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.