Hunting seaweeds, dodging polar bears

I just came off the boat Ortelius, having spent an amazing ten days sailing around the South point of Spitsbergen to remote Edgeøya and Barentsøya, the Eastern islands of Svalbard. I had come on the SEES expedition as a seaweed scientist, which is a bit of an exaggeration. My scientific focus is more faunal than floral and in preparation for this trip, I dusted off seven-year-old memories of quadrat sampling and basic seaweed taxonomy. Besides getting to revisit a foggy but fascinating topic, I was also excited to experience the polar region after having been away for ten years since studying Arctic lakes and streams in Alaska. I didn’t know what to expect, but I hoped to see some beautiful nature, meet some interesting people, and collect some cold-water seaweeds, all of which I did!

What is so interesting about seaweeds in Svalbard you may ask? Seaweeds have to be tough in general to survive life in the intertidal, but especially in polar regions with rough seas, chilly temperatures, and a night that’s four months long. When researching a potential topic to propose for this expedition, I learned that sea ice is very important for determining seaweed presence in the Arctic intertidal, because winter sea ice can scrape seaweed away from the rocks. Kelps like Laminaria are safe from sea ice because they live deep underwater where ice doesn’t reach, but Fucus, which grows in the rocky intertidal, is at the mercy of ice scraping them off the beach. With rapid climate warming and less sea ice, we can expect more seaweeds in the Arctic. And so, in Spitsbergen, where it is relatively warm, I would expect to see a lot more older and less damaged seaweeds than in Edgeoya where it is colder and sea ice is more prevalent. Thus my mission for the expedition was born: collect seaweed seaweeds in both locations to see if I could find a difference in their cover and morphology.

I thought collecting seaweeds sounded easy, but it was easier said than done. Most of the scientists, including myself, had to land on the island of Edgeøya to do their research. However, there were around 110 expedition participants, half scientists and half tourists and the large group needed to be managed carefully. The biggest reason of canceling our landings was polar bears. People can be polar bear food, and so, in order to make a landing, the expedition staff needed to make sure that there were no polar bears nearby. This meant that before we landed the staff scouted the site from the boat and then on land for polar bears. And, even if we did make a landing, one needed to be near a rifle-carrying staff member at all times, and we could be evacuated if a bear was sighted. This was important for everyone’s safety, bears included— afterall, no one actually wanted to shoot a bear!— but it made for difficult fieldwork conditions because time could be cut short and rifle-carriers were in short supply for such a diverse group of researchers. A scientist collecting seaweed needs to collect them in a very different place than a scientist collecting moss. But with a lot of coordination and patience, we managed.

I’m collecting filamentous green algae off of a rock in Rosenbergdalen in Edgeøya. See how the sea ice and waves have scraped these rocks bare; I had to work hard to find any seaweed at all! Jan watched to make sure no polar bears came by while I was hunting for seaweeds.

Fog and polar bears made the first days of the expedition challenging. On, the first day of the trip, a landing at Stellingsfjellet to see a colony of guillemots was planned and canceled because of the thick white fog. The second day was full of scrapped plans. The first planned landing at Kapp Lee was canceled due to large wave swells on the beach, then we sailed to a second nearby site, Rosenbergdalen, where the landing was also canceled due to a nearby bear. Another bear was sighted shortly after we reached the third alternative, Sundneset on Barentsøya, and so we couldn’t land there either. Having fog as a reason to cancel a landing is something that I expected, but the number of bears thwarting our plans was unexpected for everyone. Polar bears prefer to hunt seals from sea ice, but the sea ice had melted very quickly this year, leaving many bears stranded on Edgeøya. While the bears at our hoped for landing sites afforded me the possibility to see a polar bear for the first time, it was frustrating for the scientists who were foaming at the mouth to collect their samples, and also for the tourists who wanted to land and stretch their legs.

But it was not for nothing that we were cautious. On the third day we made our first expedition landing at Rosenbergdalen, where a bear was roaming the previous day. Though we landed and I was able to gather some sparse samples of seaweed for the first time, our visit was cut short when we had to evacuate because a polar bear was spotted nearby and heading our way. As I was in the coastal group and nearby the inflatable boats, I was one of the first people to be evacuated and so it was not a harrowing experience for me. But a few days later at Russabukta, I was happily loaded with samples of baby Fucus distichus and walking from the beach to join other scientists at a small patch of lakes, when Hans, the guide and rifle-carrier for our group, said he spotted a bear. I looked through my binoculars and could see a white dot as well. I would never have noticed the white dot on my own, but Hans, a much more experienced bear dot spotter, said the bear was sleeping. Sleeping bears are of course harder to spot because they don’t move and can easily be confused with ice or rocks, especially for a newbie bear-spotter like myself, but when I looked, the white dot was moving. Martine, another scientist, confirmed my conclusion: “That bear’s on the move.” And when it disappeared from view behind a small hillock in the rocky terrain, a frisson of fear went up my spine. Is the bear coming towards us?

Two days earlier, the bear that had chased us off Rosenbergdalen was seen from the boat sniffing around the spot where the vegetation scientists were collecting plants. The bear must have been disappointed that lunch escaped to sail another day.

A lot of seaweed in Hornsund, Southwest Spitsbergen

When we couldn’t go on land, the beautiful seascapes were plenty to occupy the eyes

Cruising for langostinos

I had the awesome opportunity to participate in a research cruise for three days. The aim of our mission was to examine the distribution of langostino at all life stages: larvae, wayward teenager, adult. The langostino is a tasty crustacean, one you may have remembered from my adulations over seafood empanadas a few weeks ago.

It has been a while since I’ve spent a night on a boat. My main concern was getting seasick as I had been taking medicine for an irritated stomach. I had a sneaking suspicion that my doctor might not recommend copious vomiting as a weekend activity. But, armed with two different kinds of anti-nausea meds and a large supply of galletas de agua (saltines), I felt well-prepared for the eventuality. I wasn’t reassured by the small size of the boat, nor the way that it rocked in the super calm harbor. But, the weather gods were smiling, and we left the Dichato with glassy seas and one meter swells.

We went out on the Kay Kay II, the UdeC’s research vessel. There were two scientific teams onboard as well as a crew of six to do all the necessary sailing and machine wrangling. I was on a team of three from the LOPEL (Laboratorio de Oceanografía Pesquera y Ecología Larval) lab and our mission was to track the langostino’s baby phase. We would trawl the waters for zooplankton all night long. Why all night? Because during daylight hours, zooplankton, which are small marine animals that measure micrometers to millimeters, swim deep down in the water column to avoid visual predators and then swim back up to the surface at night to feed on yummy diatoms (algae) and rogue organic particles. At every station, we deployed the CTD; an instrument which is the oceanographic equivalent to an expensive and finicky swiss army knife. Using a winch attached to a cable, the CTD is sent down to a few hundred meters and measures the water’s physical characteristics (conductivity, temperature, and density) along the way. Next, we deployed the Tucker trawl, which is a series of nets that can be opened and closed at different depths so different points in the water column are sampled for zooplankton. After dragging them behind the boat for a few minutes, we pulled them back on, drained them, and added formalin to preserve them for later identification. Hopefully we would find some baby langostinos lurking in the mix.

When you’re working on a boat, time is a measured and dolloped entity. There were six stations to do and each station took us about an hour. When you add travel (around an hour between stations), the sampling, which we started at a crepuscular 18:00, took all night. With the help of the crew, Edu, Carlos, and I would deploy the CTD and the nets, then take a nap for an hour, and repeat. I never really fell into a deep sleep, just cherished the sensation of the boat speeding through the cresting waves, as this meant I could stay lying down. But then, the captain would hit the brakes and I could feel the boat slow against the swell, signaling that it was time to roll out of the bunk and start sampling again. I got to sleep for maybe two hours the next morning before I needed to get up again to run our stations backwards with the CTD.

Luckily, at this point it was the other team’s turn to trawl. But besides sending the CTD down, the LOPEL team was also in charge of collecting water samples at each station to measure oxygen and nutrients/organic matter content. For this, we used a handy bottle with an opening on both sides called a Niskin bottle. I’ve always thought that whoever invented the Niskin bottle was someone with a genius for beauty in simplicity. The Niskin bottle is used to sample water at whatever depth you want. It is a cylindrical tube with two stoppers connected to each other by an elastic running through the center of the tube. The stoppers are pulled back and snapped to the center of the bottle so the elastic connecting the two ends is under tension. The bottle is attached to the same cable that was used to lower the CTD. When the bottle is at the right depth, we attach a weight to the cable and send it shooting down the line. It hits the catch and releases the tension in the elastic, snapping the stoppers into place. Et voila! You have the a bottle of water from any depth strata desired.

I’m carefully filling glass bottles with water *sampled at a specific depth stratum* by the Niskin. After I’m done filling the bottle, I will add chemicals to the water that will react with oxygen and precipitate. *Depending on the amount of oxygen*, the water will turn a shade of milky white to dark yellow. It is easy to see the oxygen gradient when comparing the colors of water from different depths!

Meanwhile, the other team was deploying the bottom trawl to capture the langostino on the sea floor where it had matured from its larval free-swimming form to its bottom dwelling juvenile stage. The other team had the interesting problem to contend with that the cable on the bottom trawl was too short to reach the sea floor. Their solution was to attach a long length of line to the trawl. This maneuver included dragging the net in the water from the aft deck (ship’s butt) to the foredeck (ship’s front) to deploy it. They were not able to reach the bottom the first time, but they did the next times as we sailed over shallower ground. It was interesting to see the mix of species within the trawl as well as the mix of year classes. One of the hauls had both crabs and adult langostinos, while another one heaped out juveniles. Most of the time sampling in the ocean feels like groping blind, but it’s always exciting because you’re never entirely sure what you’re going to get.

The cruise was short but packed. It was fun to reacquaint myself with a lot of ocean sampling equipment and learn about a new sea critter. Even though the seas were glassy, caution and experience did not allow me to try laying off the seasickness meds until we were well into the third day. But it was not until we were pulling into port that I realized that I had been on a boat overnight without throwing up once. A first! Hopefully not the last.

And I couldn’t resist adding a couple of seascapes.

A story of (street) dogs and (sea) lions

I remembered there being a lot more street dogs in Chile. I have only seen a handful of strays in Concepción, sunning themselves on the university lawns or trotting up the sidewalk. I asked a friend and he gave me a long look and said, yes, there used to be a lot more, but the government has gotten rid of them through neutering campaigns or even euthanization. And so, I thought I would only encounter the huge packs that I saw roaming around Punta Arenas six years ago in my memory. That is, until I went to Talcahuano.

Talcahuano is a port town 30 minutes from Concepción by bus, or “micro”. I had to go there to take a boat safety and survival course, the story of which I have regaled to you in my previous blog post. Talcahuano is a port town, destroyed in the 2010 tsunami and rebuilt. I find it grittier than Concepción, and the dogs are gutsier. I walked down the marina with some new friends from the course during lunch time and we were accosted by several dogs who wanted food though we clearly had none. These dogs were more pushy than I had grown accustomed to and followed us. Yes they were cute, but I was also a bit wary. You never know when a stray dog might bite.

At some point, when we were walking along the marina, my new friends gestured at me and pointed down over the rail. There on jetty lolled two sea lions. Maybe I’m jaded, or maybe my work with the National Marine Fisheries Service has indoctrinated me into thinking sea lions are no good endangered salmon vacuum cleaners; but whatever the cause, the cuteness of sea lions has mostly worn off me. I saw two bloated smelly blubber sacks lolling about. And I was acutely aware that if one of them sat on me, I’d be done for. Then Alondra pointed outward and I watched, eyes widening, a sea lion climb into a skiff that was moored in the bay. I was floored. I kept pointing back at that sea lion that was lolling half out the boat because it was so big, and said, “No puedo creerlo, hay un lobo en el bote!!! Que???”. My friends nodded and smiled as though to say, “Yes, we see it, we pointed it out to you.” But I could not get over it, there was a fracking sea lion in that skiff! I tried to imagine what it would be like to go out to your boat one morning, coffee cup in hand, and then find a sea lion lazing about in your boat! How do you get it out? The surprise would probably be enough to make me lose the coffee cup to the sea, maybe breakfast as well. I expressed my astonishment to a labmate later and he told me not to worry, the sea lions don’t get into boats when there are people in them. I don’t think I conveyed the root cause of my astonishment very well.

And so, later that day, we were gathered at the marina for the practical part of the boat safety and survival class where we would jump off the boat in nought but our clothes and a lifejacket and swim through the freezing Pacific water to a life raft. Dogs milled about the marina as the instructor reminded us of what we were supposed to do. We inflated the life raft on the asphalt and one dog nearly got crushed by the rapidly expanding orange rubber. I was surprised that the dogs were so easily tolerated at the launch of what seemed to be a boating club, but Chileans do have such a lax attitude about their street dogs. Still. Their presence irritated me. Or maybe it was the prospect of jumping into the freezing water. Who knows.

Another thing that got me nervous was that the dock was completely covered in sea lions. If there were so many sea lions on the dock, who knew how many there could be lurking in the water, waiting to nab an unsuspecting pretend naufragée. Then a boat approached the dock and all of a sudden, something amazing happened.

All the dogs that had been happily milling about the courtyard sprung into action and converged onto the dock, barking at the sea lions. The sea lions slipped off the dock like jelly marbles as the dogs advanced, barking, until only one or two remained, including a large alpha sea lion that alternated sticking its nose up in the air and barking back at the dogs. Still, I was astonished at how these huge animals that must have weighed at least four times as much as a dog yielded so easily to their onslaught. Maybe it was that there were so many of them. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered. But it was not a hazard-free job. One of the dogs that attacked the sea lions only had three legs because the fourth had been bitten off by a sea lion. Despite the danger, in a couple of seconds la lancha was almost completely cleared of sea lions and the boat could dock safely. The sailor tying the line to the dock peg took it all in stride as though it was a regular occurrence. And I realized that it was. These people had trained the street dogs to attack the sea lions so that they could dock the boats. Absolutely incredible.

I think what I love about this is the idea of using resources that one has at one’s disposal to tackle this particular problem. There are sea lions lying around, but so are the dogs! And this way, everyone is happy, the dogs are fed, the sea lions are kept away when necessary, and the world is in harmony. Except, I’m still not clear on what you do when you have a sea lion in your boat…

Only 2% of you would survive

As part of the requirements to step foot on a commercial or research vessel in Chile, I needed to take a boat safety and survival course. The course would last three days and at some point, we would have to jump off a boat in our clothes and swim to a life raft. I was not looking forward to that part.

The first day, I just concentrated on trying to understand what the instructors were mumbling in rapid Spanish. In the morning, two instructors went over the parts of a boat and first aid principles. I expected it would be even more difficult to concentrate in the midst of my post-lunch slump, but when the third instructor started speaking all eight of sat up straight. He had small deep-set eyes and spoke softly with little inflection, saying that the biggest enemy to overcome during a catastrophe is fear. Because one of the symptoms of fear is acting without thinking. He then relayed a story of how he was on a boat that had run aground and one of the sailors who had been consumed by fear ran up the deck shouting that they were sinking. He jumped over the rail on to the rocks below and broke both his legs. “And then we had to get him out,” said the instructor. “That took a while.”

He then proceeded to bombard the class with potential scenarios and gauge people’s survival instincts. He pointed at me. “What do you do if there are twenty-five of you trying to fit on a twenty person life boat?” I did not think that he would take “Risk it?” as an adequate answer so I just shook my head. The next person said, “Take turns hanging off the edge into the water.”

“Correct.”

Damn. Why didn’t I think of that? My odds of surviving a shipwreck were shrinking.

So it was with the mentality that fear is the enemy that I woke up on Wednesday morning with the knowledge that I would jumping in freezing cold water in the afternoon. I had taken one look at the harbor the day before and had decided to wear as little clothes as possible so as not to contaminate them. I regretted it once I arrived in Talcahuano. Everyone else was wearing two long sleeved shirts and sweaters. I was wearing a T-shirt and leggings. I had hoped the afternoon would disperse the gray and windy morning, but the clouds remained. After peeling off my sweater and donning the life jacket in the cold wind, I began to really think that saving my clothes from the foul harbor water had been decidedly the wrong impulse.

Once on the boat, the captain drove for about five minutes away from the dock to a large red buoy. The boat dragged the inflated life raft behind us. We moored to the buoy and our instructors reminded us of the exercise. We would jump one by one into the water, form a train where each person would hook their legs around the waist of the person in front of them (we had practiced inside the classroom) and swim on our backs while stroking our arms in unison. Then we would swim around the boat and buoy to the life raft and climb in.

My turn to jump in came up rather quickly. I remembered that I needed to pause to think before jumping so as to demonstrate how advanced I was in not letting fear overcome me. The water was very cold. Someone had trouble with heights and took a very long time to get in the water, so we just got colder. Finally, everyone was in and we formed our train. Unfortunately, we were facing the wrong way and had to turn which was a very laborious process. Luckily, our caboose was an older man going for his captain’s license with plenty of at-sea experience, and he was comfortable directing our train. Once turned, we were finally on our way, chanting “Uno, dos, tres!” to keep the beat of our strokes. However, we moved very very slowly. We were sheltered by the harbor, but the waves were large and sent us sputtering. Maneuvering the turn around the buoy should have required a team of coxswains. The distance we had to cover was maybe 50 meters, but it took us about 20 minutes to make it to the life raft. I cannot imagine have to swim 200 meters, or even two kilometers to the life raft. After what seemed like for too long, we made it to the orange floating island. It took a bit longer to get, but finally the last person slid across the seawater slick rubber and we cheered our victory. The ride back was freezing. Our instructor said he had once been in the water for seven hours waiting for a rescue. I couldn’t imagine being in there for seven more minutes. A day or two later, I came down with a bad cold.

According to our intrepid instructor, one of the most important strategies for surviving a shipwreck is to stay in a group. And I feel like this exercise, short as it was, did demonstrate this principle. Our train formation not only made me feel warmer, it also made me feel less anxious. In addition, different members of our group had different skills. Our older, more experienced caboose, really helped us get oriented the right way and reach the life raft. But once he was there, he needed the help of younger, stronger people (such as yours truly) to get into the life raft. While even a fake “abandon ship!” was quite enough excitement for me, it was a very interesting exercise, and I learned a lot. And even though only 2% of us would survive a real shipwreck, I am proud to say that 100% of us survived this accreditation exercise, with only mild hypothermia. Huzzah!

Food stories, Part 1

I’m calling this “Part 1” because I anticipate that there will be many more food stories to come.

Food in Chile is really hit or miss. In my first week in Concepcion I went out to lunch with a colleague and I ordered “casuela”, an apparently quintessential chilean dish which boils down to soup, in this case, chicken noodle soup without the noodles. But it was very bland and I had trouble finishing it. And this is a country where people take long lunch breaks, actually lunch is supposedly the most important meal of the day.

A lot of the local more traditional eateries I’ve been to have a three course meal menu with a salad, main course, and a dessert. But I am so far underwhelmed by these. And this may also be because eateries around universities do cater to a younger student crowd, but I have noticed a fondness for mayonnaise (without fries) and sweet drinks that I find baffling. The saddest lunch I had was when I went to a Japanese fast food place and thought I was ordering something that I thought was a poke bowl, but instead turned out to be rice with some fake crab and a huge amount of two different flavored mayonnaise. Extremely upsetting. Not any less baffling was the time I went out to lunch with another colleague and she took me to a more healthy place that offered menus of salads, quesadillas, and wraps. I got the quesadilla, and it was indeed chicken and cheese and veggies in a tortilla shell, but to my infinite disappointment … but it was stone cold. I felt completely betrayed by my food. How is this a quesadilla????

Despite the lack of food consciousness, Chilean cuisine has one redeeming feature: seafood. I had tried amazing seafood on my previous trip to Chile, including curanto and ceviches, but my first week here I had a revelation that rivals either of those: the seafood empenada.

It happened like this. During my first week in Concepción, I accompanied Pamela and Eduardo, the two head technicians of my lab to the University marine station at Dichato to renew the lab’s seawater reserves. The marine station was a newish looking building with a hatchery for dogfish and sea urchins on the ground floor, and scientists dutifully sorting through samples on the in the upper floor. Across the street was another building that was just bare bones. I was told that the lab was destroyed in the 2010 tsunami that hit the Chilean coast. It swept away the building and all the expensive scientific equipment. Luckily, no lives were lost at the lab, but they are still in the process of rebuilding and don’t have even a quarter of the scientific equipment that they used to have. They say that people want to move the location of the lab to safer place, but having a lab right at the ocean really allows you to do things you can’t do if you’re far away, such as pumping seawater directly from the source into your aquaria. It was a bit of a sobering moment, but at the same time, really fascinating to see how Chileans deal with the constant threat of disaster at any moment.

After visiting the station Pamela and Eduardo suggested stopping off at the market to get snacks. The market was mostly seafood, and they pointed out the local fish for sale: merluza, conglio, reineta; all the while Pamela steered us to a staircase in the back of one shop. We went up three flight of rickety stairs to a table that was right next to the kitchen. I was excited about the idea of seafood empanadas. Pamela said I could have several different kinds: marisco (seafood), macha (a kind of razor clam) queso, langostina (squat lobster) queso, carapacho (crab) queso, and probably several others. I elected for the classic “marisco”. Pamela and Eduardo also each ordered one. Pamela asked me if I had brought lunch to the lab, because if I hadn’t I could get another one. And I looked at Pamela, thinking out loud, “Another one. Yes… And maybe another one after that?” I asked it like a question and I was hoping that she wouldn’t judge me for my gluttony. But the look she gave me said, of course get two more if you want two more. So she amended our order for another langostino queso and macha queso empanada.

And they came out of the kitchen in steaming bags ready for us to go. but I couldn’t wait that long and attacked the bag. Pamela and Eduardo shrugged and followed suit. Oh my, I did not expect it to be so delicious. Up until this point (second week in Chile) I had only had baked empanadas which tend to be bigger than fried empanadas and have a thicker crust. I am going to go out on a limb and say that the fried empanadas unequivocally taste much better. The marisco empanada was delicious, the pastry was flaky and thin and golden and the filling was a minced lemony shellfish explosion. It was really hot but I didn’t care, I just shoved it into my mouth as fast as possible. Unfortunately it wasn’t fast enough. Eduardo pointed at my shirt which was covered in shellfish juice because apparently there was a “sopita” in the marisco empanada that I had missed out on! And as I had only recently met these people I thought that spilling the food on myself was probably a good enough show… no need to suck the sopita out of my shirt. Though I was sorely tempted. Luckily I still had two more empanadas left to go. I had planned to take them back, but considering the other two were only in the middle of their single empanadas I tore into the second one. Macha Queso. Maybe my favorite. Macha is this huge razor clam and I did not expect this shellfish to go well with cheese. I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t. But oh my gosh it was amazing. Pamela and Eduardo were impressed. “Te gusta?” Emphatic nods ensue. Yes, I really liked it!!

Baked empanada de pino, the traditional empanada filling of ground beef, onion, olive, and hard-boiled egg

And back in the lab Eduardo made a great imitation of my eyes going big and rubbing my hands together like a Bond villain while saying “Que rico!” (how yummy!). People really appreciated it. And that led to Pedro offering to take me out that weekend to eat at his sister-in-law’s restaurant in Lirquen to try mariscal frio which is a cold seafood soup. And it was incredible. Such huge shellfish! And I tried fiure which is a red tunicate that I’ve never had before. The fiure had a bitter metallic taste that I wasn’t partial to, but I was glad to have tried it. We ended up ordering a second platter of the cold shellfish soup because it tasted so good.

And so, Chile is a country of culinary contradictions, where casuelo sits aside a macha queso empanada. But knowing that one exists really makes you value having the other.

Jellyfishing

One of the most fun things that I have done as a TA is gone jellyfishing. It is a
bit like the marine version of butterfly hunting. One has a bucket for the specimens,
and a plastic dipping jar attached to a long pole to catch them. Two weeks ago,
we had to collect medusas ( jellyfish) and ctenophores for lab.

A “biological” aside: Ctenephores and jellyfish, while they look alike, are very
distant relations. The umbrella shaped jellyfish is in the phylum Cnidaria, and
the ctenephore is in the phylum Ctenephora. Just as a refresher, “phylum” is
the second highest taxanomical level after “kingdom”. Our (humans) phylum is
chordata, which means that we have a backbone. So taxonomically speaking, we
are about as related to jelly fish as the ctenophores are! When looking at
these two organisms however, you can see where people would want to lump these
two phyla together. They are both are mainly a jelloid semi-transparent body
with tentacles that float around in the ocean. Yet, they are very different!
Ctenephores are physiologically more complex than medusa (another word for the
jellyfish form), and some researchers have just postulated that ctenophores are,
genomically, our oldest common relative! To think that we may be descended from
a jelly blob! Ctenephores and medusa have very different ways of getting
around. Medusa use jet propulsion “technology” to move in the water, they
contract their bell shape which pushes water out from under their body, pushing
them in the opposite direction. The ctenephore, on the other hand, moves its
globular body by beating eight rows of ctenes (guess where the phylum got its
name from?) which are rows of ciliated combs. These are both cool ways of moving, but very different.

So last Wednesday, armed with our jelly dippers, me and group of students headed
to the docks. The wind was light, the clouds were spotty, and we had a song in our
hearts, for a jellyfishing we were to go! The first challenge was to spot them. While the
medusa and ctenophores can move, they cannot move fast, a feature that we use
to our advantage while hunting. On the down side, they are practically transparent,
which makes jellyfishing an activity for sunny and calm days. It is practically
impossible to do when wind ruffles the surface of the water, breaking it up
into a fractal layer. An added difficulty is that refraction at the water’s
surface and our depth perception makes it hard to gauge where in the water
column the jellies are.

It takes a bit of time, but once you start to discern their outlines in the water,
many of them seemed to pop out. It reminds me of what someone told me of
mushroom foraging, you need to adjust your gaze to your quarry. The next
challenge was catching them. Some students tried different methods with varying
success, one would dip quickly, making a splash and then bringing up the dipper
quickly. This did not seem to work so well. The act of disturbing the water
with the dipper sent up bubbles and created currents which sent the quarry away
and out of sight. My favorite method was to go for the ones near the surface
and use the act of breaking the surface tension as a vacuum that sucked the
unassuming jellies into the cup. A successful dip gave a very satisfying
feeling, and I think it’s surprising that we tarried at the docks for a while.
I also collected some for the lab practical, and caught far more than the one
medusa and one ctenephore that was necessary. It was too much fun! And when
carrying my stash back to the lab, I felt like I was channeling a 19^th
century naturalist, the kind of crazy collector who delights in finding a new
specimen to study. I sloshed the water in bucket and felt a thrill ar the anticipation
of discovery.

Critter Cam

#1 The Barnacle

When I thought of barnacles, I would think of those dried out husks of small shells
that hurt your butt when you try to sit on rocks on the beach. What a nuisance!
But barnacles, when you see them underwater, are actually really awesome and
mesmerizing critters. You can think of barnacles almost as upside down shrimp.
They have the fan-like legs that filter the water for particles in a regular
grabbing motion. It looks like a hand slowly closing or a three-year-old waving
bye-bye. When you see the video, you will understand what I mean.

There are four barnacles feeding, and a slime star, and a crab in this shot. Can you
spot them all?

#2 The Hermit Crab, and the Sponge

The first phylum than we covered in class were porifera, or sponges. Despite the
fact that they look dull (they don’t move and actually don’t look like they’re
alive at all), sponges are quite actually quite interesting and prolific
animals. Sponges get their name from the spongy texture of their skeletons.
Bath sponges are the skeletons of tropical species whose skeletons are made of
spongin, an elastic material that gives these bath sponges their absorbency and
are great for the bath. Sadly I ill not be able to slough away slough away my
skin with the skeletal remains of one of the sponges in our sea tables since
most of the species in the Pacific Northwest makes their skeletons out of
calcium carbonate (what shells are made of); not so good for the bath.

Sponges are loose collections of cells. While they have specialized cells, such as feeding
cells and reproductive cells, they have no organs, no nervous system, no
circulatory system. Sponges are in that weird gray area where you don’t know
whether to call one an individual or a colony. But don’t let the fact that it’s
“simple” fool you into smug superiority, being simple has its advantages. All
sponges can regenerate, if you break a piece of sponge off from a larger
individual, chances are both will grow into two fully functioning sponges. If
that’s not awesome enough, some sponges have the amazing property that if you
force it through a cheesecloth and turn it into sponge soup, the free floating
cells will spontaneously reassociate and reform the sponge. Now THAT is a cool
party trick. Even more incredibly, if you take two of these sponges and force
them through a cheesecloth into the same bowl, the cells will reform into the
two original separate individuals. WOW!! It is mind-boggling that these
simplest of creatures, that are not even proper creatures by our standards,
have a sense of self.

I already knew that hermit crabs were pretty darn cool before I got here. They
live in the abandoned shells of other gastropods. When a hermit crab gets too
big for its home, it has to scurry into danger to find a new and bigger one. We
have a hermit crab living in one of the sea tables, and instead of living in a
shell, this particular one lives in a sponge. “How did this happen?”, you may
ask. Well, a while ago the hermit crab chose a nice shell to dart into for
cover. It was a cozy shell, and the hermit crab decided to stay long-term. But
(dum dum duuuum!), it was a sponge-encrusted shell, and while many sponges are
happy living on the surface of shells, this particular type of sponge can
dissolve calcium carbonate, and it ended up eating away the hermit crab’s home.
You may think that the hermit crab was cheated of its hard won shell, but
actually both animals benefit from this situation. The sponge gets to see the
world (not that it really cares as it has no eyes or any other sensory organs),
and the hermit crab gets a home that will grow as it grows and that is
unpalatable to predators (Apparently sponges are not tasty, I could have
guessed that!). So in the end, everyone is happy!

Wrangling sea creatures

One of the main reasons why I picked the particular project I did for my Masters work is because I felt that I was deficient in my stats knowledge and could use a healthy dose of data analysis time. I see field work and data analysis as two sides of the scientific coin, the yin and the yang of sciency activity; the one side, exciting, fun, exhausting … the other side, serious, meticulous, ponderous. Note that my thinking is leaning towards the “nature” part of “natural” sciences, so this applies biologists and geologists, or any other scientist who get to go outside (Sorry all you physicists and chemists, but you chose to live in labs!).

As you can imagine, after two years of intense field experience, I felt that my scientific chakra was unbalanced, and I chose to set things right with two years of stats and much computer love. Don’t get me wrong, I have been committed to this plan, and think that it was great move; after two years of ANOVAs and R programming, I have become a much better scientist. But sometimes after a long a day of sitting in my windowless office I miss fieldwork. And while I really enjoy coding in R (I’m not kidding, it’s so much fun!), there are times when I look at my R-generated graphs and wonder what critters this beautifully proportioned kick-ass graph is representing. Because I have no idea. Other than they are probably either fish or macrozooplankton (or, the bane of all acousticians, bubbles). But I could not tell you more than that.

It is not surprising that one of the most exciting parts of my TA job is that I get to handle sea creatures. A lot of sea creatures. And not only that, but I get to learn all about them. I really like this TA gig, I get to do all the learning but none of the actual work. It’s a win-win situation! I can’t help sometimes looking over my students as they’re sketching away furiously and feel a bit smug. They do all the microscope adjusting to find interesting physiological formations and I get to go around and ask to look at the cool things they spot. Then I can go forth and look at the critters some more. It is a good life.

But of course, I also have some tasks of my own. My main task is to make Megan’s life easier. Megan is the instructor for the invert class. She is a formidable lady, with an encyclopedic knowledge of invertebrates, and is one of the most approachable no-nonsense people I’ve met. She’s also the associate director at the labs, and has been studying the intertidal ecology of the island for 40 years. As I’m sure you can imagine, she’s the type of person you want to impress. So I was not going to let her down when a week ago, my first task was to clean the sea tables.

The sea tables are large trays that have sea water flowing in from an overhead tube, and are constantly draining into gutters built into the floor of the lab. Because dirt and other gross biological matter accumulates in these sea tables, we drain them regularly and clean them. To d this, Megan tells me, I must move all the critters from one table to the other. All of them? Even the gross looking ones? Sigh. I guess that’s what I get for choosing to permanently separate from my desktop computer for a quarter. No, I am a fearless scientist! I have done way grosser things than catching sessile, mucus covered, spineless (literally) creatures! My thoughts went swiftly to last summer when I helped a fellow grad student pick enmeshed half-dead twitching pikeminnow from a gill net, and my resolve was strengthened.

A (pretty darn clean) sea table

Once I got started, moving the first mushy nudibranch over, it got easier. Sure, my hands were numbs from the freezing water, and the scallops did not want to let go of the tray (neither did the chitons), and those pesky shrimp nimbly zipped away from my chilled fingers, but I did it! And it was fun! Since then I have gotten to know these critters a lot better, and today, I didn’t think twice
about sticking my hand in the tank to grab a huge and soft and wiggly polychaete worm for my more squeamish students. You would never know that it has barely been two weeks since I hav switched over from handling my keyboard to handling sea critters.

wriggly nereid polychaete worm! You learn to love them.

Spaghetti on the wall

Today was the first day of spring quarter. I have beenhere for five days already, which in some ways is a long time, and in others, is a very short time indeed. It is a long enough time for me to have formed a picture of Friday Harbor Labs’ layout, but not enough time to have added capillary layers to my knowledge of arterial connections. Unfortunately, I need to add those capillary layers to my FHL picture as quickly as possible. A teacher is supposed to help facilitate the student’s learning process, and in large part is assumed to have more knowledge than the student about the subject that is being taught. In many ways, I feel confident that I have knowledge to impart, and that I have the experience and motivation to make a good TA. In some blatant other ways, I am sorely lacking.

A few minutes of conversation with any researcher here is enough to realize that there is a lot about the San Juan ecosystem I don’t know, mainly, the critters and where the live and how they spend their days. It seems to me that, while everyone’s research is specific, everyone at FHL has a knowledge bank about “mundane” aspects of the ecosystem like, when plankton blooms usually occur, what critters like to hang out together, what critters eat each other, and, what the critters are called. Researchers tend to use scientific names, usually a genus with the species sometimes included. I have now caught on that “pisaster” is a type of seastar, but am hopelessly drowning types of algae. They mostly look brown and leafy to me.

I knew that it would be hard to get up to speed about invertebrates, the subject of the class I’m TAing, but I forgot that I would also have to cram my head with knowledge about Friday Harbor itself. A marine station like this requires total immersion, your full attention and participation. Because everyone has a stake in keeping Friday Harbor a well-oiled machine, they tend to be more mindful of other people and more willing to help each other. It is a similar situation as being at sea on a ship: everyone works together to keep the ship running smoothly. Besides being able to get along with other people around you and being as helpful as possible, you need to know enough about how the ship works in order to be useful crewmember. You can’t raise the mainsail if you don’t know where the main halyard is! I use the ship comparison because, having spent six weeks on a boat as a Sea Semester student, I see similarities between the two situations. I remember how hard it was the first days where it seemed like my brain was a garbage can overflowing with leftover scraps of information about boat parts and procedures. As one of the instructors said, learning during the first few days is like throwing spaghetti on a wall and seeing what sticks. As it turns out, some stubborn spaghetti strands need to be thrown against the wall repeatedly to stick at all. While FHL is nowhere near as complicated as a sailing research vessel, one key difference really ups the ante for me; during Sea Semester I was student, at FHL I am a teacher.

My biggest challenge these past few days has been in remembering where everything is. The FHL campus is not so big, but the buildings all the look the same to me. There is one main road and with some small tributaries, but a lot of buildings are not directly connected to the main road by anther road. On top of the general confusion, I have a terrible sense of direction. My sense of direction is to me like kryptonite is to Superman, like water to the Wicked Witch of the West, like sun to a snowman… you get the picture. I cannot remember routes without actively focusing all my attention on my surroundings, and this is rarely possible the first time I go somewhere, or even the second time. I usually operate by taking the same route everywhere, with no deviations. Unlike my father who loves trying out new ways to reach a destination, just for the fun of it, the idea of taking a different route throws me into a state of absolute bewilderment bordering on panic. Knowing this about myself, I have tried extra hard the past few days to pay attention to Katie as I trailed behind her around campus.

Katie is an excellent tour guide and very patient, but even under her care I remained vulnerable to my Weakness (with a capital W). For example, on Friday, after I had been at Friday Harbor for one full day, Katie and I prepped the lab for students. This mainly involved hauling dissection microscopes and compound microscopes from the stockroom to the lab. We drove to the stockroom from Lab 3 to load the car with heavy compound microscopes. As the microscopes got priority in the car over me, Katie suggested that I walk back to the lab while she drove back with the scopes. I walked around the stockroom past Lab 1, spotted Lab 2, but not Lab 3. I went back in front of the stockroom and revolved in a circle, just in time to see Katie coming back down as she turned her car around. It was funny and slightly embarrassing, and I diligently followed Katie’s car to Lab 3, which it turns out was between Lab 2 and 4 (as I suspected it should be!), but parallel to them, right behind the stockroom where the saga began.

It’s been five days, and I’m glad to say that some of the spaghetti has stuck. Indeed, I now can find my way around, and I can proudly say that I walked to the dining hall all by myself today. Progress! Even though I may be a bit behind on my knowledge of invertebrates, I can at least find the dining hall just as well as any student.

The inside of Lab 3, where I will be spending most of my time teaching.

A view of some FHL buildings from the docks. I couldn’t tell you with absolute certainty which ones 🙂

In preparation for my move to an island in the sun (maybe)

It has been almost two years since I touched this blog.This hiatus occurred for two reasons:

I have forgone my glamorous errant scientist lifestyle in favor of a grad-student project that has me chained to my desk. While it has been intellectually stimulating and has made me a better scientist, the only extensive traveling I have done has been by living vicariously through my sister Tamara (https://tamadventures.wordpress.com/), with a supplemental boost from google images search.
I’m lazy.

Despite the fact that I have not had much material to blog about (or have been too lazy to), I have had a great time in Seattle. Seattle is extremely likable and livable; it blends a weird mix of laid-back West Coast attitude and uptight Swedish stoicism. I love the green spaces and food snobbery. When I order a cup of coffee, I convincingly feign interest as the barista describes the different aromas of all their available single-origin blends. I complain about the weather because it seems to be a popular conversation topic.

I have fallen victim to recycling shame for failing to compost a napkin, and have succumbed to bicycle road rage when spandex-clad racers narrowly avoid crashing into me on the Burke-Gilman bike trail. I can answer with confidence when I am asked what neighborhood I live in and I have taken an interest in the names and positions of Seattle neighborhoods. All in all, I feel at home in Seattle.

I am currently a grad student at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Hopefully, I will finish serving my sentence this summer and leave graduate school with a bona fide Master’s degree. Being paid to be a student is probably one of the best gigs I could imagine, despite the long hours and painful research moments. While I am absolutely loving grad student life, I miss fieldwork. I purposefully chose to come to a mathy program and work on project that would build my quantitative skills. And while this strategy has worked (I was a Teacher’s Assistant for a statistics class this quarter after all), the only fish I have seen in my entire time at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences have been virtual fish pixels on my computer screen. To make up for this hole in my education, I applied to be a TA (Teacher’s Assistant) at Friday Harbor Labs this spring. I will be TAing a class called Marine Zoology, which focuses on marine invertebrates. While I am super excited about this prospect, I am nervous about the fact that over the past two years I have only taken classes about ecological models and have only seen real marine invertebrates in Malaysian prawn soups.

Either way, I am departing for Friday Harbor in a week. Here is what I know about Friday Harbor: it is a town on an island in the San Juan archipelago (someone recently asked me which island, and I didn’t know, but I looked it up. It’s called Orcas Island!*). It takes between 3 and 5 hours to get there from Seattle, depending on whether you are taking a car/ferry or bus/ferry combination. It is very close to Canada. The university has a laboratory there where scientists, mostly biologists (You will be a lonely quantitative ecologist at Friday Harbor, my advisor said to me), study the San Juan ecosystem. I know that during the quarter, I will be working with two professors, both biologists (one zoologist, one botanist), two other TAs, and seventeen undergraduate students. I know that I will need rubber boots. This is all I know.

I expect that the island will be beautiful, that I will work hard, have a great time, and have to fake an understanding of marine invertebrates. Hopefully, in the process, I will also learn a lot about marine invertebrates. And maybe about other things. I am very excited!! And a little nervous. But mostly very excited. I look forward to filling you in as I discover the answers to my burning questions like, will I be able to recognize an invertebrate when I see it? Will it be squishy? Are people as interested in the weather at Friday Harbor as they are in Seattle? Stay tuned for these thrilling updates, and more!

*Correction: It’s actually called San Juan Island. The internet lied to me. Thanks, Emily!