Home Again

Big Meadow in Shenandoah National Park (click to enlarge)

So, finally after 16 days on the road I'm back in Baton Rouge. The trip saved the best for last with Ganesh and I spending five hours of the penultimate day driving through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. This park has one of the most famous roads in the US, Skyline Drive. It's 105 miles long and slowly winds its way through the mountains of the national park, with stunning views of nearby mountain ranges and the plains below. It took us so long to drive as we were always stopping to check out the view, because they have overlooks every couple of miles. After a few more hours of highway driving we finally got to our hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee, exhausted and ready to be back home in Baton Rouge. The last day of the trip was spent driving the 11 hours southwest to Louisiana and unpacking the truck, before finally heading home to catch a good and long night's sleep.

Typical view from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park

In our travels for this field trip we passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Tennessee. Florida, Texas, and California can also all be added to that list of states I've now visited, so that's 19 out of 50 that can now be ticked off!

In total we drove about 10,300 kilometres (6,400 miles) and we will do it all again in two months or so for the end of summer census. Using Google Maps I more or less mapped our journey and you can check it out below. The colours represent each different day of driving and where the colours overlap and look strange is from us driving the same highway twice or more. The details of the roads taken aren't particularly accurate, but it definitely shows the huge extent of trip.

My parents are coming to visit during June and I'm incredibly excited to be seeing them for the first time in ten months. I'll be flying up to meet them in Boston and then we'll be roadtripping back down to Baton Rouge over the course of the following ten days or so. Until then I'll be relaxing in Baton Rouge as much as possible, and tidying up loose ends of my research work from the spring.

On Holiday

DAY ELEVEN
The morning in Portland was really foggy which made for awesome working conditions in the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge while we finished up our work in Maine. It only took until lunchtime at which point Ganesh and I parted ways with Jim (who is flying back to Baton Rouge) and began a bit of a holiday! On Jim's advice we headed further north to check out Acadia National Park, situated on Mt. Desert Island just off the coast of Maine. This was my second visit to a national park after spending a day at Yosemite with my good friend Darko over the Christmas break. We checked into our hotel (the nicest one yet) just out of Bar Harbor, and then headed into town to check out what it had to offer. Other than a bunch of tourist shops, restaurants, and cafes, not a lot really! So after an hour or so of wandering around we found a sandbar which could be crossed at low tide to get across to Bar Island. We managed to cross it just as the tide got low enough and we spent the next 90 minutes or so checking out the island which offered some nice views of Bar Harbor after a hike to the top. Then it was back into town for dinner and the hotel for a good night's sleep before a big day of exploring the park.

DAY TWELVE

The weather screwed us for our only full day at Acadia National Park! The cold temperature, wind, occasional rain, and clouds we could handle fine, but it was the persistent fog that hung around the entire day that messed things up for us. It seems that appreciating the true beauty of Acadia National Park relies heavily on being able to see further than 100 metres, something we weren't able to do the whole day. We started the morning driving on the park loop road, checking out major tourist attractions like Sandy Beach (the only beach with sand on the whoole island) and  Thunder Hole (a hole in a cliff which the sea rushes into causing a booming noise and lots of water to spray everywhere), stopping often to walk the short tracks around the awesome rugged coastline. We then rushed back into Bar Harbor to catch the scenic cruise we had booked for 10 am only to find all cruises were cancelled because of the fog - it was a shame, especially for Ganesh who had never been on a boat in the ocean before. Anyway, we headed back into the park to continue around the loop road. Despite the fog there were still lots of great sites to see, and we were stopping often along the way to check out attractions like Jordan Pond, the various carriageways, and Seal Harbor (although there were no seals). One highlight was climbing to the summit of the two Bubble Mountains and seeing the bubble boulder, perched in a seemingly precarious position on the edge of a cliff, after it was placed there by a glacier many years ago. Unfortunately, the view from the top was just of pure white fog, but we were sure it would have been spectacular in clear weather, as would have been the view from many overlooks along the road. We also drove to the top of Mt. Cadillac; the highest peak in the park at 467 metres and the spot where you can be the first person in United States to see the sunrise. It was no surprise that the view from the summit was nonexistent and the wind was bitterly cold, meaning we didn't hang around long. My pictures can't do the place justice I'm sure, so check out what it really looks like here.

Pushing bubble boulder into the valley below...

DAY THIRTEEN
New York, New York, New York! Getting up at 5:30 am we started our six hour road trip to get to NYC. We parked our car at at train station in Newark, New Jersey and took a train into Lower Manhattan, getting off at the world trade centre site. Unfortunatelty there wasn't an awful lot to be seen as it was all fenced off for the construction of the new WTC towers. We grabbed a quick lunch and headed towards the end of the island to get a view of the Statue of Liberty. We initially had wanted to take a cruise out to get a closer look, but the lines to get a ticket were ridiculous so we decided to take the train to Liberty State Park in New Jersey for a closer look. Despite the overcast weather we were able to get a pretty decent view of the statue, Brooklyn Bridge, and also the endless skyscrapers of Manhattan. For Ganesh these were the biggest buildings he had ever seen which was quite cool. After hiding out from a brief thunderstorm we caught the train back into New York and 34th Street, where the Empire State Building rises high above the rest. The line to go up that was also huge so we instead just walked around, checking out the Rockefeller Centre and Times Square, which was particularly fun. On one of the many big screens there the crowd could play an interactive game on a big video screen, choosing to dunk a man or woman into a pool of water and using a ball to hit the target - if you look close enough you may be able to find me in the picture below. Tired and sore from a long day of walking around NYC we made our way back to the train station in Newark and then straight to the hotel for a good night's sleep.

Where's Warwick?

Panorama view of Times Square (click to enlarge)

DAY FOURTEEN
Back into work mode today as we finished off our last day of work, collecting native plant material from our Estell Manor site to propogate back at LSU and finishing up Ganesh's transplantation experiment at our Maryland site, Choptank. The work was easy because the sites are nice, but the weather was definitely heating up as we moved south again, and we had to watch out for ticks! Tomorrow we begin the long haul back to Baton Rouge which will take a couple of days. Thankfully we're planning on taking a much more scenic route than the one we used coming north, which will make for much less boring driving.

O Canada!

These signs are everywhere in Maine and Canada

DAY EIGHT

My first day in Canada was a pretty awesome experience. Jim and I left Portland at 7 am on a mission to the US/Canada border. Northern Maine is a really unique and beautiful place, and as we moved inland the scenery changed rapidly from that of the more populated northeast to more rugged terrain with much more hardy vegetation like fir and spruce trees. As we passed through all the small villages, we started seeing road signs with pictures of moose, snowmobiles, and quad bikes, a sure sign we were getting closer to Canada. Right before the border I was lucky enough to spot a couple of moose drinking in a roadside ditch, so we did a u-turn back to a small rest area where I spotted another moose just hidden in the trees (you can check him out on the video below). All of a sudden the two moose in the ditch ran out onto the road in front of an SUV which only just stopped in time to avoid hitting them. If you hit a moose you're surely going to total your car and will probably be lucky to survive yourself when the moose comes flying through the windshield. The two moose disappeared into the woods as we watched the young male we had spotted in the rest area. Then the first two (a young mother with a calf as it turned out) emerged from the forest right behind us! It was a really cool experience to see such massive wild animals from about 10 metres away, and the young male especially just wasn't scared of us at all.

Passing through the border into Canada was a different story. The border police took what seemed an immediate disliking to us. They searched our entire car and then we had to be interviewed by an immigration officer. He was Sargeant Hardout and definitely had no sense of humour. He wasn't very satisfied with the idea that we were conducting biological research and demanded to see proof of an "invatation" or "permit" to conduct our research in Canada, as well as wanting details of exactly where we were going and exactly what we were going to do. We of course didn't have any of these as we had been told we didn't need them, so we were becoming very worried that we were heading back to Maine to help out Ganesh! Luckily Jim was able to give Sargeant Hardout the name of a co-collaborator from a university in Quebec (who he had never met or actually talked to), who the officer promptly rung to confirm whether or not we were up to no good. Luckily the Canadian scientist put in the good word for us and we were finally allowed to pass through into Canada after an hour long ordeal. Once in Canada, we could take in the awesome scenery and countryside, from meadows filled with dandelions, lakes surrounded by forest, rolling mountains, rocky cliffs, and no people for miles and miles. It really makes a change from the flat boring roads of the southeast that's for sure.

Typical landscape on the way to Hebertville

On our drive through Canada I soon found that my French is not up to scratch (despite living with a French roommate last semester), as I tried to order McDonalds for lunch. Luckily most French-Canadians can speak English fairly well! Our single Phragmites site for the day was a native one, all the way up in a small, isolated town called Hebertville. The plants themselves were only about 50 cm tall (compared to most which can be over 4 metres), which made for a very fast survey as they tends to be very little in the way of insects on such young plants. It's probably going to be like this for all of the sites in Canada so we should be finished in about three days and back in Maine in time to spend a day at Acadia National Park! It was 30 degrees even all the way up near Hebertville, but on the way back from our site we spotted a few patches of snow, and it's almost the middle of summer! Finally we made it back to our hotel just out of Quebec city, after about 11 hours in total on the road.

DAY NINE

Saint Lawrence River bank

It was a dreary day in Canada, drizzling or raining pretty much all day, but not too bad to work in. We had three sites to do, two situated beside the Saint Lawrence River and one beside a lake in a valley not far away. Because we ended up in Canada before there is any good Phragmites growth, the work has become ridiculously easy. Instead of taking three of us up to two hours to do a site, Jim and I blasted out each of the three sites in around 45 minutes. Other than that the day was pretty uneventful as we made our way to Campbelltown, New Brunswick, driving alongside the picturesque Matapédia River for some of the way. Getting back through the US border is certainly going to be an exercise!

DAY TEN
Getting through the US border actually went very smoothly! It only took about 20 minutes and a few questions about what stuff we were bringing back in (dried leaf material and insects in ethanol) to get through the border. Before that we had finished each of our two sites in around 30 minutes each and the rest of the day was spent uneventfully driving back to Portland to meet back up with Ganesh.

Our exotic Phragmites patch just out of Campbelltown - just dead flower stems

Lots of Canadian hay

Still Heading North...

DAY FIVE
We started the day nice and early again, ready to go at about 7:30 am. The great thing about staying in these American hotels is that they all serve breakfast and you can get your fill of cereal, fruit, bagels, waffles, and coffee before the long day of hard work ahead of you. The rooms are also usually pretty nice and the beds comfortable enough to get a good night's sleep.

The first site was on the banks of the Choptank River, about 20 minutes out of Easton, Maryland, where we had spent the night. The site was an abandoned nature preserve and had both native and invasive Phragmites pretty much growing beside each other all along a dodgy boardwalk heading out into the marsh. As with most of the sites we have done around this latitude there have been lots of holes in the marsh where you can sink up your hips. It can be quite tiring slogging through this kind of stuff and you definitely feel you've had a good workout at the end of each sampling effort. However, there is nothing I'd rather be doing than field work, so even while I'm knee deep in the marsh I'm still having the time of my life!

After the Choptank River site, we headed north and into the state of Delaware, to do a native and exotic site by the Appoquinimink River. Once we got there we found that a massive construction site had opened up at the entrance to the native site. When we rang the people in charge we were told we couldn't have access to the river anymore due it voiding their liability insurance...a pretty lame excuse really. In any case  we carried on and did the roadside exotic site which also had knee deep mud, before heading North to New Jersey for the night.

DAY SIX
Got up early again and headed out to do our two sites for the day at Estell Manor Park. The sites were quite nice, located right on the edge of a river. Aphids, other herbivores, and their natural enemies seem to be getting quite scarce as we move into the colder climates further north (except for the colony being tended by ants which are in turn being attacked by the wasp in the photo below), which isn't great for data for any of our projects. Luckily we will be doing the trip again in August, this time sampling from Canada southwards.

Native Phragmites patch at Estell Manor

Big aphid colony with ants and a predatory wasp

After finishing the sites we had a five hour drive through New York to Connecticut. Of course, going through New York we encountered some pretty horrible traffic. I was glad it wasn't my tunr to drive and instead I admired the brief views of the city. I'll definitely have to go there before I leave. However, the highlight of the day was visiting Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.Yale is the third oldest university in the United States (since 1701) and boasts many famous graduates including famous US presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush Snr., George W. Bush Jnr., and Gerald Ford. We were lucky enough to be able to meet up with my friend Victor (the first kiwi I've seen in 9 months!) who is an undergrad at Yale and he gave us a really good tour of the campus. Victor and I had worked together before at Lincoln University on a summer research scholarship and also at Plant and Food Research. It was great to see him again and the Yale campus was incredible, with lots of really impressive buildings and a nice vibe to the place.

Peabody Museum at Yale University

Victor and I in front of the Yale library

DAY SEVEN
Today was almost a repeat of the day before; getting up early, knocking out the census at two sites, and then driving north again to Maine, where we have six sites. Our sites for the day were near Pettipaug Yacht Club in the town of Essex on the Connecticut River. It was a real nice spot to work in and by the looks of it, there were a lot of rich people living there! We finished the native and exotic sites relatively quickly as there were basically no herbivores present, apart from a few aphids. Then we hit the highway towards Portland, Maine. We arrived about 5 pm, giving us a bit of time to look around. So we headed to Fort Williams Park at Cape Elizabeth to check out the coast. It was a really nice place to visit, as you can see below. I had lobster for dinner for the first time, and I didn't really like it! The meat wasn't as tasty as I was expecting, and definitely too chewy; don't think I'll try it again anytime soon.

Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Tomorrow, Jim and I will be leaving Ganesh in Portland and driving nine hours into Quebec, Canada, in our little rental car, making sure we don't get taken out by any rogue moose on the way (a moose burger or bear sausage will be my next meal). Sadly Ganesh didn't manage to get a Canadian visa in time to join us so he will be working on the six sites here in Maine while we smash out the ones in Canada.

East Coast Field Trip

On Monday I left for the first of two big field trips for my research this summer. I'm travelling with my advisor Jim Cronin and Ganesh, a fellow grad student in my lab, from Baton Rouge up the east coast of the United States and as far as Quebec in Canada. Along the way we are going to conduct surveys at 27 of our 36 Phragmites australis sites to collect data for each of our own projects, which make up part of a much larger overall research plan into the invasive Phragmites australis. We had been on a two day trip to our six sites in Louisiana the previous week, but sadly when we woke up the morning of the second day we were forced to abandon the last two sites and come back at a later date due to torrential rain. Jim had done the three sites in South Florida the previous week when us poor students were still busy with exams.

Over the last semester I've been developing my own research ideas. Basically I'll be examining variation in direct and indirect tritrophic interactions (that is interactions between plants, herbivores that eat the plants, and the herbivore's natural enemies) from a couple of different perspectives. The first involves searching for the presence of any type of latitudinal gradient in the strength of these interactions, while the second will look at any differences in the interaction strength between the three known types of Phragmites in North America, two of which are considered invasive from Europe, and one of which is native. Essentially, this could provide valuable information about why the invasive genotypes have spread so rapidly in the United States. Along with Jim and Ganesh I'll be collecting data on plant characteristics and quality, aphid density and other herbivore damage, predator and parasitoid density, as well as sampling all sorts of insects from the Phragmites habitat using a range of methods.

Over the course of the trip I'm going to post some updates and photos every couple of days to document the coolest parts of my trip, so here's the first one.

DAY ONE
Leaving Baton Rouge at 6 am we arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, 14 hours later, probably the longest I've ever spent in a car. Then the first thing we see is someone being arrested at gunpoint surrounded by eight police cars about 200 metres from our hotel. Sadly that was the most exciting part of the day, as it was mostly spent driving the mostly boring highways of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The only other highlight of the day was having Mexican for dinner and discovering a new favourite food, fajitas!

DAY TWO
The second day of the trip was when we finally got stuck in to the field work with our first site in Georgetown. It was a relatively easy site and we finished our census in about 90 minutes as most of the Phragmites patch had been burned the previous fall and the regrowth was short and sparse this early into summer. Driving the six or so hours further north to Elizabeth City was a bit more interesting than the drive the previous day, mainly because the scenery was not so monotonous and we also had some excitement driving through a thunderstorm with rain so heavy we couldn't see more than 30 metres ahead.

Jetty at the Georgetown site

DAY THREE
Today we saw a lot of action. The day started at 4:30 am so we could arrive at the Currituck ferry early enough to make sure we got on the 6 am trip across the sound to Mackay Island Wildlife Refuge, the location of our next three sites. We met with Tim, one of the refuge workers, whose job all day was to take us by boat to all our sites out in the marsh. Two of the three sites were to be my first glimpses of patches of native Phragmites which I was also excited about.

The thing I was most excited (and apprehensive) about was the possibility of seeing a cottonmouth snake, a highly venomous and aggressive snake which is really abundant in Mackay Island. As it turned out, about 20 minutes into our work, Jim had a close encounter with one which was probably too close to comfort. Cottonmouths, or water moccasins as they're also called, are famous for not being scared of humans. In fact, when approached they stand their ground, coil, and gape at the threat, while some are known to approach the intruder. As they're well camouflaged in the marsh it's really easy to step on them without noticing as Jim almost found out. He was mapping the perimeter of our patch when we heard him shout out; turns out he was less than half a metre away from a large cottonmouth when he finally noticed it's open mouth. This put us on high alert for the rest of the day, and I even saw a cottonmouth of my own. It was just a small one, less than a metre in length, but it still got my heart racing when I saw it only 1 metre off the side of my trail. I stood and watched it for a minute before it slowly started swimming away.

As for the work itself, it was a tiring day, especially when you're watching where you put your feet every step! The marsh was quite waterlogged, and had lots of holes up to hip deep. The result - wet boots, socks, and pants. At 3 pm, with about one hour of work to go, a big thunderstorm broke. Tim told us that it was very dangerous to be out in the marsh in a metal boat during a thunderstorm and that he had dragged out four dead bodies from lightning strikes over his years at the refuge. We didn't want to make that number any higher so we sped back to the truck to wait it out. After a couple of hours wait and hearing that there was golf ball sized hail about 3 km away we decided to get out of there and come back in the morning.

Phragmites as far as the eye can see, the native genotype in this case

Tim and Jim in the boat

DAY FOUR
We returned to Mackay Island for a 7:30 am start, knocking out the remaining work in about two hours. There were no more close encounters with cottonmouth snakes but we did see a couple swimming in the creek from a distance. After finishing up at Mackay Island we headed around three hours north to our site at the Rappahannock River in Virginia. This site was fairly tame with only a few sinkholes in the marsh to fall into. It also had very low aphid numbers. Maryland and Delaware are on the agenda tomorrow.

Ganesh heading through a wheat field on the way back from Rappahannock

Spring Courses

Spring semester at LSU is finally over! It's absolutely flown by, especially the last six weeks or so, and at times I've felt like I've accomplished very little throughout it. But looking back and reflecting, I know I've learnt a lot, feel I'm slowly becoming a better ecologist and scientist, and have had a bit of fun in the process.

My course load this semester was intense, and to make things even worse I was still teaching two introductory biology laboratories and trying to get my research underway. Near the beginning of this semester I decided to swap from a PhD to Master's which puts a lot of pressure on to get good experiments done in less than two years but will result in extremely valuable experience for when I go for my PhD eventually. Two of my classes were full classes and the other two were seminar classes, which meet just once a week. These seminar classes both involved reading an entire book over the course of the semester, discussing a chapter or two each week. The books we read were Fifty Years of Invasion Ecology: The Legacy of Charles Elton, an edited book with all chapters written by different authors, and Plant Defense by Dale Walters, both pretty dry reading unless you're really interested in these subjects. The invasion ecology book was definitely a lot more interesting and useful for me than the other.

However, the course I enjoyed the most this semester was "Community Ecology", which was taught by Dr. Kyle Harms. The sub-discipline of community ecology is basically the study of species interactions and the forces that structure ecological communities (species richness and biodiversity) and is particularly relevant to my own interests and field of study. For the class we would read and discuss a couple of influential papers or book chapters in the two classes each week as well as taking in one lecture per week. At the end of the semester each student had to give a 30 minute presentation on the contribution of a particular community ecologist. This "symposium" was the coolest part of the whole class and I got to learn about the diverse work of some great ecologists. My own talk was on Nick Gotelli, a great ecologist from the University of Vermont; you can see a short video where he outlines some of his more famous and very cool work below at the bottom of this post.

Grades are in as of today and I got straight A's to go with my A and B from last semester. Stoked!