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.