The Stickleblog

Stickle-ventures in Alaska

2011-06-12T16:24:00.010-04:00

I am lucky enough to have spent the past week in Alaska (and lucky enough to be spending one more week here!). I have explored the stunning lakes, mountains, wildlife, glaciers, and much more with a great crew from the stickleback lab at Clark. My time here started off with adventures to a number of lakes to drop traps so that we could make collections and do crosses in the lab here at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. We had varying degrees of trapping success across lakes (Cheney Lake is driving us mad; where are all the stickleback?!?), but got to explore different views of beautiful Alaska. Several lakes, namely Kings (pictured) and Falk, among others, have the most gorgeous views of mountains and I could imagine myself living beside them and waking up to a postcard view. But only in the summer as the darkness and cold in the winter is much less appealing.

In the free moments between trapping and crossing, we like to go exploring. One stop along the way to and from Wasilla (where several of our sampling lakes are located) allowed us the opportunity to meet Harmony, the wolf. Miguel is on the hunt for handmade masks, so when we spotted a shop on the side of the road, decorated in ornately carved figures, we decided to take a look. As we approached we saw a very wolf-looking dog leashed to a tree outside the shop. There were no masks to be found, but Audrey asked the owner about this dog on our way out and he replied with 'That’s no dog. That’s a wolf!' To our excitement he let us pet this beautiful creature and oh what a sweetheart she was! After a nice backrub from Audrey and me (Miguel had to wait because she is wary of men), Harmony rolled onto her back so we could scratch her belly. Then Miguel came over and introduced himself to her and she was just delighted to have three people petting her. We wave to her every time we pass by, now.

On a girls' day out to the field, Dani, Audrey and I took another detour, this time up to Hatcher Pass. First, we gazed out along the rocky path of the Little Susitna River (pictured) and then made our way up the pass where we stopped to take in the breathtaking views of the mountains and valley surrounding us. We made our way to the top where we explored Independence Mine State Historical Park, an abandoned gold mine. It turned out to be a fantastic day of moose sightings (see Audrey's P.S. moose post), stickleback trapping and detouring.

Adventures continued the next day when Lauren, a former Clark stickleback lab member, joined Dani, Audrey and me for a trip to the Portage Glacier in the town of Whittier. When we arrived at the visitor’s center, I was astounded to see several icebergs floating in the nearby glacier lake. I don’t think they were quite as large as the iceberg that took out the Titanic, but they were pretty cool nonetheless! We then ventured into the creepy one lane, miles long mountain tunnel that took us into Whittier and closer to the glacier. After a brief exploration of the tiny town and much hypothesizing about the extremely large and sketchy abandoned Buckner Building not far off in the distance, we made our way to the hiking path. The path was a fairly steep, one-mile trek to one of the most breathtaking places I have ever seen. In one direction was the Portage Glacier, a grand piece of ice to say the least, and in the other an amazing view of the Prince William Sound and the mountains that line it. We spent a lot of time at the top investigating the wild flowers and many paths, each of which provided a different, but equally incredible view. We ended the day with a delicious home cooked meal of stickle-tillas (or open faced quesadillas to non-stickleback folk). Turned out to be quite an epic day of adventuring and I am very much looking forward to the adventures to be had in the coming week when Miguel and I will be focusing on collections for his Ph.D. research.

Waiting for Moose

2011-06-10T14:56:00.015-04:00

There are so many wonderful things about Alaska-- the hundreds of majestic lakes, the breathtaking mountains, the thousands of brilliantly colored stickleback, but most important is the awe-inspiring moose.

I have lived in Maine all my life and even so I have never seen a moose in the wild. Working in Alaska is an amazing chance for an undergraduate student to experience both field and lab work, but for me it is also an opportunity to see a real, live moose in all its glory!

Summertime is the moose calving season here in Alaska. Moose mothers and their offspring are roaming around and foraging during the long, sunlit days. I have been told that moose are everywhere; they are on the side of the road, on the highway, on the campus, and around the lakes. This news confirmed that, in Alaska, it must be easy to see a moose and for many people it is a frequent occurrence in the summertime; however this moose spotting luck, for some reason, seems to have bypassed me.

Whenever we are in the car driving to the grocery store, walking to the lab, or working out in the field I am constantly looking for them. I even took a walk with Shannon in the woods specifically to the search for a moose. Even with hard work and dedication to the moose search, the past six days in Alaska have yielded no moose. There have been several false alarms involving rocks, twigs, and trees, but the search still continues for a real, live moose.

Although the moose hunt proves unfruitful, I have still had many fantastic experiences. The most remarkable task to date is making stickleback crosses. To begin, we collect live stickleback from several different lakes in the Mat-Su Valley region. Then, we pick a male and a female from a single lake collection and go through a process that ends in fertilized eggs. These stickleback embryos, which we ship back to Clark, will develop into adults and be used to conduct research experiments in our lab. It is exhilarating to know that those fish that are later used in research experiments were created by the members of the 2011 Alaska Stickleback Crew.

Finally, I have one request to anyone reading this post- please send all of your moose spotting vibes to Shannon and me in Alaska because it seems that we need all of the help that we can get!

Life After Alaska

2010-10-02T19:03:00.012-04:00

Alicia Barlow

I spent three weeks in AK driving to lakes, emptying traps full of stickleback, fertilizing innumerable clutches of eggs by dissecting those stickleback, and then sending mass shipments of embryos back to our lab at Clark University (among other things). A daunting yet satisfying workload, to say the least, but what happened after Alaska?

Well, I flew home to Boston, rested up for a couple of days, and got right back to work monitoring my Master’s thesis at Clark. Some of the embryos we fertilized while in AK were destined for my experiment and they became my life (with the help of many others who were kind enough to lend a hand or two) for the rest of the summer. I said goodbye to the luxury of having weekends off and got to know my stickleback babies on a more personal level. Sounds like hard work, you say? Hardly. Compared to the three weeks I spent in AK previously, my summer was a breeze. I am extremely thankful to have been sent into the field, particularly at the beginning of the summer where I was suddenly kicked into high gear and forced to reevaluate my priorities. By the time I got back to Worcester I was so used to days packed to the brim with excitement and responsibility that I actually found my thesis work to be quite relaxing. I actually enjoyed taking a few hours a day out of my weekend to visit my developing embryos, and the satisfying sense of accomplishment I was left with afterwards. I think it is safe to say that my time in AK was actually life changing, and allowed me to grow up a little and become more confident in myself in the field and in the lab. Who knew?

I am currently still at Clark continuing my fifth year and moving into the next stages of my thesis work. I have finished my data collection and am currently immersed in the wonders of effect sizes and power analysis, (yay statistics!). I am ready and willing to see where this next year of my life will take me.

The Final Days in British Columbia

2010-09-30T17:48:00.006-04:00

A belated post this might be, but I felt it necessary to share with our readers the last days of the 2010 expedition to the north.

After a week in Alaska, the strangest thing about British Columbia was that the sun actually set. Granted, it set fairly late, around 9:00 PM, but there was still definite night and day.
For the end of our trip to British Columbia, Team Animal Behavior was on the BC mainland. Instead of a motel, we stayed with one of Susan's old friends, Norma, a sweet lady who had a great many stories to tell and who is very used to stickleback research.
(It seems that everyone up north is. We would be working at lakes and people would drive by us and ask "Are you the stickle folks?")

Our primary goal on the mainland was to investigate Hotel Lake. Lily and gang had scouted it out earlier in the summer to try and find courting and parental males, but the lake was empty then.Unfortunately, when Dianne, Lily and I explored the lake, we had similar bad luck. There were fry everywhere, clouds and clouds of them, but very few adults, and even fewer breeding ones.We tried twice, and laid out traps, all met with minimal success.

A view of Hotel Lake from the shore. Stickleback fry congregated near the shorelines.

Another day saw us trekking to the well-hidden Ambrose Lake. To get there, we had to drive up rocky trails and hike through thick forests and over muddy ground. The lake, however, was beautiful, and there were plenty of parental stickleback.

The parental fish in this lake were very brightly colored. Even the females, usually drab or silvery, were shades of bright gold and copper. Unfortunately, if the captured fish spent about twenty minutes in a bucket, they lost their coloration. Our collection, then, looked less impressive when preserved then they did in the water.

A courting male in Ambrose Lake.

Our last day was spent preserving all the stickleback we'd caught so they could be shipped back to Massachusetts. Working with that many dead fish and that much formaline is unpleasant, but with three of us working on it, the job didn't last long.

The trip back to the east coast required a long car drive back to Seattle and early flights. And then, we were all back in Worcester, where there were dishes upon dishes of stickleback eggs that needed attending to and fry that needed feeding.

-Josh

Being a Journey Across the Border

2010-06-11T22:35:00.008-04:00

The Canadian border, that is.

Team Animal Behavior departed for British Columbia on Tuesday night. The flights landed in Seattle at 5:30 AM, but there was no rest even then. The car had to be picked up (a monstrous Jeep, the only thing that could fit all the luggage) and it was a three-hour drive over the border to the ferry which would take us to Vancouver Island. Well, needless to say we were all very tired, but there were fish to collect and lakes to explore, so we could not be stopped! The following day saw us traveling to Sproat Lake to collect females for color observations.
On the way, though, we had a chance to stop at the Cathedral Forest.

It's an amazing place. The trees are immense and almost everything is smothered in drooping moss. The ground is covered in large ferns and the whole place feels primeval, like something time forgot. I like to think of it as Jurassic Park, minus the dinosaurs.

The trees are quite big. This one was over 500 ft tall.

Sproat Lake was very nice, despite being cold. The females there are very pretty. There was one that was gold and iridescent. Unfortunately, we came a bit early in the mating season to see much. About all we could see were some very eager males, some who would court with anything that moved.

Today was an early start so we could do Crystal Lake before access to it was shut off. The lake is in the middle of a partly clear-cut forest, but it's still lovely, and we were much more successful today than anticipated (35 captured males. Susan is tireless).

Tomorrow is another early start to catch an early ferry off the island. Hoo boy.

-Joshua

Being an Expedition to Seward

2010-06-07T12:29:00.009-04:00

Yesterday was an early start for the animal behavior group. We had a two and a half hour drive to Seward and Resurrection Bay planned to catch some fish! Along the way, we stopped many times to take pictures of beautiful Cook Inlet and the mountains.
As we drove it began to get colder. We must have been getting higher into the mountains, because there was snow everywhere. Snow. In June.

It was a strange thing to see, but this is why they call it the Great White North!

When we finally arrived in Seward we had to do a bit of off-road driving to get to the lakes. Ponds, more like. We were looking at a large group of ponds in the middle of a large muddy field filled with knee-high grass. My boots and pants were covered in mud and pollen after walking around. The scenery was great though, even though we had to listen to the sounds of seagulls and crows screaming at each other.

After lunch we got to work. Traps were laid to catch fish for our crosses and the equipment to measure color was set up. Lily manned the color station while the rest of us patrolled the edges of the pond, nets in hand, searching for courting and parental males. When the sun came out from behind the clouds, this was an easy task; the pond was shallow and the water clear, and in the sunlight we could see straight to the bottom. The males were brightly-colored and most were guarding nests built into the muskeg-y bottom. Watching them was a fascinating experience. Reading about courtship behavior is one thing. It's quite another to see it in action, to watch the males chase off rival males, to see the males and females dance about each other, to observe how diligently the males guard their nests and just-hatched fry. Watching multiples males and multiple interactions on a large scale was somewhat dizzying, but gave me a new appreciation for the stickleback mating process.

During our day we had a visitor! A woman walking her dogs saw us gathering specimens and asked about the threespine stickleback. She was treated to the full explanation of our purpose and the evolutionary significance of the fish. She seemed quite interested. It's nice to know that locals want to learn more about the work we do here.And her dogs were very friendly.

There's also nothing quite like cold pizza for lunch during field work. Mmm-mmm.

-Joshua

Alicia and Colin – Going Rogue. Sort of.

2010-06-07T03:17:00.007-04:00

After our fifth day in Alaska we are still not used to the lack of darkness! Our typical Alaskan day starts at eight in the morning, the sun just rising from its laze on the horizon; it never fully sets! Our first full day was extremely busy, with setting and collecting traps from ten different lakes. Fortunately, the last lake of the day, Echo Lake, made up for the “redonculousness” of the hard day’s work with the set of rope swings we found on the shore. Of course our next most logical course of action was to come back the next day for a quick swim.

Later in the week we discovered what the Alaskan natives call “muskeg”, the swampy marshes that surround the massive amount of lakes in the region. Colin discovered that the muskeg is a force to be reckoned with; he fell into Finger Lake after his first few steps in the muskeg. Luckily he was wearing waders and didn’t get too wet.

Yesterday happened to be Matt “Dr. Wund”’s over-the-hill birthday which we celebrated with a colorful hamburger and fries cake. (He isn’t actually over the hill…yet).

Earlier in the day we managed to collect and set traps at a multitude of other lakes, leaving us tired and in need of some late afternoon fun. We were strolling through a Sportsman’s Warehouse in search of a raincoat for Alicia when Dani noticed some neon orange fisherman’s pants, after which she said to us “hold my stuff I’m going to try this on and you’re going to take pictures”. Needless to say we ended with another good day.

Our next project involves dissecting male stickleback to make crosses for the Clark lab in home base Worcester. We had a successful learning day today and plan to spend all of tomorrow fertilizing about 80 clutches to be shipped home in the next few days.

The "Sunshine" Coast

2010-06-04T03:44:00.007-04:00

Dianne and I arrived up in Alaska a few days ago, after two weeks with Justin and Shannon in British Colombia. It was absolutely beautiful there, despite rather dismal weather (Sunshine Coast? I think not.) It did put a damper on our fieldwork. Here are a few highlights from the trip:

We hiked the Skookumchuck Narrows trail, in Egmont. The hike was a bit longer than any of us expected, mostly because none of us could convert from kilometers to miles. We had both sunshine and rain, and more notably hail. It wasn’t exactly golf ball-sized, but it did make us run back under the trees for shelter. Only a few moments later, we saw a rainbow. We even caught a glimpse of a sea lion in the inlet, but I think our oohs and ahhs scared him off.

Our trip was early in the season, and many of the lakes we went into didn’t have a lot of stickleback activity. On one of our rare nice days, we went out to Ambrose Lake. It was secluded, and there was a short hike in. We got the lab’s first collection of fish from this lake. I unfortunately lost one of my fins in the water, and Justin bravely swam to retrieve it for me.

Justin and Shannon spent a few days observing fry behavior in Garden Bay Lake. Dianne and I went in search of female stickleback for observations in Hotel Lake. Unfortunately, there was not a stickleback to be found! We’re hoping to see more activity when we return to BC in a week, with Susan and Josh.

Being a Tale of Success

2010-06-03T03:31:00.008-04:00

A successful day for Team Animal Behavior! This was especially exciting after a washout yesterday. Our primary objective was to dive in Willow Lake to gather courting and parental males and observe color patterns on them. But with the wind and clouds yesterday, no such luck, and we were forced to return early and wait for better weather.

Today, however...today was sunny and warm, just the sort of weather needed for this work. It was an early start for us in order to get to Willow Lake at a decent hour. Once there, Susan and Dianne suited up while Lily prepared the equipment in the rear of the car. For the next three hours Susan and Dianne patrolled the shallows for males, and Lily and I performed the tests on the fish, which culminated in dropping them in antacids and stringing them up with needle and thread. Those three hours alternated between Susan and Dianne catching more fish than we knew what to do with and us waiting for more fish to be caught, which left time to enjoy the sun on the lakeside.

A future trip would be nice, considering most of the eggs had just been laid. However, I'd still count this as a win, based on how yesterday went!

The next stop was a brief trip to South Rolly Lake in search of pike. The hopes were to confirm that pike were in the lake so that the lake could be used for future research projects. Susan and Dianne were (understandably) tired from three hours in the water so it fell to Lily and I to do the exploring.
Well, as Lily had already spent time in the waters of British Columbia, she knew what she was doing. Me, not so much. The dry suit I used was leaky and rather too large. I could feel the water creeping in as I searched for the elusive pike. The quest was in vain, though I encountered large numbers of stickleback.

When I returned to dry land some twenty minutes later and removed the drysuit, I was utterly soaked. For all the good it did, I might as well have jumped in without it. So a quick return back to home base was in order to get me into something warm and dry.
On the way back, we saw a female moose grazing at the roadside (no pictures; we were going too fast. But take my word for it!)

Here's hoping the good weather holds out for us. Tomorrow is Cheney Lake: the search for more males!

-Joshua

On Stickleback & Socializing

2010-05-31T02:53:00.012-04:00

As a certain mustache-ioed lab member recently put it:
"The problem with Alaska is there are too many Alaskans!"

Miguel & I have been trapping for stickleback in the Mat-Su Valley for a week now and what strikes us is the far-reaching and very recent development in this, the greater Anchorage area. In particular the "sleepy" hamlet & hometown of Sarah Palin, Wasilla is bustling with a major highway and boasts a number of large chain stores such as Target, Super Walmart, Lowe's and Sportsman's Warehouse. As we drive this stretch of road everyday we were regaled by Mr. Mustache about the good ole days before there were any stoplights to slow us on our way to the 70+ lakes we hope to trap at in the next 4 weeks. The lakes themselves are particularly juicy targets for suburbia's encroachment. It is rare to trap at a lake (most are pond-sized) with any less than 3 or 4 houses and many have entire subdivisions catering to a lake lifestyle. We drove by a private community that was strictly for pilots of float planes. The infrastructure to support these communities is staggering. Miles upon miles of winding road systems and the gravel excavation pits from whence they came. Downed timber and trash litter the sides of the road and "For Sale" signs are just about as common as "No Trespassing/Private Property" here in the land of libertarians.

So what does all of this mean for two rogue stickleback collectors? It means that in order to collect at these lakes we often do it on private property and that means befriending the locals. On a typical day we pull up to any number of properties to inquire if we may set our traps for collecting. Most people are more than happy to allow us on their land and, in fact, often wish to learn more about the "minnows" they find off of their dock. We often find ourselves teaching the very young and the not so young that stickleback are indicators of lake health, that the beautiful birds they enjoy must feed their young something and if you let northern pike invade there will be no fish to support the birds. These impromptu opportunities to educate the locals is lovely and sometimes they even teach us a thing or two! Today a homeowner recounted observing a stickleback turn on his side & shimmy in the sun. He was quite pleased to see that this important behavior went right into the notes. Often these kind folks invite us to stay or gift us salmon fillets. In addition to humans, we often get "help" from the fuzzy family members of these properties. Today a standard poodle knocked aside our traps and a few days ago, we met monty, a three month old fearless pup who led us right down the long muskeg trail to where we might trap and bounced alongside us through the whole process. We even had a particularly curious kitty who was drawn in by the smell of fish.

Of course, the story of increasing anthropogenic inputs influencing lake productivity and the resulting behavioral and life history shifts is one that our lab continues to investigate. It seems clear that this story is commonplace across these lakes as more folks choose to live the lake lifestyle. Trapping on these beautiful lakes, across variable degrees of development, will bolster our understanding of such patterns. And in the process we will meet many a friendly Alaskan and maybe, just maybe, take home a fillet or two.

-daniella

Zombie Fish!

2009-06-30T00:20:00.000-04:00

One of the most fascinating aspects of threespine stickleback biology I have learned about while here in Alaska is the parasitism of our wild-caught fish by Schistocephalus solidus. As I mentioned before, Dr. David Heins of Tulane University studies this parasite in an effort to understand how it affects the reproductive traits of threespine stickleback.

Fish 4 of 131 in trap 10 at Seymour Lake. (What? We take thorough notes.)

A fish with the parasite is fairly easy to spot. Schisto is essentially a long white tapeworm that uses the stickleback as its second intermediate host (its first being the copepod that is ingested by the fish and the third being the fish-eating bird where it will reproduce). Infected fish often appear as the poor fellow above with bulging stomachs and chins a the worm bascially shoves all of the fish's organs out of the way for it to grow. Eventually, the fish begins to lose color...

Zombie fish! Lauren caught this one with her bare hands at Beverly Lake.

The worm turns the fish white and changes its behavior so that it moves more slowly and tends to spend more time up near the surface of the water. This mind-control trick makes the infected fish much easier to be picked up by a bird; not only is the stickleback more conspicuous as a white spot in the dark water, but it's convenient to scoop up without a struggle.

Pretty gruesome, right? Just goes to show that when we're complaining about things going wrong with our field season, well, things could always be worse!

- Rachel

I'm Leaving On A... Float Plane?

2009-06-26T14:04:00.009-04:00

Much like Jeff last year, I got to go with Matt on his annual float plane trip with Scott Christy, a local pilot and very good friend to stickleback researchers in Alaska.

You know how I mentioned before that seeing that eagle snatch the dying grebe from the triumphant loon was the coolest thing I had seen in Alaska so far?

Sporting the latest fashion in hip waders - Rachel stands in front of Scott's float plane. It is lovingly referred to as "the baby."

Oh, I lied big time. This was definitely the best day I have had in Alaska. Despite all our recent poor luck, today went off without a hitch. Number one, Scott is a fascinating individual with many stories to tell - both about his own Renassiance-man-like-life, and about his many travels in search of our little fish. But also, on our trip, I got to see the landscape as I've only glimpsed briefly from the tiny windows of the jet planes that take me to and from Anchorage at the beginning and the end of the summer.

Skinny Spruce Lake from the air. Completely surrounded by marshland that gets flooded periodically as the ocean is not that far away.

Before we took off, Scott wanted to know if Matt was a one cookie or two cookie kind of guy. One cookie guys want their dessert now (i.e. we could've flown out to a pretty cool spot and seen lots of interesting things but probably not catch very many fish), but two cookie guys will hold out and wait a little while in order to earn that second cookie (we fly back to a lake previously collected and try a few others). Matt assured us he is certainly a two cookie guy, so Scott guided us out of Anhorage and across the Susitna Rivers.

Flying in a float plane was a novel experience for me. The smallest plane I'd ever been in previously sat at least 50 people. Scott's plane seats three fairly comfortably. You feel every shift in altitude and every turn, no matter how gentle or steep. Sitting in the back seat on the way out, I had windows on either side of me and was in a near-constant state of staring from one side ot the other, drinking in the landscape below, curious to know if this was how birds felt looking down on the world.

Yes, that's a fairly amazing view.

We had a very successful two-cookie trip. Although we did not catch any fish at the second unnamed lake we landed at - though we did enjoy a tasty lunch in the sunshine despite my picking up 14 new mosquito bites (they like me, what can I say?) - we caught oodles and oodles of fish at Skinny Spruce Lake. (Actually, this is also an unnamed lake, but Scott and Matt named it themselves for, you guessed it, a rather skinny spruce tree in plain sight.)

Scott and Rachel collecting fish at Skinny Spruce Lake.

Scott and Rachel in the cockpit.

And then Scott let me fly the plane on the way back! No lie, he had me take the wheel for awhile and keep our nose on the horizon. It was a fairly singular moment in my life. I am convinced that I need to get my life on track now so I can have the time and money to earn my pilot's liscense because that was one of the coolest things I have ever done.

All in all, a wildly successful day. This helps to make up for all the trouble we've had so far.

- Rachel

String of Bad Luck - But We Push On!

2009-06-25T04:08:00.001-04:00

Time flies... I've been up here in the Great North for six weeks now, but it feels more like the blink of eye. On June 17th, Matt Wund, our lab's postdoctoral research fellow flew up to our neck of the woods from the Evolution Society's annual meeting which was held in Moscow, Idaho this year. He and Sophie Valena were there presenting work on an ongoing project concerning ancestral plasticity of the threespine stickleback (you can read more about this fascinating project by following the links to Matt or Sophie's biography). Lauren then left very early on the morning of the 19th after a marathon session of packing up our 2009 fish collection to be sent back to the lab in Massachusetts.

We were back to being another fearsome foursome, though it more often felt like two dynamic duos. Kat and Jeff continued to visit their lakes in order to observe male stickleback in their natural habitats while Matt took me on to help him in our makeshift lab creating crosses (also known as making stickleback babies). And while Kat and Jeff seemed to be having decent luck getting the data they needed, Matt and I descended rather quickly into an unfortunate state of field season chaos.

I've experienced minor setbacks in the field before. Many have been detailed here in this blog. But nothing prepared me for the utter frustration of 1) not being able to get the reproductive fish we needed for making the appropriate crosses, 2) having half of our already-caught fish die in one night, or 3) Matt's ability to curse like a sailor. (Oh, he actually wasn't all that terrible. But when things are going wrong, one tends to exaggerate the negativity to make the story sound even more horrific.)

But, of course, there's nothing that can completely dampen our spirits. I mean, I survived our mid-May camping trip on the Kenai last year, didn't I? And I've heard worse field stories from Matt's graduate days... So, we went back to our study lakes as many days in a row as we had to in order to get the fish we needed. We paid close attention to our live fish at the UAA lab in an attempt to prevent any more catastrophes at home. And we made very sure to listen to a lot of U2 to keep our morale from flagging.

It also helps when we see adorable fox cubs and their mother gamboling around on the side of the road just waiting for us to take thier picture.

- Rachel

Did You Ever See A Stickleback Asking For His Money Back...?

2009-06-18T03:37:00.010-04:00

On Wednesday, June 10th, Kat Shaw (you can read her field blog here)and Jeff Huenemoerder arrived for their summer field season in Alaska. Both study behavior of male threespine stickleback, so they are well-suited for collaborating in the field.

Noffer (our Forester) took a turn for the worse. His taillights wouldn't turn off, so we traded him in for a beautiful powder-blue Toyota Highlander that immediately became known as "the sexy beast." The Beast seats four people plus all of our equipment rather more comfortably than Noffer could have, so all is well with the world.

Lauren observes Kat and Jeff snorkeling in their dry suits. Willow Lake.

With more people around (Lauren and I no longer have to make dinner every night - woo hoo!), we have a little more incentive to go out and do fun things together. Lauren and I are an efficient trapping machine, but as our collecting winds down we've been looking for other things to fill our time. So we all took a trip up to Talkeetna!

They have an annual decorate-the-moose contest in Talkeetna. Don't worry; he's with the band.

Kat, Lauren, and Jeff.

Of course we're good scientists; we did our fair share of work up in Talkeetna while we were there. Re-trapped two Benka Lake and Trouble Lake (much to Jeff's mosquito-prone chagrin) and did observations in Y Lake. (Yes, there is an X and a Z.) And then we rewarded ourselves with a walk through the tourist traps and a fabulous dinner at the West Rib Pub and Grill.

Of course, we just wouldn't be us without a funny story to tell. So when Lauren and I showed up at the access to the trail leading out to Trouble Lake and saw some conscientious citizen's posted sign about two grizzly bears seen in the area... We decided to be very loud as we walked down the trail. Which is how we ended up singing multiple stanzas of "Down By The Bay" with biology-related lyrics. (See title of this entry.)

Other fun things we do: a stickleback pie we made for Kat and Jeff's arrival!
I promise we didn't cook any fish. It was peaches and blueberries.

- Rachel

Planet Earth

2009-06-09T00:24:00.007-04:00

Swans at Beverly Lake, 2008. One example of the waterfowl we often see at collection lakes.

Most of the wildlife that we are exposed to while we work in the field up here in south central Alaska is seen in fleeting glimpses. Long enough to scramble for a camera, take a few shaky shots, and then exclaim over the incident. More often, that wildlife is seen at a distance - our grizzly on the Kenai, for example, or any one of the number of moose we see browsing from our seats in the car.

However, we are often witness to the daily lives of the birds that live on the lakes we visit. Red-necked grebes, loons, ducks, terns, Bonaparte gulls... I've gotten to the point where I know many of them by sound as well as sight.

So we thought the sounds of grebes and loons calling together was maybe only slightly more interesting than normal when we walked down the dock at Lalen Lake to pull our traps. Our contact, Paul, was sunning himself on the end of the dock.

"Oh yeah, they're putting up a fuss because there's an eagle hanging around," he told us. We nodded sagely, knowing this was certainly cause for smaller waterfowl to put up a fuss, and set about our business.

Eagles aren't exactly adored by their avian fellows. (Anchor River. Sorry about the blur from the digital zoom.)

A few minutes later, the loon's calls were becoming a bit raucous and we all looked up. There was one loon and two red-necked grebes out in the middle of the lake. The loon was hooting wildly, slapping its wings against the water and stretching out its long black neck. It seemed to be attacking the smaller birds. (We've never heard of this happening before, but we have heard some of the locals tell us that a loon will surface beneath or close to other birds to startle them.) Both grebes dove. One resurfaced about thirty feet away from us on the dock closer to shore. The other grebe resurfaced next to the loon, flopping back against the choppy waters, its wings moving weakly. The loon trumpeted and smacked the water as the grebe struggled with its own injured weight.

We stood on the dock, eyes wide, wondering at the unusual attack we had just witnessed. A second later, a shape streaked out of the sky. The eagle was diving with its wings folded about three-quarters of the way and its yellow talons out. It snatched the grebe and winged off silently over the lake as the loon repeated its triumphant calls of victory, a high and haunting sound.

I didn't even have enough time to swing my camera around and try to get a shot.

As a biology student, this was basically the coolest thing we'd ever seen in our lives. Paul said he'd never seen anything like it in his fifteen years living on the lake. And Lauren merely stated the obvious: "Planet Earth [the famous BBC documentary] right in front of us."

- Rachel

A pair of red-necked grebes. Last year, I watched slack-jawed as a mother grebe laid an egg in her nest right in front of me. So I've been lucky enough to have seen both the creation and destruction side of things.

In Which We Try Many Things and Only Sometimes Succeed

2009-06-06T13:47:00.002-04:00

Riddle: What happened here?

This morning dawned a bit cooler due to the rain, but we made ourselves french toast on the camp stove and packed our tents without complaint. We planned to move down to Anchor River today, but only for one night as there are only three places that we really needed to trap (instead of our usual four of five in a day). Having a little extra time, we decided to go for a hike on Skilak Lake Road where there are many trails with excellent views of the lakes in the area. We'd already heard about one trail from our campground hosts.

After packing up camp, we set off down the road and found a nice little trail marked at 1.5 miles.

Rachel.

It was a beautiful walk at first. The lupines and roses were all in full bloom, and we had a nice view of lake and mountains off to our left. The trail was easy enough, and there was no one else around to interrupt the peaceful morning.

And then we came across this:

Bear scat. In the middle of our hiking trail.

We both stopped and looked at each other for a few minutes, weighing our options. There are plenty of black bears in the area; we saw a few of them last year and have heard of other people seeing them this year. The omnipresent issue of how to deal with wildlife is something most people deal with in Alaska. Even Anchorage has more than a thousand wild moose living within the city limits! Anyway, we decided to hike up the trail a little longer, talking a little louder, being a little more aware.

Cue second pile of scat.

"Well, I'm pooped! Let's head back to the car!"

Yes. And we hiked all .5 miles of it. Honestly.

Off to Anchor River we went.

On the way, we picked up the traps we'd thrown the day previously and found something very unusual at Encelewski Lake (in answer to the above riddle).

Lauren: "Um, I don't think this is going to catch anything."

Seems some moose decided to take a little walk on the shoreline, and... well... The moose is a rather large animal. Needless to say, only nine out of ten traps caught at Encelewski.

We moved on down the peninsula, threw traps at Deep Creek, Anchor River, and Mud Bay, toured around the city of Homer for awhile (because it is gorgeous and nothing like the other cities on the Kenai). We set up camp quite close to the beach at Anchor River. I fell asleep listening to the roar of the ocean, the rush of the wind past my tent, and the calls and cackling of bald eagles along the waterfront. It was glorious.

In the morning, I stumbled bleary-eyed to the bathroom and ran into the campground host on my way back to the car to fetch a peanut butter sandwich. He tilted his head at me and asked if I hadn't been a little cool last night. I laughed it off (thinking of our Kenai trip last year where we experienced MUCH lower temperatures) and told him I was used to it. ...and then I found out that Lauren had slept in the car because the wind whistling around her camping hammock had frozen her out. Oops.

At least it turned into a wonderful day with the sun shining, the eagles flying, and little kids fishing in the river with their parents. We ended our Kenai camping trip on a high note by camping Resurrection Bay and hanging around the city of Seward which I had never been to. But of course, we were glad to be back in Anchorage where the showers and beds were, and even happier that more of our lab members will be coming up to join us in short order.

Anchor River beach front. Apparently the locals will take old trees and bury them with the roots up for eagles to land on. I saw plenty of crows sitting in the gnarled twists of wind-blasted wood, but all of the eagles were out in the middle of the marsh grass, stealing scraps left by the weekend fishermen.

- Rachel

Rain and Roses

2009-06-04T13:38:00.005-04:00

The view from a giant rock about thirty feet through the sparse woods surrounding our isolated campsite at Hidden Lake. We both sat up here our first night, reading and working for hours until the sun finally disappeared into the hazy twilight that passes for 'dark' in an Alaskan summer.

Today has given us a new appreciation for how beautiful the weather has been up until now. When we woke up in our tents this morning we found that it had rained. No problem, we thought. The skies looked to be clearing while we ate breakfast (some very tasty home fries from the camp stove). We drove down Skilak Lake Road picking up the traps we'd thrown the day before, humming along with our CDs, contemplating a relatively easy day of throwing only four lakes not too far down the road from Soldotna...

And then it proceeded to rain. All day. Whee!

Fortunately, it did not get that cold so the wet was all we really had to deal with. And since we were only throwing traps in lakes for the rest of the day, I didn't have to complain about getting Sharpie all over my hands from the running ink on our collecting bottles.

Unfortunately, this morning one of our traps got very stuck on a dead tree at Lower Ohmer Lake. Lauren, who is talented at these things, was not going to leave it there by any stretch of the imagination. She was immediately navigating down the short, steep slope full of wild rose bushes in an attempt to find out what was wrong. Her dedication is admirable. She took one wrong step and sat right down on that short-steep-slope-full-of-wild-rose-bushes with one hand clasped tight around another rose bush. I could only watch in dismay as she picked herself up and started prying thorns and prickers out of her palm. It took the better part of this week to get them all out.

But hey! She saved the trap! She hasn't lost one yet.

One of the beautiful (and prickly) wild rose bushes.

- Rachel

And Away We Go...

2009-06-03T13:26:00.012-04:00

...down to the Kenai Peninsula.

Some of you may remember my rather epic introduction to the world of threespine stickleback field collecting from last year when Lauren, Jana Loux-Turner, Sophie Valena, and I got to Alaska in mid-May and immediately set out for a week-long camping trip on the Kenai. (If not, you can read about the entire adventure starting at the beginning of the blog here: Four Girls and a Van )

The drive from Anchorage to the Kenai is quite beautiful and we took every opportunity to stop and take pictures. Here, Rachel takes in the view through her camera lens.

This year, we decided to set out for our Kenai camping trip directly after our Talkeetna trip - mostly because two more of our lab members are expected to arrive up here next Tuesday and we don't really want to be speeding up the Sterling/Seward Highways back to Anchorage in order to meet them at the airport. We are responsible. Go figure.

Of course we stopped in Girdwood for the giant snickerdoodles. They are an amazing confection of sugar and warm-baked goodness and procuring them is an essential stop along the way.

Some way down the Sterling Highway though...

We ran into this guy on the side of the highway. He was rooting around for food of some kind in the grass about twenty feet from the road. Stopped all kinds of traffic (including us). People were snapping photos and taking video and the bear just went on with his day, completely oblivious. It is always a thrilling sight to see wildlife so close, and this was the first time Lauren or I had seen a grizzly bear (though it was still small enough to be known as a brown bear) up here in such proximity. However, the minute he started walking toward our car... We both experienced a moment of heart-stopping, stomach-swooping panic, and then Lauren started the engine and the bear startled away in the opposite direction.

It was still one of the coolest things I've ever seen though. Despite the sheer terror.

- Rachel

The Dirty Kind of Clean

2009-06-03T01:21:00.009-04:00

Rachel and Lauren in beautiful downtow(n) Talkeetna!
This was after three days of camping so don't judge us too harshly.

Lauren and I just got back from a three day camping trip. We spent Sunday night in the Nancy Lakes area (camping next to South Rolly Lake), and then Monday night up north in Talkeetna. this involved a lot of driving, and a lot of getting dirtier and dirtier. We'd attempt to get clean when possible - for instance, using hand sanitizer - but we knew this was mostly pretend. We were the.. dirty kind of clean.

Lauren creates fire at South Rolly.

Showers this evening back in the unit at Anchorage felt AMAZING, but they're not likely to last. Tomorrow we set out for the Kenai Peninsula. This camping trip will go until Saturday as we made a deal with Dr. Heins to pick up the traps he will throw in Tern Lake on Friday. Ought to be fun shotgunning two camping trips in a row!

As we are a bit wiped out from sleeping outside and would like to crawl into bed soon, this post will be rather picture heavy. Hopefully there will be more detaile d entries about the Kenai when we return this weekend. Until then, hope everyone in the lower 48 is doing well. The weather in Alaska has turned beautiful again, and there's nowhere I'd rather be...

- Rachel

A brightly colored male stickleback pulled from Lynne Lake.

Our campsite at South Rolly. Lauren has a hammock-tent that was interesting to try and figure out. She set it up a little more successfully when we got to Talkeetna. I was smart and decided to sleep in the tent. Haha.

Lauren contemplates the "beach" in Talkeetna.

A very Alaskan bus parked in downtown Talkeetna. Zero to sixty in ten minutes!

Brief Note.

2009-05-31T12:32:00.005-04:00

Hello faithful readers of the Stickleblog! To keep everyone up to date - Lauren and I are heading out to South Rolly today for our first camping trip of the season. We will be back in a few days, so you can expect another update then. I also have a lot of pictures from the last few days, and as I mentioned I will have a post about the very interesting parasite that Dr. David Heins studies. Until then!

- Rachel

Remember our pristine, white Subaru? Not For Long has indeed lived up to his name.

I'm Only Happy When It Rains.... (Not)

2009-05-31T12:17:00.001-04:00

Lauren trooping out over the muskeg at Pup Lake.

Well, we’ve had a spell of dreary weather out here--which makes the job no more difficult, just slightly less gleeful and photogenic. It started on Tuesday. Down in Point MacKenzie the sky was cloudless and bright and all a frolicking pair of stickleback seekers could want. However, as we headed north toward the Meadow Lakes an ominous, inauspiciously dark blanket of indigo was heading quickly toward us from Hatcher Pass. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like the not-so-distant rumbling of thunder to motivate a field crew to push the limits of efficiency.

Since then the weather has been of a more mundane variety--drizzling, passing showers, shades of grey. Rachel and I stopped in at the Palmer office of Alaska Department of Fish and Game (it’s not wildlife here, it’s game) on Wednesday to introduce ourselves to Dave Rutz, the local area biologist in charge of the Mat-Su. The new person in charge of our permits is adamant about constant communication between researchers and the local area biologists, so instead of just calling the poor fellow constantly I figured I’d stop in and say hello--THEN call the poor fellow constantly.

Bad weather tends to cause scientists to... act strangely.

Dr. David Heins of the Tulane stickleback lab arrived Thursday night and has been in contact with us--we’ve negotiated communal breakfasting and had a tête-à-tête over collecting locations. As I understand it, Dave has been sampling out here for as long as Dr. John Baker and nearly as long as Dr. Mike Bell--although his focus is more on the parasites that affect stickleback, namely Schistocephalus. (Note from Rachel: I will have an extensive post on this parasite later.)

Dave will be heading down south to the Kenai Peninsula at the beginning of next week, whereas Rachel and I will head north to Willow on our way to Talkeetna. Once we’ve camped up there for a few days we’ll cross paths with Dr. Heins on our way down the Kenai to camp another few days and make our own collections at the lakes he won’t be visiting. Perhaps we’ll be able to meet up with him in Girdwood to chat over a dinner plate-sized snickerdoodle. But let’s be honest, I’ll have one either way.

- Lauren

Sweet Lorraine

2009-05-25T01:37:00.005-04:00

Things have just been going splendidly for us in the field so far. Case in point: I wore a tank top the entire day today. Why is this note-worthy? Two reasons. First, it was warm enough in MAY in Alaska to alleviate the necessity of not only several layers, but also any sleeves at all. Second, despite the early and sunny spring, what few mosquitoes are around aren't biting yet. How could it get any better?

Lauren's outfit proves the warm weather.
She is pointing to the dead moose in the waters of Stephan Lake that drove us out of there pretty quickly both days we were there.

Well, I'll tell you that, too.

I've noticed a bit of development in south central Alaska over the now four summers that I've been out here. Mostly, new houses are built and a few lots are cleared for even more future buildings - but today I saw something much bigger (and relevant to me personally). Lorraine Lake is near the tip of Point MacKenzie which is the bit of land directly across the water from Anchorage. It is 15 miles further down the road from the next closest collection location, which, until today, was a dreaded drive over a gravel road with rocks the size of tangerines. Really, it was mor elike driving through a riverbed than a road. But now it is PAVED. The entire fifteen miles. I am sure that Avis will appreciate the dozen fewer dents in the undercarriage that this development has likely allowed. And I appreciate not having to drive 25 miles per hour while clutching the steering wheel with white knuckles and cursing after each rock-meets-metal bang.

Butterfly on the gravel next to Noffer.

I usually dislike making collections at public accesses during holidays, not for misanthropic reasons but because lake traffic firectly correlates to increased risk of trap tamperings (one trap today was found out of the water at Knik Lake). However, I was pleasantly surprised (as is the trend so far this year) to have had charming conversations with locals at nearly half the sites we visited over Memorial Day weekend. I even dropped the forbidden E-word (evolution) after testing out the waters with a local fisherman who proved to be very interested in our research.

- Lauren

Some typical Alaskan wildlife in a Fred Meyer parking lot.

In Which Rachel Really Appreciates Optometry

2009-05-24T01:26:00.001-04:00

A fisherman at Dawn Lake shows off his catch.
We are impressed. Everything we catch is less than 6 inches long!

Today I discovered the importance of leaning away from jars of formalin. As we were picking out gravid females at Rabbit Slough, a drop of the stuff splashed up in my eye and I wound up doing my greatest impression of Cry Me A River. And of course i was wearing contacts and didn't have my glasses with me. Which meant I spent the rest of the day seeing the forests, roads, and lakes as big smears of different colors.

So we only threw three lakes today. My bad! Lesson learned. But seriously. I was so clumsy in the unit this morning, I kept expecting something to go wrong. Hopefully it is now all out of my system. Woof.

- Rachel

Lauren counting stickleback at Rabbit Slough. Yes, it really is that close to the Parks Highway.

P.S. from Lauren: I use my own formalin-in-the-eye story from the summer of '06 at Long Lake (which came after our advisor, Dr. John Baker, told me about his own formalin-in-the-eye story at a lake in Alaska from years before) as a chemical safety warning when I bring people out to the field, but I guess Rachel wanted her own (albeit a third-generation) story. Seems fair. I wonder whom her story will fail to warn in the future.

"Hanging tough, staying hungry..."

2009-05-23T02:50:00.006-04:00

Despite my jet lag (Lauren is lucky; she lives in Washington state so the plane ride was only a three hour hop north and a one hour time change for her), we managed to get a normal day’s work in today. Stocked up on groceries in the morning – made easier by the fact that for the first few weeks it will only be the two of us – tagged fifty of our minnow traps in the early afternoon, and still got out to trap four lakes.

And we knew Alaska had been waiting for us when Eye of the Tiger came on the radio just as we were pulling out onto Hollywood Drive to head to Whale Lake. (Remember Whale Lake? This was the site of one very crazy conclusion to one of Team Alpha’s days last year.)

To get to Whale, you have to cross a relatively busy road, hike straight up a very steep hill (Lauren w/ traps, modeling in the first picture), walk a ways down an ATV trail, and then walk across about 100 meters of muskeg. Whee.

Also saw a chicken at Rabbit Slough. Not a spruce chicken, mind you, but a I-think-I’m-not-at-the-farm-anymore chicken. Unfortunately it ran into the brush too fast for us to capture it on film. Boo.

Of course Lauren named the bright-white Subaru (Not For Long a.k.a. Noffer), and we found a small plastic yellow-and-brown-spotted dinosaur at Loberg Lake which became our new co-pilot. His name is Banana Split (as he is colored like the Jelly Belly jellybean of the same flavor), but we call him Nanner for short. Noffer and Nanner. Yes, we are very strange twenty-something year old biologists. No, we are not about to change any time soon. You know you love us.

Not For Long a.k.a. Noffer - right now he is the brightest white there can be, but he's going to live up to his name soon enough.

- Rachel

It's the Little Things, Really

2009-05-22T22:59:00.001-04:00

Flights to Alaska require you to open the window shade.

I can’t express the glee I felt in not having to make a full day’s pilgrimage from the east coast to south central Alaska for this year’s round of collecting. In addition, the half-full plane ride which allowed me to have an entire row to myself is a treat well understood by anyone who has ever flown… well, anywhere. And then at the rental car counter I was asked the question I had been waiting for:

Avis agent: “Would you like a map of Anchorage?”
Me: “Hohoho—Oh, no. No, that won’t be necessary.”

I don’t think that this quite makes me a Local—although I do pretend. All you have to do is give a nod and a wave to other drivers when you’re on dirt roads going less than 30 mph. Above 30 mph and you’re some strange out-of-towner, but with the right speed and timing this move elicits a quick, knowing smile of recognition between locals. Don’t tell them that I know their secret; I like pretending.

The drive from the airport across town to the University of Alaska-Anchorage completed the welcoming ceremony. Anchorage is a city in shape and structure—there’s a downtown, residential neighborhoods, and shopping districts—but it’s small enough that one can take pride in the whole of the quaint little town nestled up against the Cook Inlet with the Chugiak Mountains as a backdrop of watchful guardians.

- Lauren

An interesting sign in Anchorage. Holes for sale?

North to Alaska: Take Two!

2009-05-22T22:54:00.003-04:00

It was raining in Houston. The smell of wet pavement and warm humidity clogged the walkway to my seven hour Continental flight to Anchorage. Excited Texans bound for cruises and students bound for summer adventures in the wilderness pressed in around me and my duffel bag, talking animatedly. I glanced at my watch. So far I was only enduring a one hour time difference from the east coast, but I knew it was about to get worse.

But what was another seven hours flying (in addition to the three and a half it took me to get from Baltimore to Houston, and the other one it took for me to get from where I live in northern Virginia to Baltimore’s airport – oy vey!) when Alaska was waiting at the end of the ride? There were tiny fish in lakes waiting to be captured! Mountains waiting to be photographed! Moose waiting to walk across the road in front of me! And getting one more taste of the boysenberry ice cream at Little Millers on the side of the Parks Highway was pretty good incentive too.

My first sight of Denali in June 2008. That's definitely worth coming back for.

When I got off the plane in Anchorage, I was greeted by the familiar sight of stuffed bighorn sheep and grizzly bears mounted on the walls of the north terminal. Ah. Alaska. Lauren pulled up in our rented Subaru Forester at almost the same moment I yanked my giant suitcase off the baggage carousel. Perfect, almost karmic timing. As usual. (Lauren is the best.) A few minutes later and we were cruising through Anchorage. I relaxed into the passenger seat and drank in the mountainous horizon and the hazy not-quite-twilight of nine o’clock at night in south central Alaska.

My second Stickleback Summer. I have no doubts it will be as good as the first.

- Rachel

Animal Behavior Gives Us Grief

2008-07-15T03:43:00.001-04:00

Back in Massachusetts at Clark University...

The trials continue – both literally and figuratively! John and Susan realized the other day that if anything were to happen to Dianne (Dianne Suggs, one of our PhD students) and she was unable to run the testing on the lab’s male stickleback, that we would be short one essential lab process. These tests show how the males respond to gravid females and foraging groups at the time of reproduction.

To wit – John gave Anna, Jeff, and Meghan the Very Important task of learning how to test male stickleback. My commission in this instance was to write down every step for testing males in exquisite detail for posterity, and to learn the basics of the process myself so that I am able to help in the event that I am needed. (Truly, I am becoming a universal assistant in the stickleback lab. Go fish!)

Yesterday we took it upon ourselves to learn the setup for these tests. It’s quite complicated in that we test six males at the same time all in separate tanks and each tank must have two computer monitors on either end of it so that the researcher can show the male video of both the very pleasing gravid females and more sinister foraging groups. All of these males must be placed in the tanks during a time convenient for them to make a nest. Wires run across the floor in a dizzying array of electricity – spilling any tank water in here is not a smart idea! Cameras must be hooked to power sources, monitors must be hooked to computers, computers must be hooked to other monitors… It all gets quite confusing and we spent the better part of two hours figuring it all out yesterday, hooking together splitters, trying not to plug too many power strips into other power strips… etc.

Today we are still missing equipment. Each male’s tank should have two cameras in front of it to record the male during the trial. One camera records the entire trial to give us a good view of the set of behavior exhibited by the male; the other is placed directly in front of a color card in the tank by the male’s nest that allows us to make color measurements. We are currently short a couple of tripods and repeated scouring of the bio building has shown us only the interior of several other labs where cameras and tripods are hard at use. [See, for example, Justin Golub’s experiments.]

As if running all over the building looking for cameras and tripods wasn’t enough, our right computer monitor that controls the right monitors being shown to the six male fish is acting up and even our local lab techies can’t seem to figure it out. So far, it’s been an hour since we were supposed to begin trials and things aren’t looking much brighter. I suppose it’s one thing when you have trouble with your computer at the office, but when some technology you are supposed to be using in lieu with essential scientific trials doesn’t work, things are so beyond frustrating…

After an hour or two we fixed the right computer monitors, decided to borrow a couple of tripods from the female testing area, and … went to lunch. Cause fiddling with reluctant technology and equipment is hard work, doncha know.

- Rachel

Just Call Us "Team Discovery"

2008-06-21T03:40:00.001-04:00

Lauren and I left late Tuesday afternoon (Moody Blues, anyone?) for a five day camping trip needed to trap in the Willow and Talkeetna areas of the Mat-Su. Most of the rest of the day passed in a blur of driving, but luckily, we managed to find the last gas station whose price range was still below $4.29 on our way out of town. We got an amazing campsite at South Rolly where we could throw our traps about a ten seconds walk from our campfire to the lakeshore, and had a quiet night of chili for dinner and much guitar playing from Lauren.

Wednesday we discovered the joy of not having a chain grocery store to shop at. We were a bit disappointed in most of our catches (it perhaps being just the wrong time to catch shoaling stickleback) but were later gratified when we caught over a thousand fish at Willow Lake in a little under three hours. At Boot Lake, we were entertained by the rising of a loon about ten feet off the shore from where we stood (without cameras, of course), and then ended our day with an extraordinarily successful hike through the untamed wilderness using only a compass to get to Heins Pond, a lake Lauren trapped as a collection for the lab for the first ever just last year.

Thursday morning, we broke camp at South Rolly and went to pick up our traps at Heins Pond. After our fifteen minute hike back through the woods with fish and traps in tow, we drove not even a quarter mile down the road to find a black bear down the pickup truck stopped in front of us! Strange to remember that every time we are out in the field we are completely surrounded by such wildlife. We then diverged from the Parks Highway for what seems like the first time in my life (to get anywhere in Mat-Su you take the Glenn Highway which turns into the Parks Highway) and took the Talkeetna Spur up to – where else? – Talkeetna. Here we found the Best Campsite Ever overlooking the river, and were incredibly successful trapping all of lakes we needed to down to figuring out that what we’ve been calling East Sunshine is actually North Sunshine and finding a reliable contact at Question Lake. We spent the evening playing cards and watching the clouds burn off the horizon before driving out to the scenic lookout on the highway where Lauren saw Denali (a.k.a. Mt. McKinley) for the first time in her three years of coming up here to Alaska. We were so enthralled that we sat there for another hour watching the sunset behind the mountain.

Friday we pulled about a TON of stickleback from Question Lake and ate lunch looking at Denali again (neither of us really got tired of sitting at that scenic spot). We trapped X and Y Lakes and discovered that not even the locals can remember which is which as there are conflicting maps on either end of the trail leading into X (or is it Y?) Lake. But Lauren noticed something that led to a bit of knowledge that when relayed may or may not make Matt have a meltdown. The maps both refer to a third lake, obviously called Z Lake, in between Y (or is it X?) Lake and Tigger Lake. “Huh,” said Lauren. “That’s funny. Trouble Lake is definitely in between X and Tigger, but I don’t see it on here. I wonder if it’s too small to list… but no, it’s only a little smaller than Tigger. Oh look, a maintained trail leads out to Z Lake! Let’s go check it out.” Check it out we did and come to find that Z Lake is indeed the same Trouble Lake that we have been trapping by hiking through trail-less woods full of devil’s club and other nasty vegetation.

…Alaska is so much FUN.

Saturday we discovered some yellow and green stickleback in Tigger Lake (this was apparently destined to be a camping trip chock full of discoveries and nothing else) and managed to pack up some live ones for observation back in the unit. Returned home to Anchorage where Matt has now been replaced by Susan. She’s here to help Kat out with her behavior project (a rather interesting study of sneaking male stickleback). Dinner conversations have suddenly become rather more informative than usual! But it’s an incredible thing to have her here living and working with us in the field – not to mention taking part in our Alaskan antics. We didn’t even have to tell her the van was named Pewter.

- Rachel

The View From Here

2008-06-18T03:37:00.000-04:00

This weekend I went camping on the Kenai peninsula for four days with Lauren and Matt. We made collections and (the reason Matt and I went with Lauren) we made crosses in the field of a few populations down in the Kenai. There were gorgeous lookouts on the way up, so we stopped often to take pictures between lakes.

- Anna Mazzarella

Here's Lauren at one of these viewpoints. This photo looks like an ad for Clark!

This is Watson Lake, which we stopped at to trap as we drove down the peninsula. It rained every morning, but we did get one gorgeous day, and this is evidence that there was some sunshine on the trip!

Here's a picture of Matt and Lauren as we were actually making the crosses on a picnic table at our campsite on Anchor Point. We made them shockingly fast, probably because we were highly motivated by the fact that it was 44 degrees out! By the time we were done we could barely move our hands and had to go sit in the car with the heat on so our hands would stop hurting.

Here's one of my favorite pictures I took on the trip, a view of Beluga Slough with the ocean and mountains in the background.

Camping by the Numbers

2008-06-14T03:36:00.000-04:00

Lauren, Anna and I spent 4 days camping on the Kenai Peninsula. Four bears, a golden eagle, 29 crosses (performed on a picnic table in high winds and 46-degree temperatures), a dozen or so trapping sites, hundreds of beautiful mountains, and one spectacular sunset later and we were back in Anchorage, ready to hit the showers. A good time had by all.

- Matt

The. Best. Day. Ever.

2008-06-09T03:33:00.001-04:00

Matt is off with the water quality girls today to Talkeetna. It’s a long drive and Jana and Sophie need to complete the water quality on at least three lakes while they’re up there. Matt is going because he needs some live fish from Trouble Lake which is, as the name suggests, rather difficult to get into and out of.

Meanwhile, the four of us remaining (Lauren, Anna, Jeff, and me) got up early so that we could begin the Best Day Ever. Anna and Jeff brought me to the lab and taught me how to “make babies.” This involves getting a lot of fish ready to reproduce from the holding tanks in the mosquito-ridden year, bringing them across the street to the into lab where we work, anesthetizing them, then swirling female’s eggs and male’s testes together in Petri dishes full of embryo medium. (The more technical way of saying this is that they taught me how to make “crosses” between stickleback.)

After this, we all piled into Sean Connery, and set off for adventure. I learned the real words to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” (Hold me closer, Tony Danza…), climbed a really big butt – er, BUTTE, solved an earthquake and watched another hit right next to where Matt and the girls were in Talkeetna, and generally had fun running around the backwoods of Alaska with my friends.

The following might explain better:

The last story of the best day ever is about the Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer. Lauren saw it on a map and thought we should visit because she lives in Washington state and thought it’d be neat to have one of the tsunami warning stickers that she sees all over the Puget Sound. So we found the building and dropped in for awhile. The people who worked there weren’t giving tours that day, but once they found out we were a bunch of student biologists they gave us an incredible hour-long informal tour that included us getting to use their Early Bird Warning System to “solve” an earthquake! And while we were standing there, a whole bunch of alarms went off and we saw an earthquake happen in Talkeetna where Matt and Sophie and Jana were. (It was only a 2 point something so they didn’t even feel it, but still!) They were also fascinated by what we do and came out to the car with us to see the fish and talk to us some more. It was a pretty extraordinary experience and not one any of us is likely to forget soon.

- Rachel

North of Anchorage

2008-06-09T03:31:00.000-04:00

Jana, Sophie and I went up about 3 hours north of Anchorage to take water quality samples from several lakes, as well as to trap fish at Trouble Lake. Trouble is a bit of trouble to get to, but reaching the lovely, secluded lake after 1,000 feet of thorns and dense forest makes the scratches and bruises well worth the effort. It’s also always a pleasure to chat with the kind folks who let us access the lake via their property. I’ve posted a picture of Jana and Sophie working hard at Tigger Lake, and while they were taking a plankton tow, I was shooting some pictures of courting male stickleback from shore.

- Matt

View from a Canoe

2008-06-07T03:28:00.000-04:00

Things all get switched around from time to time. It’s nice for me, not being hooked into any one specific project because apparently I will get to experience them all!

The water quality team has been having some trouble with getting the U.S.S. Clifford back onto Pewter all by their lonesome so we’ve rearranged teams somewhat. Because Matt doesn’t always need both Anna and Jeff in the lab with him during the day, one of them gets hooked up with trapping or water quality in order to have the right number of people to get things done.

This means for the past two days I’ve been a temporary member of Bravo team. Do they have a nice job or what! Water quality, my foot, they just want to do this so they can paddle around all the gorgeous lakes here.

- Rachel

Jana, above, hard at work.
Below, Rachel and Sophie

I Went to Alaska and I Came Back Weird

2008-06-05T03:26:00.000-04:00

So the fearsome foursome is back together for a day or two using Pewter to tote traps and one big red canoe about the Mat-Su. The specific things we did this day hardly matter. At this point, we are used to our long work days, and it’s the little things that make them distinct. On this slightly cloudy, threatening-but-not-quite-raining day in June a few interesting things happened. We almost hit a moose that came running out of the bushes on the side of the road at the van. Lauren’s lightning reflexes saved both van and moose, and the animal looked even more scared than we were as it trotted back into the forest.

Second, we got to hear a few choice quotes from Ms. Jana Loux-Turner. To wit: “It’s not as lake-y as the other lakes,” and “I just kissed the motor.” Who knows what either of these was really supposed to mean. It’s Alaska. You go with it. Lauren had a nice quote as well — about some of the experiences we’ve had losing things at the lakes around here. “Lynda stole our temperature probe and Irene ate a trap. Those thieving ladies of the Mat-Su!” In a brief psychological retrospective (this is Clark after all), it behooves me to note that the week we spent camping on the Kenai Peninsula together at the beginning of this trip went a long, long way toward bonding us all as friends. This explains things like A-lab-skan and our penchant for naming inanimate (and animate for that matter) objects. Stickleback summer in Alaska quickly becomes all about the inside jokes and the fast friendships. Days are spent working, of course, but it’s rarely work to any of us. And nights are spent sitting around the table long after dinner, discussing the crazy things that happened that day or playing cards or harmonizing with Matt and Lauren on the guitar. I’m not sure what I expected when I flew out here, but the easy-going attitude and calm efficiency of this “working vacation” is just what the doctor ordered.

- Rachel

Lauren, above, and Jana, below,
model the latest in Alaskan fashion

Friends In High Places

2008-06-04T03:24:00.001-04:00

It's good to have friends in high places.

Scott Christy, a local pilot (and retired geologist, among other things) is a great friend to our lab, and is kind enough each summer to take us in search of stickleback in hard-to-reach places in his float plane. Today he took Jeff and me to several lakes around the Cook Inlet in search of what may prove to be some interesting stickleback populations. Our best catch came at an unnamed lake just west of the Little Susitna River. We dubbed it "Birthday Lake" on account of it being my birthday. Scott's not only a great pilot, but also a fantastic naturalist and storyteller, so spending the day flying with Scott was a great way to spend my 25th (wink, wink) birthday. You can see from the pictures that Jeff enjoyed himself as well. There's also a nice shot of the Little Susitna River from the air.

- Matt

Pup Lake and Yard Dogs

2008-06-04T03:22:00.000-04:00

It’s Matt’s birthday! The “death” of June. It never gets old.

Matt’s friend, Scott Christy, took him and Jeff up in a float plane today. Meanwhile, Lauren and Anna gave me a day off to write — so while they headed out to the field, I took a brief trip to downtown Anchorage with Sophie and Jana to do some souvenir shopping.

Matt turns 13 ... er, 31!

They then headed off to do their water quality sampling for the day. The plan was to do two lakes today — Stepan Lake being the first. However, when we trapped Stepan a few days ago, we walked in over muskeg. It being rather difficult to carry a canoe between two people over water-logged marsh, Bravo Team set out looking for the public access. They ended up at the end of a dirt road where a house stood overlooking a lake. There were dogs outside so they bravely got out and went to knock on the door. The man who answered kindly informed them that they had ended up at Big Beaver Lake and let them come into his incredibly nice house to look for the public access to Stepan on Google Earth. So they go off looking… End up at Pup Lake which they knew was wrong. Pulled into a driveway that looked oddly familiar — it was a friend’s house on Lazy Lake. Wrong again! Turned around and saw a side road they hadn’t tried, so down it they went. There was a house at the end of this road with a black dog in the yard. This detail had been in Susan’s description of where the public access to Stepan was so they got out to ask the owner if this was indeed the place. And that was how they met “Mrs. Key, but call me Dee.” An incredible character study ensued that would be impossible to relate through mere words on a computer screen because it involves a lot of relevant body language. And that would be why Bravo Team only got through one lake today.

- Rachel

One Long Day

2008-06-03T03:17:00.000-04:00

Jana and Sophie at the end of a plankton tow on Bruce Lake

What a day. Some of the days on the Kenai were long, but this day may have taken that cake for Lauren and me. I suppose it’s partially our fault for starting later than normal due to running errands, etc. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We begin at the beginning. After a long night of playing cards and chilling out in the main unit, we took our time getting going in the morning, lolling about the kitchen while we ate our cereal and packed our lunches for the day. Today, Matt, Anna, and Jeff were only working in the lab a few blocks away from the main unit, so the fearsome “deathsome” effectively had two cars at their disposal. Jana and Sophie were taking the beloved Pewter out for the day, looking forward to a productive day of testing four lakes. Lauren and I were to gain control of the Forester, who quickly became known as “Sean Connery” due to the actor being in a movie called “Finding Forrester.” We divided our equipment, and each headed our separate ways.

I heard at dinner tonight that Jana and Sophie had an interesting time of it. Their potential four lakes turned into two perfectly tested lakes. The weather had turned somewhat stormy and windy for them at the end of the second lake so they decided to lay off and call it quits before getting drenched. Not counting the hour-long nap they took in the middle of the day! Since it was just the two of them for the first time, they had to get used to taking the canoe off and putting it back on pewter’s roof rack without additional muscle support. And while reaching for something in the van, Sophie twisted her shoulder and didn’t want to risk further injuring it for awhile, so the two of them decided to rest for a few minutes while parked at the public access to Rocky Lake. An hour later…

Also heard that Matt, Anna, and Jeff had an uneventful day in the lab, making crosses and being generally productive.

No wonder $20.00 won’t even get us 5 gallons of gas – this is the “death” pump!

Lauren and I, on the other hand, had a very eventful day indeed. When we left the unit in the morning, we headed over to the lab to get Matt’s keys so we could get into his room and get hold of the power inverter for the car so I could possibly plug my laptop in and write while we drove. We picked him up because he’d also managed to forget his own charger. The power inverter didn’t work, but at least Matt got his charger. Next, we took a drive over to Frank von Hippel’s lab to pick up the hard drive Lauren’s father mailed to her while we were all still out on the Kenai. No dice. So we drove off to find a gas station (which still hurts, even though we are used to the above-four-dollars-a-gallon prices)

One of the two beautiful swans at Beverly Lake.

Once in Wasilla, we hit up the Aquarium Zoo store to replace the temperature probe I managed to lose at Lynda Lake about a week ago. Ran over to the Kaladi Brothers coffee shop and picked up a new coffee mug for Rich King to replace one he’d lost. Lauren is an excellent friend. Drove off to the Beverly Lake area and picked up all the traps thrown on the previous day at Kalmbach, Bruce, Cloudy, and Seymour Lakes. We left our tenth trap next to the water at Bruce Lake and had to walk all the way back down the trail to get it back again. Also, come to find out that the man at Seymour Lake who told us we’d better be Republicans or he wouldn’t let us trap on his property is also a bear hunter. He was loading up his float plane with equipment as we gladly took our leave. There was another errand run to Fred Meyer to pick up supplies for a huge map of the Mat-Su that Lauren is making for us to be better organized in our trapping plans. After this, we drove off looking for Spring Creek which we found easily enough. Also easy to trap, but incredibly buggy. We were happy to jump back in the car and crank the A/C.

Lauren gets the GPS coordinates at Kalmbach Lake.

Headed over to Walby Lake to get GPS coordinates we’d managed to forget not one, but two trips in a row. And managed to find some very nice people off Trunk Road who let us trap off their property at Wasilla Creek. Three kids. All talkative. And a very large, friendly dog who was content enough to follow us all over the yard while we looked for likely places to catch fish. Run to the storage unit to get more traps for Matt. Some of our traps are in need of repair though, so quick change of plans! No trapping at Lucille Creek today, we’d save those traps for Matt. Instead, we ran off down the road to drop our last traps at Knik Lake and then Goose Creek (this was our creek dropping day, if one couldn’t tell). Took a lovely ride down Burma Road which is very long and hilly and entirely made of dirt. Roller coaster ride of a road. It was great fun. Lots of trees chopped down on the roadside, however, where last year there was forest. We speculated on this for some time, and think maybe it’s because the spruce trees are sick and dying. Not sure. Something to keep an eye out for. Burma Road led us to our final stop of the day. Yesterday, Matt, Anna, and Jeff dropped twenty traps at Whale Lake in order to pull a live collection of juveniles today for behavior testing, as well as a collection of about 300 other fish for Mike Bell, another stickleback researcher spending the summer on UAA campus.

Whale Lake is an adventure just to get to. You park across the highway, hike straight up the hill of an ATV trail, and then walk across quite a stretch of muskeg. Waders required! At this point of the day, the storm clouds that chased Jana and Sophie away were threatening Whale. Lauren and I steeled ourselves, grabbed a cooler and a jar for the fish, and made the hike in. Near the end of counting the fish for Mike Bell, it began to sprinkle. And we realized we had only pulled 19 of the 20 traps. We went scouting for the 20th (which Lauren found in a corner) and then contemplated how to pack twenty traps plus a cooler full of water and live fish back out from the lake. We didn’t want to make two trips, so I got the traps loaded on my shoulders and set off across the muskeg, Lauren attempting to tote the cooler behind me. This ended in me putting ten of the traps down halfway across the muskeg, walking ten out to the trail, then coming back for the others which Lauren and I split between us, held under one arm, and used the other to carry the cooler between us. Once at the trail, we added the other traps so that we each held ten, plus the cooler still between us. Those juvie fish went for a ride! We had to put everything down only twice because we are monsters made of steel. Team Alpha stands for awesome. Made it all the way back to the car, and got into Anchorage again around 10:30.

- Rachel

I get one foot out the door of the main unit and this is what I see! A moose outside North Hall.

A perfect moose print in the mud.

Lassie, the Spruce Chicken

2008-06-01T02:48:00.003-04:00

Really need to remember to put bug spray in the van! Lauren and I went to pick up our traps at Zero Lake today and nearly got eaten alive. We also got led down the trail by a spruce grouse for awhile. We were told by a local while camping at Hidden Lake that most people here call these spruce chickens — wanting to blend as much as possible, so do we. This particular spruce chicken soon earned the name Lassie as it would settle on the trail some ten yards in front of us, then startle up as we drew close and settle on the trail another ten yards away. This continued for so long that we began to ask it, “What’s the matter, Lassie? Timmy fell down the well? Show us the way, Lassie the Spruce Chicken!” Er ... maybe you had to be there.

- Rachel

Speaking "A-lab-skan"

2008-05-30T02:46:00.001-04:00

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.

- Rachel

Other examples of the fun things the lab gets up to – sticklecookies! Here we see many nuptial-colored males courting a gravid female.

On Rabbits and Moose (Okay, Just One of Each..)

2008-05-25T02:40:00.000-04:00

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.

- Matt Wund

Blame It On the Rain

2008-05-24T02:38:00.001-04:00

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.

- Rachel

A moose skull seen on the trail leading into Whale Lake.

Homeward Bound

2008-05-23T02:36:00.001-04:00

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.

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.

- Rachel

Lauren measuring the softness of the carpet in our unit.

The Shish-Kablog

2008-05-22T02:33:00.003-04:00

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.

- Rachel

On the Road Again

2008-05-21T02:32:00.001-04:00

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.

- Rachel

The Midnight Mud Attack of 2008!

2008-05-20T02:30:00.001-04:00

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.

- Rachel

Hazy Shade of Winter

2008-05-19T02:28:00.002-04:00

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.

- Rachel

On Trapping Lakes and Flagging Tapes

2008-05-18T02:26:00.001-04:00

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?

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.

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.

- Rachel

To the Kenai with a Keen Eye

2008-05-17T02:23:00.002-04:00

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.

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.

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.

- Rachel

North to Alaska!

2008-05-16T17:41:00.007-04:00

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.”

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!

- Rachel

Sophie anticipates the plane ride to Alaska.

Coming Attractions (or ... 4 Girls and a Van)

2008-05-15T17:27:00.002-04:00

The Journey Begins: View from the van’s front seat on the way into Wasilla

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.

- Rachel LaBranche

Plankton Sampling in a Parking Lot...

2008-05-13T17:19:00.003-04:00

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 Chock’s successful defense, 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…...

- Susan Foster

Preparing For Adventure

2008-05-05T17:15:00.002-04:00

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.

- John Baker