Closeout Stats

We may not be able to trust Mayan numerology again (or at least not our doomsday interpretations of it), but you can sure trust these numbers!


Number of earthquakes felt in J's presence: 1
J's guess at said quake's magnitude: 3.6
Actual measure of quake's magnitude: 3.5

Total chocolate consumption by Holly: 7.86 kilograms
Rate of chocolate consumption: 1.43 kg / week
(...and accelerating. Sometimes I impress even myself.)

Root tips counted: >200,000
Bird bone photos taken: 201
Papers in press at Ecological Applications: 2 (woo hoo!)

Number of pages filled with meaningless algebra: 8
Number of models for tree-fungal interactions attempted: 4
Record lowest biomass of tree (in a badly broken model): -1 x 10^(76)
(Happily, my trees are behaving better now!)

Months until I return to Landcare: ~11
Grant money I must spend before then: ~$9,200
Thesis chapters that must be accepted before then: 2
Thesis chapters presently written up: 0.71394



Whether it's been driven by chocolate, good company, or successful science, this trip to New Zealand has been a spectacular one. And while I'm looking forward to getting back home to my practically-beachfront-apartment, I'm also so excited to come back next year and let you know how the wee seedlings fared!

Thanks for coming along on the ride!

"Well before I'm northward bound..."*

As I begin to pack up my five-and-a-half week stay in New Zealand, I thought it might be nice to document some of the fun the last week has brought my way. I was drawn to science because of its variability: It's rare that I spend more than a few days -- much less a few weeks -- doing the same thing. Which means that I'm never stuck on a dull task for very long, and that I occasionally get weeks like this one, which remind me how lucky I am that I get to play for a living and how much joy I get from my job!

Having finished up his seedling harvest, I spent Monday with J. at the Canterbury Museum, where I got to dust off my dSLR (which got hauled down here, telephoto lens and all, only to sit on the shelf while my point-and-shoot saw most of the action) to photograph some of the bones that he was measuring. Many of the photos will hopefully see some use as reference photos, since we posed them to highlight morphological differences between species. 

Bird-brained?

I absolutely love going behind-the-scenes at museums, and it was so cool to get a glimpse of the avian collection -- especially some enormous Moa bones!

And if that weren't enough, I also got treated to a couple evening trips to the seaside, once with K. to enjoy a bottle of our favourite wine, and once for a nice long run, as the shadows slowly stretched out in the lingering summer dusk. It's going to be hard to adjust to the short days of the Northern Hemisphere winter next week.

Sumner: the perfect spot for a beach run!

Fir is Murder! (Or: The Value of Scientific Collaboration)

About year ago -- before I did any field work in New Zealand; indeed, before I was even certain I'd be working on Douglas-fir in New Zealand -- I went for a run around the Stanford campus and passed a Christmas tree lot.

A lifelong tree-hugger, I was reminded of my annual childhood distress at the start of each New Year, as my Dad and I, walking around the neighborhood, bore witness to the ignominious disposal of many a family's Christmas tree. (We'd always had a lovely little artificial tree, passed down from my Dad's relatives. I think this was mostly to avoid the myriad cleaning joys of a tree shedding needles everywhere, but I chose to interpret it as my family's deliberate efforts to save baby trees.)

I mean, we wouldn't have these beautiful Canadian running
trails if someone cut down all these trees for Christmas!
(Err... let's not discuss the logging situation in B.C.)

When I got home from my run, I told Luke about the horrors of the Christmas tree lot, and he told me that every single year, his family had a lovely real tree, and that it wasn't Christmas without its delicious conifer smell permeating their house.

"Well," I spluttered. "Well... That's twenty-five years of murdering baby trees for you!"

Several days later, I'd come up with a slogan and was feeling very clever about it. "FIR IS MURDER!" I'd bellow at Luke every time one of us entered or left our apartment. (Fortunately for him, I have the memory of a tunicate, so I didn't keep this up for long.)

The Dynamic Duo and Their Microscopy Minion (or: Anatomy of a Harvest)

Ladies and Gentlemen, your cast, in order of importance:

The Dynamic Duo, a.k.a. the Able-Bodied Assistants, a.k.a. the best money Holly ever spent on science
The Microscopy Minion, a.k.a. Holly -- and her bloodshot eyes, too

The Backstory:
Many weeks ago, in a land far, far away, through the mysterious portal of Skype, Holly and her thesis committee members conferred.

"My, what a fine set of data we'll have," they remarked as they contemplated the upcoming harvest of more than five hundred Douglas-fir seedlings. "And we'll have a whole bank of little seedlings, all with their own tiny root system communities of ectomycorrhizal fungi. Whatever shall we do to torture them next?"

Seedlings waiting to be victimized. Note the adorable straw-
and-sticker labeling scheme, which cost S. and I an afternoon.

"Well," said Holly, feeling too ambitious for her own good, "Let's do something high-risk."

"Well," said Holly's advisor, "Let's do something involving community assembly."

"Well," said the NZ team, "Let's do something involving conifer invasion risk."

"Well," said the Stanford crew, "Let's do something cool."

Miscellaneous Harvest Stats

A longer post updating you on the current status of the soil survey will be forthcoming, but here, a few amusing (and perhaps terrifying) numbers to sketch the picture. All values are accurate to three decimal places. Totally. We're doing super-precise science here!


Number of able-bodied assistants: 2
Hourly wage of able-bodied assistants: Higher than NSF pays graduate fellows
Enthusiasm of able-bodied assistants: Off the charts
Volume of music played in the lab by able-bodied assistants: Dunno, but it's *loud*

Max number of soil cores processed in one day: 39
Soil cores processed to date: 163
Soil cores remaining: 91
DNA samples taken: 1632
Anticipated end date: Wednesday -- two weeks ahead of schedule!

Hours per day Holly spends at the microscope: 8
Car Talk podcasts listened to at the microscope: 7
Number of times Kid Cudi's "Up, Up and Away" has played on repeat on my iPod: 217
       (Yes, I can get a little obsessive.)
Number of Rutgers football games listened to on the radio: 1
Number of Rutgers wins listened to on the radio: 0
Percentage of workday calories comprised of chocolate: 97%
       (Also I think I ate three plums and a banana.)


I was starting to have dreams about meat again, but luckily J. arrested my rapid degeneration into protein deficiency by suggesting Indian takeaway on Thursday night.

In other adventures, I have learned that the proportion of drivers who like to honk at running girls is substantially higher in Chch than in SF. (Today's mile times averaged 7:45 so I'm heading in the right direction!) And that, according to J., I drive a standard transmission "better than expected," but "can only improve from here."

Have I mentioned that J. is a pretty laid-back and super-accomodating guy?

Roadside Tourism

[[You can also read the Seeing Green column inspired by this trip here.]]

Until my first whirlwind of graduate school interviews back in 2008, I didn't realize exactly how much travel was involved in being a scientist.

But by the time I interviewed at Stanford in 2010, I was a firm believer in travel as one of the perks of the job. As a result, I somehow convinced my amazing advisor to let me siphon off his grant money for a field project in New Zealand, convinced the National Science Foundation to let me spend a month at a time visiting collaborators in Woods Hole, and in the end managed to spend fully half of 2012 out of my own bed.

In general, you can expect graduate students to have extra pages in their passports, stockpiles of frequent flier miles, and exceptional time zone-acclimation abilities.

How did we wind up getting so spoiled?

Mostly by being exceptional opportunists. Yes, concerned funding agencies and taxpayers, all the travel we do has a very carefully justified purpose! But once we're at our fantastic destination, it doesn't hurt to poke around a bit, right?

A snowmelt-fed stream cuts its way through native
mountain beech trees in Arthur's Pass National Park.
Our first stop on our way across the Southern Alps.

That's the principle that J. and I applied last weekend. Tasked with obtaining a handful of leaves from a species of tree that grows only on the western side of the Southern Alps (the mountain backbone of New Zealand's South Island), J. generously offered to take me on a bit of a sightseeing tour on the island's other coast.

On Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving, United States-ers!

Once again, I've managed to be out of the country for my favorite holiday. (Well, favorite outside of the day after Easter, which I celebrate with my credit card and circuit through all the major grocery stores within 5 miles.)

Last year, I ate amazing smoked turkey with friends, collaborators, and future founders of "The Ukranian Journal of Looking at Animals" (future home of many a paltry thesis chapter?) in Montreal and was grateful for a warm dinner, laughter, and snow on the ground.

This year, I had an even stronger prompt to remember all there is to be thankful for. Because my experiment failed.

That's right: Those cute Douglas-fir seedlings, looking all fat and happy in their posh greenhouse, had next to no ectomycorrhizal fungi on them at all.

Individually tagged, pulled out of the PVC
pipe, and ready for washing!

We're not sure why the experiment failed.

Baby, we were born to run!

I have a really clear memory of the first time I ran as a deliberate exercise.

Looking back, I had always been a runner in some way. I was the kid at recess who sprinted back and forth on the field just for the joy of it. (Luke and Danny will appreciate that, after Dad read Jurassic Park to me, I used to pretend I was a velociraptor on the hunt. Surprisingly enough, I was not a particularly popular child.) I always ran the full set of laps on field day, and, err, I suppose I chased a few boys around the playground as well.

But then one day, Mom took me to the fitness club with her. Usually, we'd go inside for a few laps in the pool, but this time, for some reason, we went around back to a few jogging trails. Mom settled in for a brisk walk and said, "Why don't you run some, Holly?"

Off I went.

The girl who quit gymnastics and basketball, who dodged wiffleballs instead of catching them, who didn't learn to ride a two-wheeler until middle school, and who couldn't swim the crawl without drowning herself until last year... That girl had finally found something that would stick.

Let the record reflect that I outran this thunderstorm home. :)

"Teach me how to Dougie"

Six months ago at a beach cleanup day, I learned from a local DJ -- and about 100 dancing middle-schoolers -- about a new dance called the "Dougie."

As someone with little demonstrable sense of rhythm, I'll leave it to you to look up the YouTube videos and learn the moves.  But what I can teach you here is a different, nerdier form of Dougie-ing.

Seventeen hours, two plane flights (complete with early meal delivery thanks to my new vegetarianism!), and one skipped Wednesday (thanks International Date Line!) after leaving San Francisco, I found myself in a newly-renovated Christchurch airport. A very generous J. had come to greet me as I exited security, in spite of having just flown through himself after returning from a stint in Australia just a few hours before.

"Well, are you game to just head straight out to Landcare, then?" he asked.

And off we went!

I was excited to see the progress my little greenhouse buddies had made in my absence!

Each one of the 264 pots holds two Douglas-fir seedlings,
most of whom seem reasonably delighted by their surroundings.

Back to Aotearoa!

For those of you who don't know, when I left New Zealand last March, I'd just set up a greenhouse full of 264 soil-stuffed pieces of piping.

The effort represented several weeks of dragging J and K out into the field, breaking our hands hammering the white PVC segments into the ground, and breaking our backs hauling the intact soil cores back to the lab. (In actual fact? We had a ton of fun!)

The end result: Neatly nested little soil cores, waiting to be
planted up with Douglas-fir seedlings before I left last March.

An audio postcard

J. and I were sitting by Lake Rotoiti admiring this patch of forest over lunch. We were astounded by how loud the birds were, even in the middle of the day. (I'm used to hearing a flurry of activity at dawn and dusk.)

Here's a quick video recording to give you a glimpse of a genuine New Zealand beech forest, complete with native sights *and* native sounds.

Most of what you're hearing are native bellbirds; we saw a few flitting around in the canopy, but they were too fast and tiny to be captured with my little point-and-shoot camera's video function.  Apparently -- at least, judging by the signs forbidding entry to dogs -- there are also kiwis poking around in the forest's leaf litter, though they're only active at night.

Two-Month Summary

Obviously I've been rather lax in posting these summary statistics, but with two months down and two weeks to go, here are some entertaining figures drawn mostly from J. and my trip to Nelson Lakes in search of more field sites.

Distance driven on the "wrong side" of the road in the last three days: 1200 km (~750 miles)
Number of American-style (i.e. counter-clockwise) "open space U-turns" (i.e., in parking lots or grassy areas): 2
Number of Kiwi (i.e. clockwise) U-turns: 3
Number of mp3 files that will fit on a standard CD: 140
Do two such mp3-packed CDs fill a 1200 km journey: No

Lake temperature in St. Arnaud: 45 F
Number of eels seen post-swim: 8
Length of largest eel observed: 4 ft
Number of one-legged ducks spotted: 2 (out of 30+)
Number of stories about ducklings being eaten by eels heard: 1

Ocean temperature in Kaikoura: 60 F
Number of frightening creatures seen in ocean: 0
Moral of this story: Salty >>> Fresh

Number of insect bites currently being ignored: 13 (plus the 3 I won't feel until I wake up scratching them)
Number of field sites obtained and sampled: 2
Number of field sites expected: 5

Desire to do future work in insect-free, ocean-full Antarctic: 50,000,000
Relative scale of this desire: Unknown

Where the Wild Things Are

Everyone knows I love microbes. In general, I have very little patience for multicellular things -- they're just adding unnecessary complexity to the metabolic magic that a single-celled bacterium or protist can do.  In fact, the only thing that saves tress for me is the fact that they can photosynthesize: Photosynthesis is my absolute most favorite metabolic process.

But in spite of my preference for things visible only through a microscope, I've still enjoyed a few very special wildlife encounters over the last few weeks.

The first was in Akaroa last month (it's taken me a lamentably long time to post about it), when my friend Elise was in the country following her research cruise to Antarctica. (Elise, like many of my most awesome friends, studies microbes: She works on marine phytoplankton, the free-floating algae responsible for half of Earth's photosynthesis.)  Elise's Dad treated us to a wonderful boat trip out of Akaroa Harbor.

Akaroa Harbor sits in the crater of an ancient, sunken volcano.

The 190th Hole (Anatomy of Soil Sampling)

The past week -- and the week to come -- are all about digging.  More precisely, they're about hammering a short segment of PVC pipe into the ground, and then digging.

K. and J. extracting samples from a grassland. You can see a
pine plantation in the background, and a wilding Douglas-fir
just behind K. (in the purple shirt). The white tube in J.'s hands
is a newly-extracted soil core.

Together with the help of K. (who knows all the best ice cream spots on the South Island) and J. (who's generously loaning her strong arms and back in the name of seeing more of New Zealand), I'm collecting soil samples for a greenhouse bioassay (a glasshouse-based experiment using living organisms to test the properties of an environment).

This experiment is the natural complement to my survey of fungi infecting existing seedlings. In this case, I'm collecting soil from the same three canopy types (grassland, native beech forest, and Douglas-fir forest) at sites spread across the South Island of New Zealand (rather than the few local sites at which I collected my seedlings).  I'll plant Douglas-fir seeds in these soils, allow them to grow in the greenhouse for 6 to 9 months under the watchful eye of some helpful Landcare folks who will keep them happy and watered for me, and then harvest them to find out what fungi from the soils colonized the seedlings.

I need your help!

The National Science Foundation has asked me to write an abstract of one segment of my Ph.D. research.  In 350 words or less, I need to describe a project I'm working on back home, also using Douglas-fir, but with fungi from its native range.  Because the National Science Foundation is funded through our tax dollars, they -- and I -- want this abstract to be really readable.

Unfortunately, having buried my head in science for the past four years (and having been nose-deep in it for four years before that), I'm not the best at catching all my technical jargon.  Have a look at what I've written below, and let me know what you think.  What don't you understand?  What's missing?  What's unnecessary?

Thanks!

---------------------------
Metabolic Bet Hedging as an Explanation for Maintenance of Diverse Tree-Ectomycorrhizal Mutualisms*

Trees are a critical part of many terrestrial ecosystems, providing both physical structure and chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis.  In order to conduct photosynthesis efficiently, many trees rely on mutually-beneficial interactions with below-ground fungi called mycorrhizae, which gather nutrients, supply water, and defend against pests in exchange for energy provided by the tree.  One group of these fungi, the ectomycorrhizae, is particularly diverse, having a large number of species, each with its own suite of metabolic abilities which determine its value as a trading partner to its host tree.

Intriguingly, an individual tree may host dozens of different species of ectomycorrhizae simultaneously, including species which appear to be of little to no benefit, or may even be harmful to the tree.  Presumably, rather than limiting its interactions to the subset of most useful fungi, the tree is incurring fitness costs by supporting a larger fungal community. Why hasn't natural selection produced a tree that can perfectly control its suite of fungal partners, so that it maintains only those that are most beneficial to it at any given time?

One possible explanation is metabolic bet hedging.  Trees are long-lived organisms that experience seasonal and interannual environmental variation. Therefore, their nutrient requirements also vary over time, potentially altering the relative value of each fungal partner. So, much as human investors maintain a portfolio of stocks to compensate for economic variation, trees may passively maintain a range of ectomycorrhizae in response to changing environments. 

This project tests the metabolic bet hedging hypothesis using laboratory (greenhouse experiments that control trees, fungi, and environmental conditions) and mathematical (economic models that test tree fitness as a function of fungal mutualisms) approaches. Results, in addition to their broader theoretical value to scientific understanding of mutualisms, will be of specific value to the management of Douglas-fir (the tree model used in this study), which is both a commercially important forestry species, and an aggressive invader in some foreign locales.


*Sorry, I can't do anything about the title.  Otherwise, I'd have tried to think of something more witty, like this week's ozone hole column, "All that's holey".

Teaching a sprinter to run marathons (Anatomy of lab work)

I've always been an endurance athlete.  Probably because I'm just plain slow, and you can hide that a lot better in a 5K than in a 100-meter dash.

This Douglas-fir seedling has lost its chance to take over the world.
Or at least, the surrounding native forests. 

For the most part, after more than a decade of semi-competitive running (though over the last few years it's been more about the pleasure of stretching my legs over a few miles than about lowering personal records), my brain has been molded into that of a distance runner.  I like to stick things out, I like a certain amount of pain (I can picture Mom and Dad making their 'self-flagellation' gestures... thanks for the emotional scarring, guys! :), and -- according to Dad, anyway -- I have a reasonable degree of mental toughness.

But in some things, I will always be a sprinter.

To some extent, I espouse Hemingway's "Live hard, play hard" dogma: I have a tendency to throw myself into science and work feverishly for a few weeks or months, then wear myself out and collapse in a fit of TV-watching, elaborate-meal-cooking relaxation.  (Err, I guess that's not really relaxation... more like throwing myself into something else, equally intensely.)

In addition to seedlings, we also collect any sporocarps (mushrooms,
the fruiting bodies -- a.k.a. the physical structures that release spores,

the reproductive part of a fungus) that we find in the field.  These are

brought back to the lab for DNA sampling, photographed, and dried.

I've never been very good at pacing myself when it comes to work.  So it's no surprise that, where we said we'd collect 15 seedlings per canopy type, we came home with closer to 30.  And now, with bags and bags of samples piled up in the freezer, I'm feeling some perturbation, which is currently manifesting itself in nightmares in which I open the door to the cold room and am instantly toppled by a tidal wave of Douglas-fir seedlings that come pouring out.  (Silver lining: This is a much better dream than last week's, which featured an unfortunate encounter with a band saw while cutting sample tubes for the second half of my field work.)

As I know from experience, there's only one cure for this dream-inducing stress: Getting to work! With one sprint into the field over, it's time for the sprint to finish up lab work before the next phase of my project.  Here's how it's done.

Waitangi Weekend: Wellington

Like many a good blogger who also pretends to be a scientist, I've fallen.. oh... three weeks behind now in posting photos from the second half of my Waitangi Day Weekend trip.

At last!  A sort-of view of the Kaikoura Range.

I left Kaikoura on the Coastal Pacific train to head up to Picton, the interisland ferry port on the South Island.  Along the way, we got through some of the fog to see glimpses of the mountains, ducked through plenty of tunnels, and passed some very scenic wine country.

One of many vineyards in New Zealand's famed wine country.

Salt-making at work.  These vast pools are turned red by
some halophilic (salt-loving) microbes.

As usual, I spent my train ride in the viewing car, looking ahead for tunnels and traffic signs before sticking my head out to take photos.

Week 5.5 Summary

Halfway done!  And halfway done my fieldwork, too!  Looks like I'm staying on schedule for now.

Chocolate consumption to date: 6.1 kilograms (as in, I bought lots on sale, and ate it all, too.)
Cups of coffee to date: 2
Cups of tea to date: 4
Weight gain: We'll see when I get on the scale back home...  I'm concerned.

Amount of time it takes me to write a good column: 12 hours
Amount of time I spend writing a column these days: 5 hours
Amount of trouble I've given my poor editor: Uncountable
Number of reasonable column ideas remaining: -2

Number of seedlings processed: 150
Number of seedlings remaining: I'm afraid to count

Orion is upside down! (Anatomy of field sampling)

On Monday night, to celebrate the completion of the field survey, I stayed up long past sunset (working on this column, actually) in order to check out the Southern Hemisphere's stars.

One of many, many Douglas-fir seedlings we've collected in the past weeks.

It was a remarkably clear night up in Hanmer (location of the Hanmer Hot Springs, which we skipped, and one of the worst wasp infestations I've seen, which we sampled in), and the tiny town offered very little light pollution.  So I got my first look at an upside-down sky.

I only recognized one constellation, Orion (my "cellestial boyfriend").  And he was upside down.

"No, he's not!" K. said.  Though born and raised in Germany, she's been in NZ for more than a decade and a half, so this disconcerting reversal is normal for her.

"But his sword is pointing up instead of hanging down..."

Feeling troubled, I went back to my room in our rented Kiwi batch.  (We stayed overnight in someone's vacation home.  One wall of the living room was literally plastered with pictures, from which K. and I decided that the family had three children, one of whom was now married with a child of his own, and the parents loved taking pictures of themselves with statues.  And bathing in the... erm... nude.  Naughty bits safely underwater, fortunately.)  It was 10:30pm, way past my bedtime (yes, I am an old lady), and I was ready for bed.

"I've never been stung."

"Are you allergic to bee stings?" Ian Dickie, local fungal expert and key collaborator on my work in New Zealand asked.

"I've never been stung, actually," I replied.

Ian swore.  Not an unusual occurrence, but a particularly vehement example.  "Well, let's make sure we grab a wasp kit, then."

Wasp kits here are lightweight packs of antihistamine cream, a couple bandages, an inhaler, and vials of adrenaline.  No epinephrine pens for us: if you go into anaphylaxis in the field, someone will be snapping open a glass ampule and shooting you up with a syringe they filled themselves.

I like to think that, if I were in such dire straits, I wouldn't care.

So far, so good.  I'm more than halfway through my stay in New Zealand, and through much of the most treacherous part (from a wasp perspective), and no one in my field team has yet been stung.  We're quite proud of the fact, but we knock on wood every day.

Looking up at the Mountain Beech canopy.  We mostly don't do this, since
it's easier to avoid stepping into wasp nests (dug into the ground) when you're
actually looking down at where your feet are going.

You remind me of a land that I once knew

Two summers ago, in 2010, I drove solo across North America, ducking up through New York State into Canada, and then across that beautiful and formerly unknown-to-me country to British Columbia. On my way, I heard a lot of good music, composed a lot of prose in my head (which got written down in the tent every night), and listened to dozens of episodes from the New Yorker Fiction podcast, in which various literary figures read short stories from the magazine's pages.

I was somewhere halfway across Saskatchewan, hoping to find a campground before it got too dark, and adding a repair to a recently chipped windshield (courtesy of a large truck earlier that day) to my California future to-do list, when I heard it. The line that moved me more than any other single sentence since Hemingway's "She was built with the curves of the hull of a racing yacht."*

In his short story Bullet in the Brain, Tobias Wolff writes: "He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else."

Waitangi Weekend: Kaikoura

The weekend before last (February 4-6) was a Kiwi holiday honoring the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. This treaty, signed by British emissaries and Maori leaders back in the 1840s, established British sovereignty over New Zealand, and is widely considered the founding document of the country. (Of course, its text -- whose meaning is still hotly debated, given its alternate meanings in Maori and English versions -- is still subject to negotiation and debate.)

Thus, I've heard Waitangi Day described to me as the "Kiwi version of the 4th of July."

I guess that says something about later civilities between Britain and her colonies. For us Americans, the founding document is a -- pardon my strong language -- middle finger to the Brits which started a bloody war. For the Kiwis, it's a happy agreement that, depending on who you ask, worked rather well. Certainly New Zealand's European colonizers never chucked their tea into a harbor.

Week 3.5 Summary

Days spent procrastinating trying to think of clever stats for this summary: 4
Clever stats thought up for this summary during that time: 0

Chocolate consumed: 2 kilos (though some of that shared with field crew)
Fruit consumed: 30 pieces (hooray for a second stonefruit season!)

Number of new bird species sighted: (at least) 9
Number of mammal species sighted: 4 (including humans and working dogs; not including roadkill)

Days out in the field: 2
Samples taken while in field: 142
Samples processed back in lab: 11
Week's scientific conclusion: "Uh oh."

A Field Teaser

This week, we finally pinned down a sampling design for my field survey!

You can spend all the time you want having academic discussions in offices, but when it comes to field work, you've really got to go have a meeting in the field.

For those of you who don't know, I'm in New Zealand studying an invasive tree, Pseudotsuga menziesii, better known to most of you as Douglas-fir.  Doug-fir's also known as "Oregon" around here in New Zealand because it's found all across that state back home.  It's actually one of my favorite trees -- I adore the Pacific Northwest, and though Doug-fir wasn't part of my Juneau experience, I've subsequently seen it in British Columbia, been surrounded by it on the Olympic Peninsula, and spotted it all over Oregon and California.

Douglas-fir growing happily in the rainforests of Olympic National Park.

Week 2 Summary

Time it takes to bike to work: 30 minutes with a tailwind, 55 minutes with a headwind
Number of falls off of bike: 1.5
Number of bruises resulting from falls off bike: 5

Kilos of chocolate consumed: 1.4 (uh oh)
Cups of tea consumed: 0
Caffeine in consumed chocolate in cups-of-tea-equivalent: 25

Strongest earthquake: 4.6, with ~10-second duration
Response to strongest earthquake: "Hmm... I wonder if this will get stronger.  Should I get out of bed?"


Hours spent coding a statistical model in R: 5
Hours it would have taken in MatLab: 1.5
Motivation to keep using R (scale of 1-10): -1e12

The Squeeze Theorem

If you haven't heard me talk about the navigational applications of the Squeeze Theorem before, you've been missing out.  (Hey watch it, I can see your eye-rolls!)

For those of you who didn't take, or don't remember, first-year calculus, the Squeeze Theorem is a mathematical nicety that helps you if, say, you need to know what value a function (a particular type of equation) will have as a variable on which it depends goes to infinity (i.e., as you take the limit).  If you're lucky, you don't need the Squeeze Theorem, and you can calculate the limit directly.  But if you can't perform that calculation, you might be in luck if you know that your function is bounded (i.e., always bigger than one thing, and smaller than another thing) by two other functions that go to the same limit.  That is to say, your function of interest gets "squeezed" to its limit by the bounding functions.  Ta-da!

All right, that whole paragraph was utterly useless (and probably not mathematically accurate).  But the Squeeze Theorem, that most glorious concept, is not!  Because, you see, the Squeeze Theorem is vitally important to everyday life -- specifically, to finding your way around in strange places.

Consider the following:

• You are Holly.
• You want chocolate.
• Chocolate occurs in discrete patches.  For example, in Ghirardelli Square, at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula.
• Therefore, if you head generally North while in the city (creating your own wandering function as you do), and do not swim across any bays or oceans (your bounding functions), you shall reach chocolate.

I've used the Squeeze Theorem to find chocolate, and also to burn it off (it worked remarkably well during long marathon-training runs in Boston, which, like any decent city, has a river to aid in bounded navigation).  And my friend Adam has reported that it works rather nicely in Minnesota, where the land is so flat that you can see your boundaries for miles (never mind that those boundaries happen to be ten miles apart).

And, wonder of all wonders, it turns out that Canterbury plans are the perfect for some Squeezing.  Allow me to present photographic evidence:

Imagine you are biking along a perfectly anonymous road.  You are surrounded by cropland, and it's very flat (i.e., the plains of Canterbury).

Perfectly Anonymous Road

 You might think you are lost.  But no!  Simply look left, then right!

To your left, some power lines (which are a useful North-South
bound once you get the hang of the place), but more importantly,
the Southern Alps!

To your right, the Canterbury hills!

Now securely bounded, you know you are traveling Southward!  Don't ask me how far apart the hills and the mountains are... that's why I've memorized road names. :)

Above Water

When I left California, it was in the midst of the driest winter in twenty years -- so dry that when my friend Luke and I went to Yosemite last December, every single road was open.  (On my previous trip there, Dad and I arrived in May to find most of the roads still closed.)

I wrote about the state of Californian affairs in my weekly Seeing Green column (water has, so far, been making an annual appearance, as it also graced my first-ever piece for the Stanford Daily), and then hopped on a plane to New Zealand, where I've been enjoying plenty of clouds and the occasional bout of precipitation.

Though I greet any kind of overcast weather with unabated delight (ever since a summer in Juneau, I've preferred clouds to sunshine), I was particularly ecstatic to go for a run in the rain during my first week in Christchurch because, as my landlords had just informed me, this is the dry season here in New Zealand.  Although the place seems unbelievably wet compared to California, at this time of year, water restrictions are tightened.  This is especially true in the wake of infrastructure-damaging earthquakes, which have compromised water delivery in the metropolitan area.

I've never been the best at conserving water -- I don't drink very much of it, but I sure do take long showers.  I'm trying to get better, though, especially after experience with a shower timer in Death Valley and military-style showers shipboard a few years ago.

To my great delight, I also received the following set of great tips from a Seeing Green reader:

1. Collect rainwater in buckets for outdoor use.  My landlords do this!  But note that such things are not permitted in all areas.  For example, Colorado residents need permits to capture their own runoff, because the legal system there believes that rainfall belongs to the downstream recipient.
2. Flush toilets with shower water.  (Did you know that if you pour a bucket of water rapidly into a toilet, it will flush?  This is a great trick Dad told me about when I was little, just in case...)
3. Xeriscape (i.e., plant drought-tolerant ornamentals; landscape to eliminate the need for supplementary water).  Very important in dry places like California.  Plus, the best plant choices tend to be natives.
4. Capture the first, cold wash of shower water in a bucket.  This is my absolute personal favorite.  I have to confess, even with the shower timer, I never flip the hourglass until the water is tolerably warm.  Now, I have a way to partially alleviate my guilt!

Two-Wheeling Around Town

There's something you should know about me: I never stand on my bike pedals.  It's not that I can't: when I'm going at a reasonable clip, I've practiced getting out of my seat to pump the bicycle.  And when I'm crossing an intersection, I can manage a few feeble turnovers to appease the waiting cars.  But I always sit securely back in my seat just as soon as I can.

My inability to pump a bike has led to some entertaining attempts at hill climbing in California, and promises to lead to some interesting experiences here in New Zealand.

Trusty, but thus-far nameless, beautiful steel-frame
I've been enjoying.  Admittedly, needs a racier seat.

How to Get Raccoon-Eyes in Two Hours

I was feeling a bit down after my tour of post-quake Christchurch last Saturday (and after spending $40 -- $40!!!! -- on a pair of hiking socks), so I hopped on a bus out to the coast.  After living for a year literally on the water in Woods Hole, I find nothing so soul-restoring as the ocean.

Perhaps the easiest beach to access by public transportation from the heart of Christchurch (read as: The only beach Holly has yet accessed by public transportation from the heart of Christchurch; any tips Liz?) is out at New Brighton. 

Week 1 Summary

Time it takes to bike to work: 50 minutes
Kilos of chocolate purchased: 2.4 (sale this week!)
Kilos of chocolate consumed: 0.3 (I've been good, I guess!)
Number of earthquakes Holly felt: 4*
Number of earthquakes everyone else felt: 36
Length of first run in the rain in what feels like ten years: 15 minutes
Cups of tea consumed: 3 (all on first day of work)

*I thought I felt 7 yesterday but there were only 3... Overcompensating?

Oh, the Mondays

Some of you (Hal!) may have noticed one stray post claiming to be from the future (a.k.a. 2013) constantly hovering on the top of my blog.  It's not actually from the future -- it's just pretending to be, so that there's a constant introduction to the site for new visitors.

Now for something from the present:  It's Monday here in New Zealand, so while the rest of you have been preparing to watch epic football* games, or going looking for amphibians, or sleeping late, I've loaded up a backpack, hopped on a loaner bicycle, and pedaled 14km (about 8.7 miles) into work to start my day.

Inspired by my Stanford labmate Rachel, and my very dear friend and former roommate Li Ling, I've decided that real scientists bike at least 5 miles to work every day.  (Actually, this new method of transport was really inspired by a scheduling conflict with my landlord, Hugh, with whom I usually carpool in to work at Landcare Research.)

It's quite the pleasant ride -- when you're not worried about getting lost, that is!  I can see myself getting quite accustomed to it over the next few days -- hopefully so accustomed that I remember to stop for pictures to show you all!  All in all, it's just part of the transformation of Holly, from soft-and-lazy desk worker to hard-core field biologist!  (Yeah, we'll see how long this lasts... probably until the first time I encounter a steep slope or a wasp's nest in the field, and run away screaming.)


*A note on sports:  Here in New Zealand, the big ones are cricket and rugby.  My landlords (Hugh and Robyn) are tremendous sports fans, and have been slowly teaching me the rules of cricket.  When rugby season starts next month, I'm sure I'll learn all about that, too!

As most of us know, there's general confusion between Americans and the rest of the world about what "football" means.  I've learned to specify "American football" in most cases, but here in NZ, it's called "gridiron."  All right, that's well and good.  So does "football" mean soccer?  Nope!  Here's the jargon, as best I can map it:

Gridiron -- American Football
Soccer -- Plain old black-and-white ball soccer (but the uncool term for it)
Football -- Used to mean rugby, but slowly coming to mean soccer.  Except that there's some complication Hugh was trying to explain to me about several different kinds of football in Australia and.... oh well.

It feels like a truck going by...

The first time I ever felt an earthquake, I was perhaps five or six years old, in Los Angeles visiting my grandparents.  I remember thinking that a fully-loaded eighteen-wheeler must have driven by the house, a sufficiently frequent occurrence that I wasn't alarmed at all.  That quake didn't do any damage -- nor have any others I've subsequently experienced.

Perhaps for this reason, I'm characteristically oblivious to earthquakes.  Last year, Tad (my Ph.D. advisor) was giving a lecture when suddenly the room fell silent and someone said, "Was that an earthquake?", and the projector began swaying.  As the TA, perched in the back of the room, I hadn't felt a thing.

But here in the Christchurch area, everyone is finely attuned to any movement of the earth.  And so they should be -- a big quake in September, 2010, damaged many buildings in the heart of the city.  The first time I visited New Zealand, three months later, I walked around a Christchurch liberally decorated with caution tape, bracing steel, and a few security fences.  Still, I got a chance to see a beautiful city teeming with life.  I bought the ring that I wear everyday in Cathedral Square, toured the Botanical Gardens, and saw an exhibition in the Arts Centre.

11 December 2010.  On the left, the University of Canterbury's former campus,
now the Arts Centre.  On the right, the Christchurch Cathedral.

Because I spent only one day in the city, I admired the iconic Christchurch Cathedral from afar, figuring I'd have plenty of time during later trips to get the inside tour.  Unfortunately, this was not to be.

In February 2011, almost one year ago, Christchurch was rocked by another quake -- this time, in the middle of the day.  This time, 181 people lost their lives, and the Cathedral's tower fell.

Today, the heart of the city is cordoned off for repairs, most -- if not all -- of the buildings are sealed shut, and every doorway still bears the spraypainted marks of the crew that cleared it after the devastating quake.  I felt like a voyeur photographing the city when I returned to it yesterday.  Although commerce is springing back in the form of brightly colored shipping containers-turned-temporary storefronts, the streets are only lightly populated.  Most of us seem to be tourists, taking silent footsteps and saying little, awkwardly pointing cameras at piles of bricks and twisted metal.

Left: Chain-link fences block pedestrians from entering the heart of downtown.
Many of the buildings there are still dangerous, especially since aftershocks are
still being felt every day.  On the right, Summer 2011 ads still mark this storefront.
The spraypaint on the glass marks the building as cleared, by a New Zealand team
four days after the earthquake.

The Shipping Container Mall.  Business must go on -- in this 
case, with typical kiwi flair.  Within this one block, you find
an enclave of commerce in an uber-modern setting.

And yet there is the sense that life is resilient, that it goes on.  I cannot imagine the feelings of the city's citizens, if I, who saw the place only once before, feel so utterly heartbroken by what I saw when I returned.  It seems... wrong... to feel such strong emotion about it, since I am just a visitor here.  I feel like an imposter, with an inappropriately keen sense of empathy.

Home Life in ChCh

Thanks to my amazing Kiwi friend Liz, who is also working on her Ph.D. at Stanford, I've gotten a head-start on some of the common abbreviations and turns of phrase used here in Aotearoa (the Maori word for New Zealand).  For example, "ChCh" is short for Christchurch, "cheers" is pronounced "chiz", and "tea" can mean pretty much any meal, as well as friendly mid-morning and mid-afternoon tea breaks during which we all sit around and chat about life and science, and, as the new kid on the block, I get ragged about American politics.  (I'm going to need to start a glossary pretty soon!)

But before I get bogged down in linguistics, the purpose of this post is to pontificate (OK, Holly, that's enough alliteration for one day) about daily life in New Zealand.  I arrived on Tuesday, January 17, 15-or-so hours after leaving San Francisco on Sunday, January 15.  Wait a minute!  How does 15 hours turn into two days?  Well, New Zealand is both across the Equator, and across the Date Line.  That's right, I'm in a whole new quadrant!

Technically, New Zealand's time zone is GMT+13:00.  But, as I prefer to think of it in relationship to being home in California, I'm a day ahead and three hours behind (or 21 hours ahead, if your brain prefers to compute with double-digits).  If it seems surprising that New Zealand should be only three timezones away (the same amount that Hawaii is during North America's summer), remember that here in New Zealand, we're on daylight savings time, while the United States is not.  So, the time change between California and New Zealand can be five hours (during CA summer and NZ winter), four hours (when no one's on daylight savings), or three hours (right now; NZ summer and CA winter).

But the great thing about the Internet is that time doesn't matter!  Though I have to be careful not to Skype-call Dad (back on the US East Coast) in the evenings here.

Anyway, back on the ground here in NZ... I'm staying with a wonderful (read as: slightly irreverent, incredibly hilarious, and truly warm and generous) couple in Halswell, a suburb of Christchurch (which is the largest city on the South Island -- sometimes shortened to Southland -- of New Zealand).  They've built a beautiful home to their own design, with room for a garden, lots of glass sliding doors to keep the place feeling airy and light, and a couple spare bedrooms for guests.  Since their son just moved to Australia, they had a room free for a tenant -- albeit an orange and black room!

My brilliant orange-and-black bedroom (with baby blue and pink sheets).
The walls not shown are painted black, and the curtains are all black, too!
Since I won't be doing a whole lot of decorating, it's great to have a bright
room to keep the walls occupied, especially since I've been stuck in white-
washed dorm rooms for the past couple of years!

So far, I've really been enjoying my stay, and am starting to feel like one of the family -- as I should, since we're all so casual around here!  (Almost) every day, I find time to go for a run around the neighborhood, and am slowly discovering local gems like a little park frequented by ducks and schoolchildren.  (Because this is New Zealand's summer, most of the kids are off from school until the end of January.)

What a great use for a right-of-way!  (You can see the infra-
structure for the high-voltage lines in the top-left corner.)

A twenty-minute walk (shorter jog, and much shorter bike ride) down the road, there's a shopping centre with banks, a post office, lots of ice cream vendors, and a supermarket.  Luke says one of his favorite things about visiting foreign countries is checking out the different stuff found in the markets, so that's what I did on my first day in town.

Clearly Americans and New Zealanders have very different
taste in their spreads!  But my favorite thing about shopping
here is the chocolate!  It's so much cheaper than in the States.
And naturally, that's why I bought only chocolate on this trip.

So that's home life!  Not too shabby for a graduate student!