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.