Zombie Fish!

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?

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!

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...?

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

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

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

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...

...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

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.

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.

In Which Rachel Really Appreciates Optometry

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..."

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

North to Alaska: Take Two!

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

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"

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. Best. Day. Ever.

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