Speaking a-lab-skan
May 30, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
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| : Other examples of the fun things the lab gets up to – sticklecookies! Here we see many nuptial-colored males courting a gravid female. |
Late last night, the other half of our lab group flew in. They are all here to mainly work in UAA’s lab, using fish caught in the area. Matt Wund is the lab’s postdoctoral research fellow. His work is based around studying how different populations react to the selective pressures of new environments. Anna Mazarella, a junior biology and studio art major, is here to not only help out in the lab, but to take as many pictures as possible. Jeff is a junior psychology major and joins Sophie and me as a rookie to Alaska. His first few weeks, he’ll be working in the lab with Matt and Anna, but eventually he’ll be working with Kat Shaw, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut who graduated from Clark with her fifth-year Master’s in 2005. The four of us had to explain a few things to our new counterparts: we have developed our own peculiar language in the two weeks we’ve been up here. Lauren calls it “A-lab-skan.” For example, the night we got back into Anchorage we had some fortune cookies with our dinner and one of the lottery numbers on the back of someone’s fortune was 4. Lauren mentioned that it was mildly amusing because 4 is an unlucky number in Japanese culture, and I remarked that I had heard that was because the word for the number 4 was very close to the pronunciation of the word for “death.” Well, this was hilarious to us at the time. Who designs a language system where you count “one, two, three, death?” And ever since we do not say “four” anymore; we say “death.” So we became a “fearsome deathsome” with “death” chairs around our kitchen table… etc. That’s right. You can never take us too seriously up here. Also decided to label ourselves using the military phonetic alphabet due to the street names surrounding Wolf and Kings Lakes, which are all named Echo, Sierra, Tango, and so on. Lauren and I are Alpha Team — making her Alpha Leader (Alpha One) and me Alpha Two. Jana and Sophie are Bravo Team — Jana being Bravo Leader and Sophie, Bravo Two. And because the other three are not in the field, we emphasized their difference by passing over Charlie and labeling them Delta Team. Matt is Delta Leader, Anna, Delta Two, and Jeff, Delta Three. This has led to some very interesting phone conversations. Especially because we spelled people’s names out using said alphabet and thought it was hilarious that Matt became “Mike Alpha Tango Tango.” Which quickly led to us calling him Captain Tango Tango. Maybe you all didn’t need to know that. Poor Matt.
On rabbits and moose (OK, just 1 of each)
May 25, 2008 | author: Matt Wund
Here are some Alaskan pics I've taken so far. The top photo shows Anna and Jeff at Rabbit Slough. We saw the moose, 2nd photo below, at Whale Lake. He regarded us for a few minutes, and then plopped down to relax.
Blame it on the rain
May 24, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
The weather treated us surprisingly well when we were down on the Kenai. It was cold in the mornings and at night, but for the most part we had sunshine.
Today it rained. All day. Not hard or anything, but enough to make life interesting.
Our first day in the Mat-Su was spent in a new car. Poor Pewter’s “maintenance required” light came on, so we took him back to the car rental and got a Highlander for the weekend. Unfortunately, this car had no roof rack, so Jana and Sophie had to leave the canoe behind for awhile. But that meant that we got to trap incredibly efficiently for a few days. Today we experienced the extreme bugginess of Irene Lake and the interesting trek via ATV trail and muskeg to Whale Lake.
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| A moose skull seen on the trail leading into Whale Lake. |
Homeward bound
May 23, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
So, yesterday we made some rune stones to help us make decisions. For example, the decision of who showered first when we got to our unit.
I won that one.
After pulling all our traps from the day previous, we headed home to Anchorage. We rolled into town around 9pm after a slightly harrowing ride on the highway due to high winds. Pewter handles well for a minivan, but he becomes a high profile vehicle in the wind with the U.S.S. Clifford tied on top. Tired, but excited to sleep in real beds, we got some dinner and the keys to our unit on the UAA campus.
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| Jana and Sophie batten down the hatches. |
Showering for the first time in seven days was GREAT.
Our unit is fantastic; there are four single bedrooms and a very nice galley kitchen. This will be the main unit, so Jana, Sophie and I will move out into the second unit a week from now when our other lab members arrive. For now though, we have another week to enjoy being a fearsome foursome. And tomorrow we get to settle into our normal commute out to the Matanuska-Susitna area (also known as the Mat-Su). All is well with the world.
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| Lauren measuring the softness of the carpet in our unit. |
The shish-kablog
May 22, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
This is our last night of camping. The UAA residence halls open tomorrow, so we’ll be traveling back to Anchorage and moving into our main unit tomorrow night.
Met some people today at Encelewski Lake who know Rich King! It is a small world, and very satisfying to know that the locals almost always remember the “stickleback people.” We make an impression.
Traveled down to the tip of the Kenai Peninsula today and threw some traps in Deep Creek and Anchor River, which require treks through salt marsh to get to. The beach was relatively unoccupied today, but we’ve been seeing the beginning of the Memorial Day campers and RVers. I don’t blame them for taking advantage of the time while they have it; despite the still chilly air, the ocean is gorgeous with the mountains as a backdrop and the sky yawns wide here, blue and inviting.
Took a brief trip down to the Homer Spit (“Spit Happens!” or “A quaint little drinking town with a fishing problem.”) for a souvenir run. Bought postcards and gifts for the poor people back home who are missing all of this.
Halfway through our drive off the spit to our next trapping site at Mud Bay, we spied a bald eagle. We’d been seeing eagles ever since we moved farther south, but this one was sitting on a signpost, just chilling. We drove right up to it without it ruffling a feather. Quietly dubbed him “Ebert” and went to drive away after taking about twenty pictures each. And then we spotted Ebert’s cousin not fifty yards down the road! More pictures. The wildlife and its proximity to human life up here is fairly mind-blowing.
We made our last night camping one for the books. Made an awesome campfire, sang all the camp songs we knew, cooked up some mouth-watering kabobs (and hot-dog-a-bobs), and rounded it out with some roasted marshmallows.
On the road again
May 21, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
As the title clearly states, another day of driving. Nothing terribly exciting until the end of the day when we left our Hidden Lake campsite and moved down to Ninilchik in order to trap farther south.
The midnight mud attack of '08
May 20, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
Speaking of Skilak Road … We had quite the eventful night. After throwing all of our traps and picking up the water quality duo from their last lake, the four of us spent some time in the Soldotna McDonald’s charging our cell phones and the ATV battery we bought to use with the trolling motor on the canoe. (This was a fun four hours in which we sat in the back of the restaurant charging our equipment, using the wifi from the Safeway across the parking lot, and eating Subway sandwiches for dinner.) It had already been a long day, and Lauren and I still had twenty traps to throw back at Hidden Lake near our campsite. After seeing some of our first moose on the slowly darkening ride home from Soldotna (and what Lauren and Jana suppose was a great-horned owl in a tree off the side of the road), the three of us who weren’t driving drifted off to sleep. Lauren took it well, but Skilak Road is an adventure by itself even in the light. Nineteen miles long, it is entirely dirt and gravel – very fun in a minivan in the middle of May when things have been muddy and the vehicles with four-wheel drive who have been using it create large ditches down the middle and sides of their road by taking the mud puddles at good speed. Pewter takes these areas slowly and carefully, and Lauren had gotten through every bad patch just fine. Until…
The front left wheel slipped off a ridge of hard-packed mud that Lauren had been carefully navigating and fell down into a small ditch of mud. The rest of us woke up to see the sign for our campsite maybe fifty yards down the road. Sweet. So we got out to assess the situation. Lauren had her window rolled down to talk to us while we figured things out — so when we went to push and she went to accelerate… Well. Let us just say that Pewter and Lauren both were very artfully decorated with the plume of mud that fountained into the air as the front wheel escaped.
Made it back to Hidden by 12:45, grabbed our twenty traps, and threw them before heading off to bed. Nothing brings a good field researcher down!
Today, we made a friend at Longmere Lake, a place Lauren has tried and failed to trap for the past two years. Very nice people, but talkative! Alaskans are great for conversation. They will tell you their life’s story and expect yours in return. Also very curious about what we do — but the questions are fantastic. Especially when we meet kids. They ask the most random, pointed questions about what we’re doing. It’s a great deal of fun.
Hazy shade of winter
May 19, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
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| Lauren, left, and Rachel take a moment |
Water quality girls still figuring things out. Today, I learned how to count and preserve fish in the field. It’s so crazy and amazing to actually see this fish in the wild after studying them for years in a classroom. It’s very early in the season; we’ve talked to a few locals who’ve told us that most of the lakes around here only just iced out a few weeks ago. Apparently, it was an unusual winter weather-wise. We heard that Anchorage had a few feet of snow only two weeks before we arrived!
And yet … the sun was beating down on us enough today that Lauren and I actually turned on the air conditioning in Pewter for the time we spent riding between lakes. Oh, the humanity.
Also! Saw a black bear today while driving down Skilak Road. It stood on the side of the road for a moment, nonchalantly watching us as we exclaimed and scrambled for the video camera before trotting off into the woods again.
On trapping lakes and flagging tapes
May 18, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
First day! Lauren taught me how to set traps in about two minutes while standing on the muskeg at Watson Lake. Muskeg is great stuff; generally, one can refer to it as bogland or marsh. It consists of sphagnum moss and other vegetation in various states of decomposition and is home to all sorts of interesting plants — like berry bushes (cranberry, blueberry, cloudberry, crowberry), carnivorous pitcher plants, wild calla lilies, and Labrador tea plants. Can one tell that we have been trying hard to identify every new plant and animal we stumble across out here?
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| Sophie works in the field |
Trapping the threespine stickleback sometimes requires the skills of a ninja warrior. In general, it is as easy as putting together a small minnow trap, throwing it out into the water, and tying it off to vegetation at the water’s edge. We usually throw about ten traps in a lake and leave them overnight before coming back the next day to count and preserve the fish we’ve caught. Where we trap at a lake is a matter that becomes more delicate. Some lakes do not have public accesses, or the public access is so well-traveled that we wouldn’t want to throw traps there because curious Alaskans and/or tourists might pull them up to check them out. Or worse, think we’re doing something wrong and remove our traps completely! Our ninja skills include finding isolated spots to throw traps, hiding our flagging tape and ropes from inquiring eyes, and making friends with nice homeowners who might let us throw traps off their property.
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Traps, field notebook, and a jar of preserved fish. What more could you need? |
To throw a stickleback trap: tag them (with permit number, Lauren’s name and contact info, and a line indicating that the trap is for research purposes), flag them (with the same information), toss them out parallel to shore, tie the rope off to nearby vegetation and discreetly hide the flagging tape. Our waterproof notebook (rightly labeled “Collector’s Bible 2008 Part 1”) gets a sketch indicating where each trap is, air and water temperature, GPS coordinates, and directions to the lake if we don’t currently have them. All of this information, as well as the counts we get for fish collected the next day, later gets copied neatly into a notebook for future referencing available to anyone using the collections from 2008.
The water quality girls had their first run today. They managed to set up their canoe with necessary equipment, but unfortunately have forgotten the chlorophyll filter in the lab in Massachusetts! Lauren and Jana have attempted to “MacGyver” a replacement filter, but the sponge that was supposed to be the filter got damp and the sealant hasn’t properly sealed. No worries. John will send the real piece of equipment a.s.a.p. to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for us to pick up on Tuesday.
To the Kenai with a keen eye
May 17, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
I suspect that in the next couple of days, I am going to really appreciate that the grant money provided the four of us in these first two weeks was used to put us up in hotel for my first night’s sleep in Alaska. The trip here was exhausting, and it had just fallen fully dark when I got here around midnight (which was interesting by itself! It is strange to be in a plane headed north and the sky keeps getting lighter and lighter even as your body gets more and more tired). Met up with the other three girls who are here with me for the first two weeks.
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| Lauren and Jana in Alaska in 2007. |
Lauren Ackein, a fifth-year master’s student, is in charge of our little group for this trip. This is her third trip to Alaska being in charge of the field collections the lab makes every year. My presence here is being put to good use by helping Lauren with trapping efforts.
The other two members of our party are Jana Loux-Turner and Sophie Valena. Both are junior year biology majors like me (and all of our families are from New Hampshire, too!) and are here in Alaska to continue a project Jana participated in last summer in Alaska testing the water quality of the lakes where we trap stickleback. This is Sophie’s first trip to Alaska, and she’s here to help Jana with the water quality study as well as to think about a possible future project on land cover change in the area.
The morning of the 17th was spent showering and piling on the food at the hotel’s continental breakfast bar. We packed up our Toyota Sienna minivan — oh, funny story. We have a penchant for naming things here. When Lauren and Sophie went to pick up the van from the rental desk at the Anchorage airport, Lauren wanted to know if it was a white van so we could all call it “Vanna White.” No, said the lady at the desk. It’s pewter. And “Pewter” it has become. He was the only male included on our camping trip. So, we packed up Pewter, and went to the lab’s storage unit in Wasilla which is about forty minutes away from Anchorage. It’s a beautiful drive alongside mountains and rivers and forest.
After picking up all our equipment and the canoe (which is big and red and was promptly christened the U.S.S. Clifford) for the water quality girls to use for their plankton tows, we were finally on our way to the Kenai. The long drive was made amazing via the wild views out our windows: the Prince William Sound, more mountains (with more snow), cliffs and waterfalls. We had our eyes peeled for mountain goats, which Lauren has seen in the past, but we were fresh out of mountain goat luck this year. Maybe on the next trip down.
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| Our beloved minivan, Pewter. |
Drove into Soldotna to get food for dinner around 10:30. Set up our tents at a campsite on Hidden Lake. We were right on the shoreline, and as it finally fell dark we crawled into our sleeping bags to fend off the cold, ready for our first day of work in the morning.
North to Alaska!
May 16, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
Scene: Dulles International Airport in the early afternoon of a rainy, spring day. The terminal is crowded with people chattering on their cell phones, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. One girl sits, notebook in lap, smoothie in hand, writing and dreaming of a land they call “the last frontier.”
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| Sophie anticipates the plane ride to Alaska. |
Traveling to Alaska for the summer was never a dream of mine, but when I heard I had the opportunity to go there for six weeks of my junior summer and participate in a genuine field research session, I leapt at the chance. Last semester, Susan Foster, my faculty adviser and one half of the husband-wife duo doing research on the threespine stickleback at Clark University, made my college career when she suggested that I unite my two primary passions in life (biology and writing) by writing an article about the natural history and adaptive radiation of the stickleback — and that I could easily travel to Alaska with the lab group that goes every year in order to research my topic in a very hands-on way. So, here I am on my way to Anchorage using the Traina Scholarship I was awarded when I was accepted to Clark and NSF funding awarded to the lab. The feeling is mostly excitement. The new things to see and experience are almost beyond numbering; I cannot even imagine half of them. The plane ride is long and I’ll have plenty of time to contemplate the next few weeks while I glide through the clouds, but I think I’ll just use the time to sleep. It will be at least 4am when I finally touch ground in Alaska, after all!
Coming attractions (or ... 4 girls & a van)
May 15, 2008 | author: Rachel LaBranche
Coming soon: The tale of what it is like to camp for seven days on the Kenai Peninsula in late May, trapping fish and taking water quality samples daily. A harrowing experience of traveling in a van packed with equipment and four girls who haven’t showered for a week (oh my!). A tale chock full of wildlife infiltrating human civilization. Of glorious views, scenic campsites, late-night dinners around crackling campfires … and the satisfying and almost surreal ability to apply everything one has learned in a classroom or lab at school to a project that will have long-lasting effects on the academic landscape. It is a tale of contributing new knowledge. A tale of getting to know one’s study system up close and personal. A tale of summer in Alaska with the threespine stickleback.
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| The Journey Begins: View from the van’s front seat on the way into Wasilla |
Plankton sampling in a parking lot…...
May 13, 2008 | author: Susan Foster
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| John and Jana’s dry run for plankton sampling in Maywood parking lot at Clark University. |
On May 13, the day of the group photo and celebration of Rachel’s successful defense (LINK to PIC), a dry run (literally) of the plankton sampling routine for Alaskan lakes was played out in the Maywood parking lot next to the Lasry Bioscience Building. This involved the movement of a canoe from John and Susan’s lawn in Petersham, to the parking lot – not a natural home for a canoe! There John taught Jana to (well, maybe not paddle a canoe) but to suspend plankton nets and a flow meter that would tell her how far she traveled in each run. They did not catch much plankton. With luck, the catch will be better in an Alaskan lake! As Lauren, Rachel L., Jana and Sophie leave on Thursday we should hear soon…...
Preparing for the adventure
May 5, 2008 | author: John Baker
Students in the Foster-Baker lab are packing for field work in British Columbia and Alaska. One post-doc, four grad students, and five undergrads are gearing up to perform field work on threespine stickleback and their lake environments from mid-May through early July. One team will work in the Cook Inlet region of Alaska, and the other will do research in the Vancouver Island and adjacent British Columbia mainland region. Studies will range from collections made to continue our conservation archive for selected lakes, water quality and plankton, behavior, and host-parasite relationships.
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