Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for ground squirrel
Bad guy got run over by a caribou!
Merely saying that Jeremy and I were in the field for more than 27 of the 42 hours between Friday at 6 and Sunday at noon does not quite capture the enormity of what Team Efficiency accomplished this weekend. Add on travel time and prep time and one will quickly deduce that we didn’t really sleep more than five hours a night.
Exactly what we accomplished is as follows: wet site total season (marked individuals), dry site total season (marked individuals), wet site total season (largest reproductive), dry site total season (largest reproductive), leaf collection (three leaves times two species times twelve plots times two sites), other leaf collection (fifteen leaves times two species times six plots times two sites), specific leaf area index leaf collection (ten leaves for each species we study in Atqasuk), removal of soil probes, soil sampling for two different researchers, thaw depth on all 96 plots, OTC removal and disassembly, remarking the boardwalk, taking pictures of each plot, transplant growth measures, seed collection (one species from every plot), cleaning out and taking down the tent, staking and stringing the biomass plots, cleaning up the lab, packing away the equipment… oh yeah, and we started the marathon weekend with collecting phenology data, just like we always do.
I’ve spent nearly the whole ten weeks and never even explained that last bit! For each of the plots I have at the wet site (24 control and 24 with OTCs (open-topped chambers) I have a spreadsheet printed out with spaces to fill in the general status of the vegetation in the plot. As events happen in the plots I write down the date. We record information for each species both for the plot in general and also for three marked individuals of each species in the plots. For example, I observed that in experimental plot eight, Eriophorum angustifolium individual four had green leaf on J169, inflorescence on J169, open flower on J170, withered flower on J175, seed set on J188, and seed dispersal on J201. I did not observe leaf senescence for this individual, though there were Eangs in the total plot that were in this state on J228. Making these kinds of observations is easier when you only saw the plots every ten days or so (like we did), but it is clearly more accurate to check more often (like Rob and Jean did).
While everybody and their brother was seeing polar bear after polar bear in Barrow this weekend, Jeremy and I had to be content with the company of the reincarnation of Rob’s ground squirrel and a few pesky caribou, one of which nearly ran us over and seriously interfered with the science*. It was… charming?
We never would have succeeded in our race-against-time to hop a plane that didn’t know we were coming without the help of Wondrous Bob. Of course, without Wondrous Bob to add several things to our to-do list, we might also have been a bit less stressed.
It was a pleasant kind of stress, and we were pretty happy with ourselves and our accomplishments, like the hoity-toity researchers that we are. We were also happy that the airplane, which we made with twenty minutes to spare, did not reject us.
*Tripped on a string and broke a stick.
Two blokes and a ****load of cutlery.
The official report read: Today the ground squirrel succumbed to high-velocity lead poisoning. I hope I am not stealing Jobby’s thunder here, as those are his words and his deed, but I do enjoy reporting things! Bob told us to shoot it if it was messing with the Science, and as it was seen digging up the graminoids and eating Jeanie’s bugs, some of us felt that it qualified for a special delivery bullet. “Some of us” are not vegetarians.
That’s about all there is to report. We are in Atqasuk. The kids came to visit… I tried to count, but cannot get a more accurate count than “14ish.” In other words, too many.
Speaking of killing the ground squirrel, we killed a few other things today. Plants. After point framing a 70 x70 cm square, we snipped them off at ground level and packed them into environmentally-unfriendly Ziploc bags. This is called “collecting biomass.” In the dry sites we refer to it as “making tundra cake,” and we get much pleasure from carefully removing delicious slices of inch-thick sod from the mighty tundra, but at the wet sites the act is more like a haircut, and the five-and-a-half inch blades of the kitchen knives we purchased from the trusty Stuakpaq are not nearly as useful as the bumble bee scissors.
I don’t know about my teammates, but I always feel a bit guilty desecrating the plants in this fashion. We also, at the request of Bob, are helping out some scientists that we’ve never met from across the country. These people have asked us to do things like insert soil probes into our plots, probes which made a horrendous tearing sound as they sliced through the root structures of our science. The other audacious researcher told us to pick leaves from plants inside the plots- the very idea! However, we grimly did as we were told… weeping all the while.
I’d like to go back to Barrow, but I am getting work and sleeping done here, so what more can I ask for? I have my health. Well, I do now. There are little to no lingering effects of my illness of last week. I’m sure the bulk of the credit for my return to health should go to Hiroki, who kindly presented me with a water-resistant paper crane. I feel ever so much better. Well, my finger hurts a bit, but that has more to do with the fact that I cut it with the bumble bee scissors than with my general health.
