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.

The soils came from places where we collected healthy, well-colonized seedlings. They came from places with healthy, long-lived Douglas-fir forests. They came from places with plenty of mushrooms, indicating a healthy ectomycorrhizal community. Perhaps we watered too much, or too little. Perhaps there wasn't enough light, or it took too long to plant the seedlings, or the seedlings didn't grow fast enough over the austral winter. Either way, the vast majority of our seedlings have the cleanest root systems I've ever seen. They'd make great controls* for any other one of my experiments!

In spite of the general lack of fungi, we'll probably be able to recover some useful data to tuck into another paper. And we may still learn something about what facilitates Douglas-fir invasion. So really, the experiment didn't fail, and that's something to be thankful for.

But the thing about having 500 seedlings sit in a greenhouse for 8 months is that you start fantasizing. You invent all sorts of weird and cool experiments to do with those seedlings once they've completed their bioassay first task. And sometimes you pick one of those experiments, get totally committed to it, and do things like go out into the field and dig a big hole to get soil for it.

"We dug a really big hole!"
L. and I sieve soil in the field to bring back for the second
phase of the greenhouse experiment.

And then you find out that, because you haven't got any fungi on your seedlings, that second experiment -- the one you created this imaginary, glorious, Ecology Letters-worthy fantasy about -- doesn't make sense.

I have to admit, I looked at that big, deep pit of despair. I thought about jumping in. I did that thing, you know, where you hold onto a tree branch or a fence or something and lean out over the edge to scare yourself a little bit. And then I remembered that it was the fourth Thursday of November.

I am grateful, no matter what happens to the results, that we spent those long days in the field harvesting pots of soil or sieving roots. Because I work in New Zealand -- I mean, are you kidding me?!

Hard-to-access Skippers Canyon, which we got to visit
specifically to collect soils for the greenhouse experiment.

After Tuesday's soil collecting mission, we hiked along
this stream for a beautiful view of native beech trees and
a mountain-backed scree slope.

I am grateful for those pesky, field-harvested seedlings that gave me cool results and the assurance of at least one publishable dataset from this segment of my thesis. And for feeling like I helped control the invasion when I plucked them all out of the ground.

I am grateful for a committee member who responds to panicked emails within 10 minutes, a collaborator who runs to the microscope at the drop of an email, and an advisor who will take trans-Oceanic Skype calls on Thanksgiving Day.

I am grateful to my friends and family, who tirelessly remind me of the meaning of unconditional love.

I am grateful for the fact that, because we're spread all over the world (and keep such radically different sleep schedules**), there's always someone around on gchat.

I am grateful for hope and joy, for the ability to laugh and play and smile, and for two legs that give me the freedom of the open road and the winding trail.

I am grateful that, for all it may make me seem like a scatterbrained mess, I've kept fingers in many pies for my thesis, so I'll have a set of chapters to stitch together even without this experiment.

And also, I'm grateful for pies. Though the amazing savory ones down here make me almost want to forget I'm a vegetarian***.



*In this case, controls are seedlings which are set up in sterile soil. Ideally, they would not be colonized by any fungi, indicating that the only source of fungal colonization is the field soils (i.e., that there aren't any random spores floating around the greenhouse or in the water).

**K, if you're actually reading this on T-day, no smartphones at the family feast!

***Everyone, please eat a double-serving of turkey on my behalf.