"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.

I'll get started harvesting the experiment early next week, so today was all about logistics and planning. It turns out that, of the more than 500 seedlings planted by the team here at Landcare, only about 50 have died. (This is stunningly low mortality in my opinion, given that I'm used to having half my experiments die off on me!)

This gives us plenty of seedlings to use for data collection right now, and for transplanting on into a further experiment in which we test how fungal communities from different environments compete with one another.

Many of our seedlings are accompanied in
their little pots by various mosses and weeds.

In addition to figuring out which fungi are where, we're also interested in how healthy the seedlings are. For example, how big have they gotten? How many needles have they put out to gather light energy from the sun streaming through the greenhouse glass? What color are they?

Color is an especially interesting metric for measuring seedling health. Like other trees, Douglas-fir gets its rich green color from its chlorophyll, an elegantly evolved molecule which captures incoming light and harnesses that energy through the process of photosynthesis. It's through photosynthesis that plants transform carbon dioxide into the sugars that are used by almost all other forms of life on Earth, including us.

Just as we need a suite of foods to feed our bodies (no, even Holly cannot live on chocolate alone), a plant needs a particular set of nutrients to manufacture its roots, stem, leaves or needles, and, of course, chlorophyll. And, as many a gardener knows, one of the signs that a plant isn't getting the right nutrition is a yellowing which stems from a lack of chlorophyll, or "chlorosis."

Where do Douglas-fir get their nutrients? Why, from ectomycorrhizal fungi, of course!

So, while I wasn't exactly happy to see some sickly seedlings in our greenhouse, it was really interesting to note that most of the sadder members of the collection were found in grassland soils. This is really interesting because it suggests that perhaps Douglas-fir may have a relatively tougher time finding fungal partners in grasslands, as opposed to under Douglas-fir plantation canopy, or under native beech forest.

Of course, the proof will be in cracking open these pots, visually inspecting the root system for fungal colonization, and, ultimately, using DNA sequencing to identify the fungi present on each seedling!

A chlorotic seedling (left) shares its pot with
a healthier, greener, neighbor. You can see from
the grassy weeds coming up in this pot that this
particular sample was taken from a grassland!