give yourself two.  If you’ve carried a backpack full of mist-netting equipment, a car battery, a thirteen foot pole, and a nine foot aluminium ladder through a peat bog (or the equivalent), give yourself five.

5.  Thermostat  Field biologists spend time outside in all kinds of weather and all kinds of seasons, so they tend to have a pretty high temperature tolerance.  If you find that you are comfortable in a range of temperatures more than double that of *ordinary* humans around you (i.e. humans adjusted to temperature controlled conditions), give yourself a point.  If you’ve ever gotten frostbite before you’ve felt cold, give yourself five.

6.  Big Fish  Most of the field biologists I’ve known love to spin a good yarn to anyone who will listen.  If you have a particular obsession for storytelling, give yourself a point.  If most of your stories start with, “This one time, in the field…” give yourself two.  If you can point to scars on your body to go along with the story, give yourself five.

7.  Hands on  Field biology is a very hands on career.  It requires you to apply both your body and your mind to solve problems.  If you’re a hands on kind of person, give yourself a point.  If that includes catching/holding wild animals, give yourself two.  If you go out of your way to find salamanders under rocks, give yourself five.

8.  Junk in the trunk  You has to be pretty innovative sometimes when you’re in the field.  Maybe you’re in the middle of nowhere, you certainly can’t afford to backtrack to the nearest Wal-mart to pick up something you’ve forgotten.  If you always have a healthy supply of duct tape in the trunk of your car and the ability to make just about anything out of PVC piping, give yourself a point.  If you’ve ever invented something on the spot to solve a problem using just out of the junk in the trunk of your car, give yourself five MacGyver.  Remember, a good field biologist always has a lot of junk in his/her trunk!

9.  What’s in a name?  Competent field biologists are very aware of the living world around them.  They often know the names not only of their study organisms, but of the flora and fauna around them, the types of ecosystems to expect in given locations, and the land use history of their area.  If you can comfortably name more than 50% of the plant and animal species in your area, give yourself a point.  If you know most of them by more than one name (i.e. common and Latin), give yourself two.  If you’re more embarrassed about forgetting the Latin name of burdock (it’s Arctium minor, btw) than about forgetting the name of that guy you just met, give yourself five.

10.  Out of doors  There is something incredibly special about being outside.  That’s where everything happens, am I right?  If you require a certain amount of time outside every day, give yourself a point.  If you must get outside, even in the face of incredibly horrible weather, give yourself two.  If you get hives from spending too much time indoors, give yourself five.

11.  It’s a dirty joke  It’s true, field biologists get pretty dirty.  Wading through waist high mud will do that to a person.  If you have a high tolerance for being covered in dirt, sweat, and blood, give yourself a point.  If you turn the water black when you finally get to take a shower, give yourself two.

12.  Creature comforts  Staying at a field station requires you to sacrifice certain comforts of civilization; hot water, electricity, food other than beans and rice…yet, if you are super stoked to stay at a biological station because of all the cool animals or plants (or fungi) you will possibly spot, give yourself a point.  Give yourself five if you are willing to travel halfway around the world, camp in snow, or sleep in a tree canopy just for the chance of seeing that one rare thing…

RANKING

0-12  Just not an outdoorsy type?  That’s okay; nobody’s perfect.

13-20  You’re a weekend warrior!  You like the occasional dalliance with nature, but you’re not signing any contracts.

21-30  Puppy love…you’re getting to that point where you miss the out-of-doors terribly when you can’t be out there.  This is just the beginning, my friend.

31-40  Pretty tough!  You’ve got the makings of an excellent field biologist.  Think about quitting your day job.  (Hint: don’t do it for the money.)

41-50  You’re probably a naturalist with a strong passion for everything outside.  You might even have lists of the different things you’ve seen.  Heavens forbid!

51-57  Yep, you’re a field biologist all right.  I’d shake hands with you, but you smell. 

YYYYYYYYYYeeeepp.  I am a 54 according to that quiz.  Sorry about the stench.  

What’s your score?

Nest naming

Tags

Birds, ecology, field biology, Field work, nature, outdoors, stories, storytelling

Back when I worked for an ornithologist in the swamps of northern Ohio, one of my primary jobs was nest-searching.  Bird nests are intentionally cryptic and that makes them exceptionally difficult to find.  Add to that the fact that our study organism was the American Goldfinch, which nests preferentially in brambles, and that our study site was in a swamp lush with poison ivy (up to my hips in places), and it made for a challenging task.

Wading through blackberry thorns, green briar, and multiflora rose from 8 am to 6 pm every day left my legs looking like someone had taken a lash to them.  They still have an intricate mesh work of fine white scars that stand out across my shins.

And, though I had been resistant to poison ivy at the beginning of the summer, it wasn’t long before I became sensitized to it.  At the end of the season, I was “one gigantic poison ivy blister”, according to my “hilarious” PI.

But those Goldfinch nests.  Boy were they things of beauty…composed of thistle fluff and cattail down, they shone like golden pillows in the sunlight.  And to find one was so rare…we searched every branch of every bush and tree across that nature reserve for weeks, a sweeping arc of field biologists on the hunt.

There were rewards for all of this effort and pain.  Namely*, if you were the one to find a nest, you got to name it.  It was a unique privilege, and I will tell you that when I found a nest, I glowed more than any time I received an academic award, no matter how prestigious.

Naming the nests was a game in itself.  You were under a lot of pressure to come up with something clever or cute, funny and witty.  Because every nest was such a precious resource, it just had to have the perfect name.

And the names told the story of how the nest was found, where it was located, or the personality of the parents.  There was Hole in the Wall and Diamond in the Rough.  There was Phoenix (for a nest we thought was dead that was resurrected) and A Pirate Walks into a Bar (a bad joke, because the nest was completely inaccessible).  There was Powerline and Northern Shamrock and Copper.

Isn’t it funny how the simplest things can sometimes mean the most?  A good name earned a guffaw from our team leader and the respect of the other field assistants (not an easy thing to win).  A poor name fizzled like a bad firework.  Those names were immortalized on the maps we drew out of our sites.  We followed each nest, and each family of birds for months, watching as the parents mated, laid eggs, hatched and reared their young. We spent hours in bird blinds recording every move of the mother.  (“3:12 pm  mother gets up and looks at eggs.  3:13 pm  mother sits back on eggs.  3:15 pm bird flies overhead.  mother looks up.”)

We weighed the birds and recorded the colour of their plumage.  Holding those little embryonic nestlings in our hands to keep them warm inevitably caused us to bond with them.  In the case of a happy ending, we watched the little nestlings fledge and fly for the first time, all stubby tails and clumsy wings. 

We mourned every nestling mortality as if it was our own.

*That’s a pun.  Duh.

When you’re not out standing in your field

Tags

drought, ecology, experiments, field biology, Field work, grad school, perseverence, research, science

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of field work horror stories.  I don’t mean the ones where I was covered in leeches or ticks (or scars), I mean times when things really go wrong with your field work in an epic and disastrous way.  It has happened to any field biologist worth his/her salt.

I once was doing field work on biodiversity in sugar cane fields (as compared to wild fields) and showed up one morning to find that my research field had been harvested.  Another time, a research plot got blasted by a fire hydrant.  Wild turkeys once annihilated one of my insect traps in search of a snack.

A post on one of my favourite blogs brought this to my mind this morning…Mark Berkery wrote about a severe drought in Oz.  I loved his post, but it got me thinking about droughts in general, such as the devastating drought in the mid west of the US last year.  I’ve lived in a desert before, with severe water restrictions, and I’ve done field work in the outback.  All of these times were very dry.

But the region where I am currently living is almost never dry.  Nevertheless, one of my fellow grad students (in fact, my best friend) started out with the intention of doing a drought study here.  If I remember correctly, she had 180 plants, with varying drought regimes randomly assigned.

That summer, it rained Every. Single. Day.

I remember biking home…every time I pedaled my foot would go under water.  And her poor drought study…kicked the bucket.*  (It rained on her parade?)

But field work is all about picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and continuing on.  It’s like breaking your shoulder half-way through a field season…and then you have to climb over four sets of fences one-handed (one of which is filled with angry wasps), while carrying sampling gear and dragging a science wagon with two full water tanks.  And after all that, someone goes and sprays half your research plots with Glyphosate.

Sigh.

Listen, the moral of this story is…okay, I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story, but if you’re having a rough time, if you’re not feeling like you’re “out standing” in your field right now, it happens to everyone.  Sometimes it will rain on your parade, and sometimes it will drought when all you need is water.  Nothing teaches you this lesson (over and over again) like field biology.

*Sorry.

The importance of a city boy

Tags

city boy, field biologist, field biology, Field work, hardcore, perspective, science, stories

Field biologists can be a rough and tumble lot.  We work in all kinds of weather and all kinds of terrain, get torn apart by brambles and preyed upon by ectoparasites.  We slog heavy gear and are not afraid to dig, pick-axe, machete, and chain-saw our way through obstacles.  Most of the time, we work on a shoe-string budget and lots of man-hours.

One summer, I was working in a swamp with three other veteran field biologists.  It was hard work…our shirts would be soaked in sweat by mid-morning and would stay that way all day.  The PI (principal investigator) on the project used to say, “You know you’ve been sweating a lot when you’ve drunk 4 liters of water before lunch and still haven’t had to pee.”

Of course, because we were field biologists, none of us would complain.  None of us wanted to seem like the weakest link, you see.  We all had to prove how tough we were, even when our legs were bloody from walking through blackberry thickets.

But a couple of weeks into the summer, the PI hired on a fourth field hand.  His name was Malcolm and he was from Manhattan.  Mal had never done field work before; he had never gone hiking or camping.  He was a city boy, through and through.

The first day, he didn’t even last an hour before he piped up, “Whew!  Boy, is it hot out here.  Gee whiz I am sweating through my shirt.  Look at how much sweat is on my shirt!”  We all looked over at him in mild surprise and bemusement.  His curly auburn hair clung damply to his forehead.

Later that day, it was: “Ow, ouch!  Why are we walking through these brambles again?”

Because of Mal, we started taking more water breaks, we found a shady place to eat lunch, and the whole intensity of the summer eased up, if only just a bit.  He invented a game to play.  At the end of the day, we collected points in this way: a thorn in clothing is 1 point, a thorn in skin is 2 pt.s, a bloody thorn is 5 pt.s, and a tick is 10 pt.s.  Somehow, we learned how to laugh at ourselves, just being parodied by the city boy.  He wasn’t afraid of looking weak or incompetent, and somehow he never did.

One time, he and I were sewing a bird blind out of camouflage material.  After we had spent and hour sewing on opposite sides, I lifted mine to show my handiwork.  He tried to lift his side and discovered he had been sewing the material to his trouser leg the entire time.

I don’t normally consider field biologists to be an overly serious bunch, but it sure did take a city boy to give us some perspective that summer.  And he was a great asset to the team.

I stole this photo of him from the internet!

Flashy birds

Tags

Australia, Bush Stone Curlew, Field work, humour, nature, stories, story telling, travel

My namesake, the Bush Stone Curlew, cannot be described as a flashy bird.  It is very plain and prefers to go unnoticed (that works in describing me too).  Just to look at one, you would never think it was anything special. (Also appropriate for me!)

But I’ll tell you a story that shows how things are not always as they seem and it involves me and a bush stone curlew.

At the time, I was working on an independent study project on a desert island off the coast of Australia.  The goal was to get 160 hours of field surveys done in three weeks, and then to write a 50 page paper and do a presentation three days after that.  I was sleeping in various backpacker’s at the time, and doing maybe 40-50 km of survey transects per day.

I wanted to collect as much data as was physically possible, so I continued to do surveys during the day and spent the nights working the the paper.  After a couple of sleepless nights spent typing and doing research in the island’s dingy old library, my stress levels were pretty high.

I decided, at 2 am, that I needed to go for a run.  Right.  Now. 

So I went.  I dropped everything and sprinted out the door.  The problem was that it was black as pitch outside.  There were no streetlights on the island, and without a moon, there was very little light to see by.  I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face.

But, still, I ran.  I ran down a steep hill and around the bend, my feet remembering the transects I had walked so many times, although I was effectively blind.  I remember thinking how easy it would have been just to take a wrong step and to fall into a ditch full of lawyer-cane and break a leg.  But I kept running…until…

These white bars started flashing across my vision!  I recoiled and threw my arms up to protect myself…my body’s reflex was as if something was flying at my face.

My first thought was that I was hallucinating from exhaustion.

My second thought was that I had fallen and hit my head.

But then, as the bars kept flashing, I heard a flutter of wings and then the distinctive and eerie wailing of the curlew.

You see, the curlews have these fairly nondescript white wing bars. But the curlews have a defensive display where they flap their big wings, showing off those bars. During the day, they are not noticeable.  BUT, at night, in the inky darkness…they make quite the impression.

Ode to the field vehicle

Tags

cars, field biology, field vehicle, Field work, ode, science, stories

A field vehicle can be one of the most valuable pieces of equipment that a field biologist uses, both monetarily and in terms of utility.  Depending on the nature of your field work, a proper field vehicle can make or break an experiment.

Although field biologists will argue all day about what the best field vehicle is, it really depends on what you need at the time.  Sometimes, you have to make do completely without a field vehicle.  In the best of times, you have a field vehicle ideally suited to your research.  At such times, you can become almost emotionally attached to your vehicle.  You’ve been through a lot together, creek beds and mud slicks.  You’re both a little beaten up and dented by the end of the season…maybe neither of you is firing on all cylinders.

A field vehicle can be a field biologist’s best friend.

From the little Toyota Corolla into which we would daily play a game of tetris to get six mist nets, a field spectrophotometer, a bird blind, a 4 meter pole with a mirror on, a 2 meter aluminium ladder, a small table and two folding chairs, a bird banding kit, and five sweaty field biologists, to the all-wheel drive sports utility vehicle which I took through all kinds of terrain with squealing undergrads in the back, to the dinky fire van that has been to the moon (and once caught on fire), field vehicles have featured in my own work very heavily.

O field vehicle, how we have loved thee
On the land and on the sea
Rambling o’er hill and dale
I wonder oft if you will fail
And as we plunge through muddy stream
I hear your undercarriage scream
And so I write this ode to you, and pray
That you will last the season (or at least the day)
That you will not feel overwrought
You vehicle that I have bought.

The Fire Van

Field vehicle on the ocean (aka a boat)

Undergrads dancing from the perspective of a field vehicle

And, of course, the inimitable science wagon from this summer’s field work

 

Hey punk!

Tags

Field work, insects, nature, paper wasp, photography, polistes dominula, wasp, wasp nest

“Hey punk! Stay away from my fence!”  A European Paper Wasp (Polistes dominula) guarding her nest

This is the fence that I must climb over (one-handed) with my sampling gear every day to get to my field site.  It is guarded by a growing nest of angry paper wasps.

Don’t come in here!

They are surprisingly timid; although (inevitably) I have been stung, they seem to prefer darting at me and chewing on my hair for a little while to actually stinging me.

“We’re just trying to protect our nest, okay?”

Okay.

The artistry of field work

Tags

biology, ecology, Field work, nature, research, sampling, science

I was flipping through some of the photographs that we use as data yesterday (just where we’re measuring things and recording things) and thinking that they’re actually quite artistic.  Let’s see if you agree.

Measuring plant height

Insect sampling at a research plot

Comma Butterfly (Polygonia c-album) on my sample bags

Counting the number of flower heads, but it looks like a peace sign!

Quantifying floral area

Quantifying leaf area

Patterns in the ocean

Tags

Charriere, counting, Field work, obsessive compulsive, ocean, Papillon, pattern

Ocean off the Osa Peninsula, in Costa Rica

I have mixed feelings about the ocean.  As much as I want to love it unconditionally, and as much as I adore swimming, snorkeling, coral reefs, cephalopods, and especially parrot fish, I seem to be fundamentally terrestrial.

I struggle with field work in the ocean, grappling with my equipment to prevent it from floating away.  I can’t hold my breath long enough to sample for long periods of time, or dive very deeply as some of my marine colleagues can (I swear they must be part fish).

And, though I hate to admit it, the ceaseless, senseless noise exhausts me.  I feel like it beats down on me endlessly, so that when I am close to the shore for long periods of time, my senses are battered into submission without reason and I am left numb and speechless.

I needed to fit a pattern to it so that I could understand it, rationalise it (is that an obsessive compulsive thing?).  One day, upon deciding that I would ‘figure out’ the ocean, I swam out to a rocky outcrop and climbed up the sharp rocks barefoot at low tide.  I sat on the pinnacle and counted…I counted the time between waves, the number of small waves before a big wave hit, the duration of a big wave.  I sat patiently for hours, counting endlessly, doing my best to keep track of those three sets of numbers.

At some point, I realised that the sun had set, the tide had risen, and I was shivering uncontrollably.  I was soaked to the bone from the spray, drenched over and over as each big wave hit.

I dove back in and swam to shore.  Frustration was my dominant emotion; after all that time, I had found no pattern.  The sequence of waves seemed completely random and there was no rhyme or reason to it.  It could be five small waves with three seconds between, a big wave of 4 second duration, 8 small waves, a big wave of 2 seconds, a big wave of 9 seconds, so on and so forth.  But nothing ever repeated in all the hours I counted.

The ocean would never fit into a box for me.

Ocean in a box? Off the shore of Hobart, Tasmania

So, imagine my surprise when, upon reading Papillon (by Henri Charriere), I found this passage about him counting waves and finding a pattern!  The waves were predictable enough that he could use them to escape.  I wonder if this is truth or fiction, or if you can only find such predictable waves on small islands in the middle of lots of ocean.

“Only one wave out of every seven was as large as the monster that had flung my sack back against the rocks.  The others were little more than half its size.  From noon to sundown I watched to see if this was always so, if there wasn’t an occasional shift or whim that altered the regularity.

 

“There wasn’t.  The ground swell never came sooner, never came later.  There were six waves about twenty feet high, then, forming about three hundred yards from shore, the ground swell.  It came in straight as a cannonball, growing in size and height as it approached.  There was hardly any spray on its crest compared to the other six, very little, in fact.  It had its own special noise, like far-off thunder.  When it broke on the two rocks and hurled itself into the passage between them, crashing against the cliff, its great mass caused it to choke and turn on itself.  Then, after ten or fifteen seconds, the eddies would work their way out with a wild churning, tearing off huge stones and rolling them back and forth, making a rumble like a hundred wagonloads of stones being dumped.

 

“I put a dozen coconuts in a sack and added a fifty-pound rock.  As the ground swell broke, I threw the sack in.  I couldn’t follow it with my eyes because of the spray, but I saw it for a second as the water was sucked back to the sea.  It did not return.  The next six waves lacked the strength to throw it back on shore, and by the time the seventh had formed three hundred yards out, the sack must have drifted beyond it, for I didn’t see it again.”

Sunset on Magnetic Island, Australia

Funny Onions

Tags

allium vineale, Field work, funny onions, onion, photos of strange looking plants, the onion, wild garlic

There are all these wild onions (or Wild Garlic Allium vineale) standing out in the field where I work (see what I did there?), and I think they are very funny looking.  They are invasive, but they are amusing.  Since it is Friday anyhow, I thought I’d share them with you and maybe you’ll like them too!

And, of course, you know of the other funny onion:  The Onion.

Water your obsessions

Tags

field biology, Field work, nature, obsession, rain, science, stories, water, weather

Every field biologist I have ever known is obsessed with water in one way or another.  Too much, too little…terrestrial ecologists sit and stare at the radar and chew their fingernails.  It seems like we are always either praying for rain–or praying for it to stop!

Even marine biologists are obsessed with water.  You wouldn’t think so, since they’ve got plenty of it, but even they are forced to study the tides, to be obsessed with the temperature and currents and flows of the waves.

I have a friend who once attempted to do a drought study.  That summer it rained Every. Single. Day.

If you want engage a field biologist in conversation, any field biologist, anywhere, all you have to do is to mention the weather.  Is it going to rain tonight/tomorrow?  Have you seen the forecast?

Most field biologists can spin off a four day forecast without blinking.  “Well, accuweather says there’s a forty percent chance this afternoon, but those clouds on the ridge look pretty dark.”

You see, there needs to be this perfect balance of water in life.  Too much, and everything dies.  Too little, and everything dies.

Still, it seems strange that I have been equally obsessed with water in a swamp and a desert.

When I have field assistants, they always dread going out in the rain.  I can’t imagine why, and before you call me mean I will assure you that I always check to make sure they are not soluble in water before I hire them (what a mess that would be, hey?).

I remember one year where I had been checking the radar constantly.  The forecast for the day was 20% chance of rain, which I felt was low enough for sampling insects.  As we headed out, though, my assistants began to protest.  “Standingoutinmyfield,” they cried, “It’s raining!”

“No, no, no,” I said calmly, “There is only a 20% chance today.”

“But it is raining RIGHT NOW!” they argued.

“There is only a 20% chance!”

“But…” eventually they gave up.

For my current field work, I have to haul water out by wagon to plots several kilometers out.  It’s a lot of hard work: each of the three tanks I haul is 20 liters (about 5 gallons), and I have to drag them up a steep ridge.  And, unless it rains, I must do this every day. (*flexes biceps*)

You might think, at this point, that I am praying for rain, but I cannot!  For when it rains, there are no insects.  And without insects, my experiment will fail.

Of course, the ideal situation would be for it to rain every night and be sunny every day. 

A stanza from Dr. Dolittle’s (1967) “My Friend the Doctor”

MY FRIEND THE DOCTOR SAYS THAT EVERY TIME IT STARTS TO RAIN

AND PEOPLE RUN INDOORS AGAIN IN SWARMS

IF YOU REMAIN OUT IN THE RAIN,

YOU’LL THINK YOU’RE DRINKIN’ PINK CHAMPAGNE!

AND YOU’LL SPEND YOUR LIFE PRAYIN’ FOR THUNDERSTORMS!

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself, by Barbara Crooker (and a story)

Tags

Barbara Crooker, counting birds, Field work, grass birds, midwest, nature poem, pheasant, poetry, Sometimes I am startled out of myself, story telling, winter bird survey, winter in Nebraska

I read a poem this morning that reminded me of a story.

Years ago, I was doing a winter bird survey in the midwest of the United States.  The temperatures in that region frequently dropped below -28 C (-20 F) and sometimes below -34 C (-30 F) if you include wind chill (which I, wholeheartedly, do include).  I’d be out for hours, counting the sparse bird life, including juncos which watched me with pity from within their downy feather coats.  “Silly human,” I imagined them saying, “What are you doing out here?  You don’t even have any feathers!”

One day, I was trying to pin down a group of small grass birds.  The problem with flocks of birds in tall grass is that they always move to the part of the grass farthest from you, making them difficult to ID and count.  The fact that the grass was taller than me did not help matters.

After a while, I managed to get completely turned about in the ‘a-maze-ing’ grass.  I couldn’t see a way out, so I headed in one direction, hoping to eventually escape.  When the grass did end, it did so abruptly, and I stumbled out onto the edge of a frozen stream, thereby startling a male pheasant, resplendent in colourful feathers.  He flew up with a raucous squawk and a thundering of beating wings, buffeting me so hard that I tripped and rolled down the bank, nearly crashing through the ice of the stream.

Needless to say, both of us were surprised by the interaction.  So, reading this poem this morning recalled the memory.

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

- Barbara Crooker

Ticked off

Tags

field biology, Field work, nature, outdoors, parasite, Puns, summer, tick, wetland restoration

Shoulder high grasses in a wetland restoration area.

It was late June.  I had been working all day in the sultry summer heat of a wetland restoration area in central Virginia, wading through shoulder high grasses.  I had checked endless numbers of tree tubes, recorded deer damage and germination success on each and every one.

In other words, it was prime tick season in prime tick habitat.

Trudging wearily back to my beat-up field vehicle at the end of the day, I knew I should do a tick check…but I was too tired.  I longed to head for home, where I could peel off my sweat soaked clothes, take an ice cold shower, and wash the dead insects out of my hair.

Some days are like that, particularly days that involve wetland restoration areas and germination surveys.

So, instead of checking for ticks, I slumped behind the wheel, put it in gear, and drove onto the motorway.

It wasn’t long before I felt something crawling along the sensitive hairs at the nape of my neck.  I cringed, reached up, and plucked it off.  Yep, a tick.  I rolled down the window and let her fly off at 100 kph (~60mph).  A tick has probably never moved so fast.

Then I made the mistake of looking down at myself…there were eight ticks in plain view, crawling about on my field clothes.

I must have been quite the sight, weaving down the highway at 100 kph, flinging tiny black specks out the window.  Eventually, I decided that this was hazardous behaviour, so I screeched to a halt in a skeezy petrol station, leapt from the vehicle, pulled off my shirt, and frantically flung ticks in all directions.

After I had calmed a bit, I looked up and realised that there was a gang of dangerous looking Mexican guys, leaning up against an old Ford pick-up, smoking cigarillos, and watching me through squinty eyes.  I jumped, flicked one more tick off the driver’s seat of my car, dove back behind the wheel, and peeled off, not bothering with my stinky shirt.

Despite all my efforts, I was still picking off ticks at every stoplight on the way home, albeit at a less frenzied rate.

I don’t know how many I found during that frenetic drive, but when I got home I bundled up all of my clothing and put it in the machine to wash, took an icy shower, checked myself carefully one last time, and went to bed.

Well, you can imagine how I felt when I woke at 2 am to a tick crawling across my eyebrow.

Nonplussed.

A travel story: the case of the too friendly tourist

Tags

fear, Field work, tourist, travel

It was a balmy, perfect day.  Jenny and I left the field station at dawn for a morning of data collection in the ocean.  We hiked the trail to her field site at a good clip; it was challenging, with more obstacles than a military training course.  Old, half-rotted ropes and roots were the only assistance to scale rock faces, slippery boulders were the only path across rivers with rushing white waters.  It was beautiful, but difficult with bags full of sampling gear.

At the head of a long curve of sandy beach, we stashed our clothing and heavy hiking boots in a copse of heavy vegetation up a small rocky cliff.  I scaled it barefoot and pulled branches and leaves over the things we were leaving behind before jumping down.  We continued a few more kilometers, barefoot in our bathing suits on the sand.

I stayed on the shore to watch over our sampling equipment while Jenny swam out to set up some cameras on the coral.  It took her much longer than she expected and, while she was gone, I entertained myself by climbing into the canopy of a nearby tree.

Almost magically, a group of four Scarlet Macaws landed in my tree, feeding on seeds all around me, almost close enough to touch.  I’m not sure how long I watched them, mesmerized by their stunning colours, deafened by their screeches, but eventually they flew off, leaving me to the pulse of the ocean waves hitting the shore and a faint cool breeze in the leaves.  Completely at home, I drifted off to sleep in the branches.

I was woken some time later by a call from below.   I woke with a start, glad for the arm I had looped around a branch that prevented me from tumbling to the ground.  I jumped to a crouch and peered groggily down at the owner of the voice.

I should mention at this point that I was wearing nothing but a bathing suit.

The tourist below me waved and repeated his, “Hey!”  I was feeling a bit vulnerable, so I responded to his hail with a wary nod.

“Are these waters good?” he asked and, when I hesitated, he added, “Are they clear?  Lots of coral?  Lots of fish?”

I was still sleepy and wary and barely managed a, “Yes, very clear.  Today.”

He was American and he kept chattering at me.  He had left his snorkeling gear in his hotel.  He had tried snorkeling elsewhere but the water was not clear and the waves were too rough.  He jabbered on and I shifted uncomfortably, not speaking but nodding occasionally.

I think I must have seemed very unfriendly now that I look back on it from the comfort of my own home, but that was in fact the message that I wanted to communicate.  I was alone, kilometers from my clothes and shoes, and even farther from help at the biological station.  Here was a stranger who wouldn’t leave me alone.

After an eternity, he gave up and left.  I watched him go and waited a while before climbing down to check on the sampling gear I had stowed in a hollow tree trunk.  It wasn’t long before Jenny came back and we headed out together to sample the coral and record mussel damage.

A few hours later, I had to head back to the biological station to set up a bait for Euglossine bees.  Jenny was supposed to come back with me, but she wanted to get more sampling done.  I didn’t want to leave her alone, but she insisted and I reluctantly gave in.  I promised to return as soon as possible with food, as she had neglected to bring any.

I hiked the long stretch of beach back to my stored clothing, clambered into the dense thicket, and peeled off my wet bathing suit, which had rubbed several awkward spots raw.  I pulled on a shirt and shorts over my bare skin and hurled my boots out of the brush before shimmying ungracefully back down the rock face.

Imagine my surprise when I heard someone exclaim, “You again!”

I turned.  My feet were bare, my hair wild with wind and sea, my skin salty from the ocean, and my knees bloody from kneeling on sharp rocks.  It was the same friendly tourist from earlier.

I was, again, feeling vulnerable.  After all, not long ago I had been naked in the bush above where we now spoke.  I pushed my glasses back up onto the bridge of my nose and looked at him unhappily, keenly aware of the way my shirt stuck to my wet skin.  He stood between me and my boots.

“Where are you staying?”

I tried stepping around him to get to my boots, but he stepped in my way.  “The biological station,” I replied, ducking in the other direction and scooping up my boots and socks.

“Biological station?” he tilted his head to one side, “Where is that?”

“Down the trail…a few kilometers,” I gestured vaguely at the nearby trail.  He stepped closer and I stepped back, sitting down a little too quickly on the prop roots of a coconut palm to put on my socks.

“How many kilometers?” he asked, sitting down next to me.  “I hiked that way and didn’t see a station.”

I shook my head, “I’m not sure.”  I didn’t make eye contact, trying to appear cool and calm, though my heart was pounding.

“Are you a student?” he asked.

“A teacher.”

“What university are you from?”

The questions continued.  I tried to respond as shortly as possible.

I stood up abruptly once I had my boots on.  “What’s this in your hair?” he asked, reaching out to touch my hair.  I stepped quickly out of his reach and put a hand to my hair, pulling out a leaf from the brush.

“Just a leaf,” I said unsteadily.

“I thought it might be a decoration.”

I shook my head and waved mutely goodbye, trying not to run into the forest.  His eyes followed me, but I don’t think he did.  I could feel my heart pounding as I hiked along stiffly.  After a moment, a thought occurred to me.

Jenny, doing field work alone in the ocean was gorgeous, a blonde-haired blue-eyed beauty.  I am homely at best…if he would bother me that way, how would he react if he ran into her?

I ended up sprinting the four kilometers back to the biological station, scrambling back up cliff faces, bounding recklessly over the slippery boulders in my rubber boots, thumping along through the understorey with both hands holding tight to my backpack’s straps.

I arrived back at the station flushed and sweating.  Danny, whose job it was to look after the students, was concerned, he wanted me to rest and drink water.  I obliged by grabbing a bottle of water before I sprinted off again, this time heading up onto the rainforest ridge to set up my Euglossine bee bait.

With that done, I dashed back down from the ridge, grabbed some food for Jenny and shoved it into my bag before sprinting back alone the shoreline trail to rescue her.  I didn’t want to tell anyone else about my unfounded fears.  She was capable and competent, she had traveled alone.  And the tourist wasn’t evil, just friendly.

But I didn’t stop running until I saw her heading slowly back along the beach, hauling the sampling gear.  I breathed a sigh of relief and traded her the food I had brought for the gear.  “Let me carry that,” I said.

“Are you sure?  You look exhausted,” but she was too grateful for the food to question further.

I felt nothing but relief as we hiked back at a slower pace.  She hadn’t run into the friendly tourist.

The encounter must have bothered me more than I realised at the time.  I had no appetite for dinner that night.  And, clearly, I am still thinking about it now, weeks later.

Why was I so afraid of him?  He didn’t really do anything wrong.  Then again, why didn’t he pick up my clues to leave me alone?  Would you bother a person who was so unfriendly to you?

I guess I am still trying to understand it, and that is why I wrote the whole story up.  I am wondering if I am just paranoid, whether my avoidance of interaction was a phobia or well founded.  I don’t think I’ll ever know.

I must admit that humans are still the only animal I truly fear.

Ant Nest Architecture: featuring molten aluminium

Tags

aluminium, ant nests, art, Field work, fire ants, nest casts, science, Tallahassee, Tschinkel

This post is cool because it features molten metals.  Truly!

I worked for a while at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.  I was working with one of my favourite myrmecologists, Walter Tschinkel.  I have a huge academic crush on Dr. Tschinkel, among others, but he’s also a really interesting person and he has the most melodic whistle I’ve ever heard.  That man should whistle in a symphony, like an instrument.  (Cue the French horns, now the whistler!)

Dr. Tschinkel, the myrmecologist man (also note that Tallahassee, although in Florida, is not warm in January, don't be like me)

He’s also an artist.  His illustrations of plants are gorgeous and line the halls of the old biology building at FSU, and he also does woodwork.  His house is filled with fascinating trinkets from all over the world.

You shouldn’t be surprised to see how common it is for scientists to also be artists; science is just another form of art, in a way.  I’ll try to convince you of it today.

Dr. Tschinkel is not famous for his wonderful illustrations, nor his whistling (sadly), but for his work on the architecture of ant and termite mounds and his unique methods of representing this architecture in 3 dimensions.

I’ll show some pictures of when I was working with him to illustrate the process:

After finding a nest that we would like to cast, we set up our equipment.  There are three different types of material we would use for casts: dental plaster (if we want to recover the ants), zinc (for small nests and foraging tunnels), or aluminium (for long term, large, or nice looking structures).

If using a metal, we have to melt it first.  Zinc can be melted using a titanium crucible above a petroleum heater (like a camping stove), but aluminium has a higher melting point.  In order to melt it, we must stuff a metal garbage can full or charcoal, pump air through it until they are white hot, and melt the aluminium (scraps of scuba tanks) in a titanium crucible.

Don't mind the tongues of flame shooting up from the garbage can.

After removing the impurities that separate from the aluminium when it is molten, we pour it into the nest hole.

Yes, that is molten aluminium

Which is kind of cool because you can see where the foraging tunnels are (that run close to the surface of the ground) by where the grass catches on fire.

Then, after it has cooled (which happens pretty rapidly), we must dig it out.  I can tell you that it is a lot of hard work to dig a hole 4 m (~14 ft) down.  It is hard to throw shovelfuls of soil above your head.

We're making progress.

Yep, definitely a hole.

But the hard work is definitely worth it.  After we get the nest out, we solder any broken pieces and examine the architecture.

Some of the nest molds we made.

Ant nests are pretty complicated, but they also have species specific patterns that are recognizable.  That’s Pheidole morrissii above, here’s Wikipedia’s photo of Dr. Tschinkel standing next to a Pogonomyrmex badius nest.

photo courtesy of Wikipedia

And here’s a fire ant nest.

photo courtesy of animalpicturesarchive.com

And Dr. Tschinkel’s ant nests are even featured in museum exhibits.  While I worked with him, we were preparing a nest for a museum in France.

So have I convinced you that science is a form of art yet?

I’ll keep trying. 

Estacion Biologica Campanario

Tags

biological station, Campanario, Costa Rica, Field work, lowland rainforest, Osa Peninsula

So I told you a little about the biological station up in the cloud forest near San Ramon.  Today, let me take you from the clouds to the coast, from mountain to lowland, from cloud forest to rainforest, from one paradise to another: to Campanario.

Welcome to Campanario!

La estacion biologica Campanario is situated on a remote part of the Osa peninsula, and is accessible only by boat.  It is not far from San Pedrillo, a biological station in Corcovado National Park.

The San Ramon station is in the mountains of central Costa Rica, Campanario is on the Osa Peninsula.  I left a piece of my heart in both places.

In some ways, the two stations are as different as night and day.  And in others, they are very similar.

Neither station has hot water.  At both we eat mostly rice and beans (except for when there are beans and rice).  Both are full of a wonderful support staff of ticos.  They’re smart, funny, and very knowledgeable about Costa Rican natural history.

Ticos are so great.

At San Ramon, for instance, there is electricity that comes from the river.  They have to use some electricity, in fact (something about flow), so a couple of light bulbs are left on all the time.  It isn’t very much electricity, but it is there.

At Campanario, there is only solar power.  That means that there is only electricity when there is sun hitting the roof of the station.  And what little electricity they do have is jealously guarded for the refrigerator, to keep food cold.  Students are allowed to use it between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm, IF there’s sunshine.  For everything else, there are headlamps.

And San Ramon gets quiet, quiet at night (even with all the cicadas, crickets, frogs, and geckos) compared to the incessant ocean at Campanario, which is always rushing and whooshing about.  (Ever notice how the ocean does that?)  It is very difficult to give a lecture on mutualisms over the roar of the ocean!

Campanario’s front yard

But of course, I am mostly thinking about biology.  Lowland tropical rainforests are a very different animal from cloud forests.

Trails

There are 139 species of mammals, 117 species of reptiles and amphibians, and over 350 species of birds in Corcovado National Park, which has, according to some, the highest densities of jaguar anywhere in the world.

And we spent plenty of time studying in and around the ocean too!  The students seemed captivated by the diversity of the tidal pools.

Okay, I could talk about Campanario for days (and probably will), so enough for today!  Let me know if you have any questions or comments. 

Ed: Woops, you’ll probably be wanting a link to Campanario’s website.

Sweet, sweet coevolution

Tags

antbirds, army ants, coevolution, Costa Rica, Field work, floral deception, leaf cutter ants, mutualism, parasitism, symbiosis, travel, treehopper

Hey there!  I just wanted to let anyone that happens to stop by know that I will be teaching a field ecology course in Costa Rica over the next few weeks.  We’ll be, um, in the field, so I won’t have access to computers, and thusly, the interwebs.

Hence, and therefore, no new posts until I get back from Central America with heaps of new stories and adventures and amateur photography to share.

I’ve wanted to go to Costa Rica my entire life.  Well, since I was eight and read about the Monteverde Cloud Forest in National Geographic magazine.  And now I get to go!  And I get to teach a course on tropical ecology!  I am stoked.

But what I’m most excited about is the rampant and shameless coevolution in the tropics.  Coevolution is when two or more interacting species evolve together over time.  They can be in an arms race of antagonism (re: the Red Queen Hypothesis), or they can be adapting together because they are mutualistic.  And in the tropics, symbioses abound.  I mentioned a few different kinds in early posts, the zombie ants, the Euglossine bees, the three toed sloth, the acacia ants.

Since symbiosis in general, and mutualisms in particular, are really what rock my boat (so to speak), here are a couple of cool Costa Rican examples:  (NB: I may need to go more in detail after I get back and have great stories!)

Fungus gardens and their attending leaf cutter ants (mutualism):

Leaf cutter ants (genus Atta): photo courtesy of pixdaus.com

The Atta genus of ants, popularly known as leaf cutter ants, collect leaves from many different rain forest tree species and bring them back to the nest, where they cultivate the with a fungus.  The fungus breaks down complex carbohydrates that the ants can’t digest, and the ants eat the fungus.

Antbirds (commensalism — one benefits and the other is not affected):

Spotted Antbird (Hylophylax naevioides): courtesy of galleryofbirds.com

There is a family of birds known as antbirds (Thamnophilidae) with more than 200 species.  There are about 20 species that have been shown to be very tightly linked to army ants (especially Eciton burchellii).  They follow the lines of ants around in the forest and eat all the insects trying to escape.  Yes, it is a sad day for you if you are being pursued by army ants!  If you are not torn up by ant soldiers (see massive mandibles below), you will be quickly snapped up by a Spotted Antbird (see photograph above).

Army ant soldier (Eciton burchellii) photo courtesy of one of the most awesome blogs, myrmecos.net

If you don’t know about army ants, you should read one of the greatest short stories of all time: Leiningen versus the ants.

The fantastic treehopper mimicry (commensalism):

Treehoppers are a family (Membracidae) of true bugs (of the insect order Hemiptera).  They are known for their mimicry of plants.  They often look like thorns or twigs. But sometimes we have no idea why they look the way they do.  See below.

An ant mimic treehopper: courtesy of Nicolas Gompel

 

WTH Treehopper, courtesy of iheartchaos.com

You can also check out this blog post on wordpress that addresses the treehopper phenomenon.

Those conniving orchids (parasitism?):

You have to love orchids, especially when they trick insects into pollinating them by pretending to be females ready to copulate.

 

Wasp copulating with a tongue orchid (Cryptostylis sp.) courtesy of webecoist.com

Darwin was pretty fond of orchids too.  He wrote a book titled: On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing.

I’ll be back!

 

courtesy of wikipedia

In January!  With my own photos, hey.