ESA 2013 in Austin, TX

For people who know me well and spend a lot of time with me, they may be continually frustrated by my fascination with insects. I say this because anytime I happen to spot a small critter flying around me or scurrying along the ground I almost always will stop to take a closer look or try to catch it (unless it is of the stinging or biting variety!). The sheer diversity of species, morphology, functions, and adaptations of insects is something I find intriguing, and is why I can see myself using them as my primary study organisms for the rest of my career.

One of the many display cases in the exhibit hall

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the 2013 Meeting of the Entomological Society of America (a conference of insect geeks in plain speak) in Austin, Texas, with my labmate Ganesh and his wife Sara. The main reason we were there was to give a 10 minute presentation of our research to the wider scientific community, and also to attend the talks of other students or researchers which we found to be of interest. There were many interesting talks which I attended, many of which have given me some excellent ideas which I can apply to my own research. There was also an awesome exhibit hall with many companies and organizations presenting. The highlight which everyone was interested in was the Bioquip stall; this had many spectacularly colourful, bizzare, and huge insect specimens for sale (such as the butterflies pictured above), various insect collection devices, and even live hissing cockroaches, scorpions, and tarantulas for sale. As for my own talk, it went pretty well considering it was my first ever presentation at a conference, and I'm looking forward to trying this again. You can see the presentation I gave below:

It was my first time visiting Austin and only my second time in Texas. It definitely seemed like a fun and busy city. It had a lot of restaurants and bars around downtown but also a lot of green space relatively close to the city centre, which was cool. The layout of the city was nice, with the bridge and road of Constitution Ave lining up perfectly with the huge State Capitol, which then backs onto the University of Texas. The campus itself is sprawling, perhaps even larger than LSU's. The football stadium is definitely larger, holding slightly over 100,000 Texas Longhorn fans. We also visited Mount Bonnell, the Austin Botanic Gardens, and Barton Springs pool. It's really just great to be travelling to new places again after a while, as I haven't done it since Alaska.

Downtown Austin

In the botanic gardens

Texas State Capitol

The University of Texas Football Stadium (capacity: 100,000)

On the way to Austin we made a little detour to visit Ganesh’s friend Arjun in Waco, Texas. The city itself was nothing special, but is home to Baylor University, which we went and toured around the morning after arriving. We then drove a couple of hours north to visit Dinosaur Valley State Park which was really cool. There you can see dinosaur footprints probably belonging to the large herbivore Astrodon, and also tracks of the predatory Acrocanthosaurus, a dinosaur similar in function and ferocity to Tyrannasaurus rex. The prints are estimated to be approximately 110 million years old, which is simply amazing! On top of that the area was beautiful, especially because the leaves of trees are changing colour to the browns and reds of autumn. 

Footprint of Acrocanthosaurus

In Dinosaur Valley State Park

November already?!

Since I returned from my trip to Alaska and the Northeast I haven’t posted much in the way of updates to my blog and time has just been flying by. That's mostly because the semester has been an eventful one, full of hard work, new challenges, good times, and great company. Here's a little run down of what's made it so special:

Halloween
Of course, one of the highlights of this time of year in the USA is the craziness which is Halloween. For the third year in a row I headed down to New Orleans to spend the night on Bourbon Street with all the other people in costumes. It's always a lot of fun walking up and down the French Quarter checking out all the crazy costumes people have made or bought - my favourite this year was a long-haired guy dressed as Jesus holding a cask of wine which had this used to be water written on it. We had an awesome night out, trawling the various bars and drinking hand grenades, with the night finally culminating in a photoshoot beside the LSU-coloured Lamborghini in the post prior to this one.

Weddings
I’ve been to a couple of weddings this semester which was really cool as I haven’t been to a whole lot so far in my life. The first was the wedding of my girlfriend’s cousin, which was held in Lafayette, a city in Louisiana about one hour west of Baton Rouge. The second was the wedding of my lab mate and friend Ganesh, to his long-term love Sara, who had finally finished her studies in Sweden and had come to join him in the USA.

They were both really nice occasions, but also couldn’t have been more contrasting in style. The first wedding was pretty much similar in style to that of a New Zealand wedding, with a nice ceremony conducted by a wedding celebrant, followed by a big reception with food, drinks, music, and dancing. Everyone was wearing their number ones and the celebrations carried on well into the night. Ganesh and Sara's wedding was much more low-key and intimate, with a small personal ceremony held at their apartment where they exchanged a few words about one another and presented each other with flower garlands, before everybody present had tikka (red rice paste) placed on their forehead. This was then followed by a delicious dinner at the Baton Rouge Nepalese restaurant.

Tikka on the forehead at Ganesh's wedding

Hiking Trips
During the semester I've somehow found the time to get away on a couple of one-day hiking trips to Fountainbleau State Park in Louisiana and Clark Creek in Mississippi. Fountainbleau State Park is right on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and even has a man-made beach. It has around 12 km of trails, a nice campground, and also a lot of Phragmites where I took a little time to do some data collection. Clark Creek is just over the Louisiana/Mississippi border, close to the Tunica Hills Wildlife Management Area, and it was really nice. We all took lunch and lots of water and hiked for over 6 hours along creek beds, beside waterfalls, and up and down the largest hills you can find this close to Baton Rouge. We saw a few armadillos, some deer, frogs, and lizards, and a baby snake. It was a great place to visit and was definitely a highlight of the semester so far.

Hiking in Mississippi

Large orb-web spider at Fountainbleau State Park

One of the waterfalls at Clark Creek

LSU
Of course, there is always plenty going on at university, with my school commitments again being shared between research, teaching, and coursework. This is basically my last semester of coursework before I can solely focus on my research and teaching. I'm still having a lot of fun teaching the ecology lab class, although this has been a freak semester where I have only had a total of 11 students compared to the usual 24 (hooray for less grading!). One of the projects we conduct with the students even made the Baton Rouge newspaper (http://theadvocate.com/features/people/7470629-123/lsu-students-work-to-keep). Because I've been enjoying my research and time in Louisiana so much I have decided to stay on and finish my PhD. I already have a lot of nice data and am making steady progress towards producing a nice dissertation and a number of scientific papers. Next February I will be sitting the dreaded general examination. This is a comprehensive written and oral exam where your PhD committee members supposedly ruthlessly probe your knowledge of the field of ecology to determine whether you are worthy of becoming a PhD candidate. According to my advisor Jim, it is the last major hurdle before defending your dissertation research. It's time to start studying NOW!

The LSU football team hasn’t been doing so well this year, and have already lost three games. They looked great in their first few games of the season but then lost a couple of close ones before being blown out by the #1 ranked team Alabama over the weekend. Next weekend they have a big game in Tiger Stadium against Texas A & M, who have Johnny Manziel, one of the best and most exciting quarterbacks in College Football. I've only been to one home game this season, but I'll definitely be attending this one!

On a final note, I’m especially proud of my great roommate and friend Darko, who has received an offer for his dream job to work as a petroleum engineer at Shell; it just goes to show that hard work will always be rewarded. He’ll be moving to downtown New Orleans in June next year so many visits to his new apartment will have to be in order!

All Things LSU

One of the key things that sets LSU (or most big US schools) apart from universities in NZ is the school spirit. It's everywhere - from people wearing LSU clothes, objects being painted purple and gold, and virtually anything can be bought this time of year with an LSU theme to it; the latest is the LSU tiger burger available from Burger King. This school spirit seems to have the effect of bringing everyone in the community together and you can definitely feel the excitement around campus for the start of football season.

The first game of the season is coming up this Saturday. LSU are ranked 12th nationwide going into the season and they play Texas Christian University, who are ranked 20th. I have bought season tickets again this year and plan to go to all the big games in Tiger Stadium - it should be a good time! To celebrate the start of football season I thought I'd post a few photos I've taken over the last two years showing the crazy LSU-themed things you can see around the place.

Alaska: So Much To Do, So Little Time

My time in Alaska winds down today with my early afternoon flight out of Juneau to Baton Rouge via one last night in Seattle. Reflecting upon my brief visit here I have to conclude that it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life so far. Not only have the beautiful landscapes and intimate wildlife encounters been some of the best I've ever seen, but I also made some good friends, had an immense amount of fun during the trip, and gained some really valuable teaching experience. Most of all, I feel I learnt a lot about myself and am now in the healthiest and happiest shape of my life!

We certainly packed a hell of a lot into the three weeks of our time here. Classes generally started at 8 am and ran all the way until 5:30 pm, with students alternating between lectures with the professors, and labs and research projects with the three of us graduate students in 90 minute slots. On top of this they had to write papers, prepare lab reports, and study for tests and practical exams. Despite this, we still managed to somehow find the time to go on fun adventures and I feel we certainly made the most of the experience. I definitely would have liked to have been able to get out into the wilderness a bit more, but really this trip has just left me hungry for more of this beautiful place. I'd definitely like to come back to Alaska one day with more free time to explore under my own agenda. As the largest state in the US it seems like there are endless wonderful things to see and do: I want to see would be polar bears roaming around the town of Barrow in the far north, Mt. McKinley in Denali National Park (the highest peak in North America), and the aurora borealis (the northern lights). I'm also still yet to see a brown bear or go fishing for salmon, and I'm sure I could spend a few weeks walking the trails absolutely anywhere.

There were many highlights of the second half of the trip despite it seeming to fly by so quickly. We went whale watching one afternoon and managed to spot six or so humpback whales and a bunch of Stellar Sea Lions fighting for prime basking position on a buoy. The boat didn't get particularly close so it wasn't as great as the trip I went on in Maine last year, but afterwards we stopped off at an island to enjoy a fresh pink salmon bake which was absolutely delicious. A couple of days later we had the entire day off to enjoy a cruise to the stunningly scenic Tracy Arm, a huge fjord a couple of hours boat ride from Juneau. We were super lucky to see orcas twice during the trip, including a mother and her calf. The fjord itself was lined with towering rock walls and littered with waterfalls of all sizes (I put my head under one which was pretty refreshing). But the most spectacular scene was the two huge blue glaciers at the end of the fjord. We even got to see a chunk of ice calve off one and rode the resulting wave. I also had a great time getting out and being active thanks to the endless recreational opportunities; we went hiking to the top of Eagle Crest Ski Area and Nugget Falls, sunset walking along Eagle Beach, swimming and kayaking in Auke Lake right on campus (it wasn't even that cold), and I went running every two or three days, enjoying the stunning views as I pounded the pavement.

Thanks has to go out to the many people who made this such a memorable experience. Dr. Bill Stickle and Dr. John Caprio were two great guys to talk to, room with, and learn from - I really owe Dr Stickle a huge amount for inviting me on this trip as a teacher. Both Katherine and Jenessa (the other graduate students up here) were awesome to hang around with, worked their butts off tirelessly, and I now have two good new friends. The students themselves were an awesome group; tons of fun to be around and they seemed to really enjoy the fairly tough field work we threw at them. I'd definitely never got to know any students quite so personally before which was really great. And finally, the weather; what an unbelievable run we had. Out of the 21 days we spent in Juneau we only saw rain about five or six times, which is quite unbelievable considering Juneau is know for getting over 2000 mL of rain per year. The sun was shining on most days and the temperatures were so hot I spent most of my time in a t-shirt, shorts, and jandals - perfect weather! It really made a nice change from the 30-35 °C temperatures I'm now heading back to in Baton Rouge.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite pictures from the second half of the trip (I took over 1500 photos during the four week trip so managed to get a few good ones!).

Sea lions basking in the sun

View over Auke Lake

Orca!

Rock wall in Tracy Arm

Downtown Juneau

Sunset at Eagle Beach

Bald eagle in flight at Eagle Beach

Eagle Crest Ski Area

Mama bear teaching her cubs how to rip up a salmon carcass

Great fun in the kayak on Auke Lake

Yours truly enjoying the final day of field work

The entire class on our salt marsh field trip

Alaska: Glaciers, Porcupines, and Bears!

Sunday was our day off from teaching responsibilities and the three of us graduate students decided to go for a long stress-relieving walk. At the tramway the day before, Katherine and Jenessa had heard of a "secret" trail which could lead you right up to the Mendenhall Glacier itself. Turns out the trail isn't so secret as there were heaps of people on it, but it sure did give us some spectacular views of the glacier and the Mendenhall Lake. It took us around two hours to get right up to the glacier, but we were able to climb right on top of the front of it which was an amazing experience. The weather was perfect as it has been pretty much the whole time we have been here, but it did get cold in the exposed areas with a fierce wind sweeping down the valley. Can't wait to see where we will go walking next.

The first full on view of the glacier

Up close to the glacier with ice climbers for scale

Made it!

Beautiful views in either direction

Later that evening we went to look for bears at the popular Steep Creek boardwalk by the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. Turns out the third time is lucky (we also went the two preceding days, but had no luck), because we spotted a mother bear and her two little cubs and watched them for half an hour or so. The mother bear shooed her cubs up a nearby tree where they fell asleep while she went about fishing for salmon in the creek. It was amazing to watch her chase the salmon down the stream and she managed to catch two while we were there. There was also a great interaction between her and one of the cubs when she climbed the tree to check on them; she tried nuzzling up to the uppermost cub, who had fallen fast asleep. It woke up, looked down, and gave its mum a whack on the nose with its little paw, as if to say "not now mum, I'm trying to sleep up here!", keeping on doing this until its mum eventually gave up and went back to hunting. I managed to get a semi-decent video of the bear which you can check out below.



At the same location as the bears there is also a lot of other wildlife hanging around. We've seen a few cute red squirrels, salmon, birds, and some deer, but nothing comes close to this adorable baby porcupine which looked like it was going to fall out of its tree at any minute!

Alaska: Getting There and Research Projects

The ferry journey to Juneau

Because Juneau is only accessible by sea or by air, we took a three day ferry trip through the Inside Passage. The MV Columbia (our home for the next three days) left port under brilliant sunshine from the small city of Bellingham, just south of the Canadian Border. This was the last we would see of the sun for the next three days, with the exception of a few tiny patches of blue sky. The ferry ride was largely uneventful, with the only real excitement being the late night rescue of a fishing boat which had run aground. One of the professors also gave a lecture in the ferry's bar, we saw an old deserted cannery, and stopped off for breakfast one morning in a small touristy town called Ketchikan. As part of the faculty on this trip, we were sleeping cabins. The students on the other hand had to rough it on deck cheers in the open solarium. The scenery all around the ferry was continually awesome, and it reminded me a lot of the Marlborough Sounds back home.

Sunset on the ferry

We finally arrived in Juneau at 7 am on Monday morning, and since then it has been all on! Jenessa, Katherine and I (the three graduate students who are helping out) have been kept pretty busy. We've been teaching and attending lecture classes, driving the students around (to the bar in downtown Juneau on more than one occasion), planning out the activities for each day, and then finally passing out in bed at the end of the day. We haven't had a lot of time off to explore on our own, but it also hasn't all been hard work: The entire group spent Tuesday morning walking around the beach at Sunshine Cove, learning about all the organisms that live there. On Thursday we visited the Alaska State Museum in the morning, and the Alaskan Brewery in the afternoon, both of which were pretty cool. And on Saturday everyone took a two hour walk up to the top of the Mount Roberts Tramway, where we ate some dinner, took in the spectacular views, and then took the tram back down. In all, it has been an amazing experience so far, with plenty more to come!

Mendenhall Glacier from just off the main highway

The salt marsh and beyond from Mt. Roberts

While in Alaska, some of the students are enrolled in a course where they conduct research in the field and lab, and then write a paper based on what they find. My main job as a teaching assistant here in Alaska is to design, organise, and run three of these research projects. I had a lot of fun coming up with the projects by reading various papers and talking with Dr. Bill Stickle, the LSU professor who is in charge of the program here in Alaska. While there isn't enough time to collect publishable data, these projects introduce the students to most basic aspects of conducting ecological research, from getting down and dirty in the field to curating and identifying various organisms, managing data, conducting statistical analyses, and writing up results. Below is a brief outline of each project:

Diversity of Insects Associated with Salt Marsh Plants
The Juneau salt marsh is one of the biggest on the west coast of North America, although it has nothing on the ones on the east coast. Salt marshes generally increase in elevation the further they get away from the ocean and this leads to often obvious zonation of plants. The students sample in 1 m² plots along a gradient from the water's edge to the road which borders the salt marsh, collecting data on soil salinity, moisture, and temperature, the plant species present in each plot (we are preserving specimens for deposition in the LSU herbarium), as well as taking samples of any invertebrates using a sweep net, pitfall traps, and hand collecting. The students will then identify the species present (or at least to family level with the insects), how they are related to one another, the abiotic conditions they tolerate, and how the community changes with elevation in the salt marsh. So far they are having a great time wading around in the marsh, and it has only rained on us a couple of times!

The salt marsh crew

Effects of Marine-Derived Nutrients
Every year, hundreds of thousands of salmon make the journey from the ocean back to Alaskan streams where they hatched. Here, they spawn and then die, their life cycle completed. All these dead salmon and their eggs add a whole lot of nutrients to the water, which also must have an effect on other organisms downstream of the spawning sites. We decided to test this using a simple design: we would sample above the salmon spawning sites (i.e. past a barrier such as a waterfall), within a salmon spawning site, and below the spawning sites (near the mouth of the stream). Data to be collected includes taking water samples to test for nutrient and chlorophyll concentrations, sampling epilithon (the algae and plant material on river stones), and counting the numbers of dead and alive salmon in a 50 m stretch of stream. In one stream sampled so far we estimated there to be over 4500 live salmon in the 50 m stretch. They are so densely abundant you have to watch where you are walking so you don't step on them and you could literally reach into the water and pick them up if you wanted to.

Sheep Creek, one of our amazing field sites

Aquatic Insects as a Food Source for Salmon
The final project the students are working on (and probably my personal favourite) uses the same design and field sites as the marine-derived nutrients project, but the students are examining the effects these nutrients may have on higher trophic levels, in particular the aquatic insects in the streams. Students are sampling aquatic insects using a kick-net and debris bags, and also collecting habitat data such as stream width and depth, number of coarse woody debris, number of deep pools, and amount and type of overhanging vegetation. We have also obtained a permit to trap young fish (hopefully some juvenile salmon) and pump their stomach contents to determine which of the aquatic insects make up the majority of their diet. This will allow us to determine if top-down (the fish predators), bottom-up (nutrients), or environmental (habitat) variables are having a greater effect on insect abundance and diversity. After working at these amazing field sites I wonder why I don't change my PhD to studying aquatic insects in Alaska!

Sampling for aquatic insects

I have a lot more great pictures and a couple of videos from today's adventures which I will post in the next couple of days too!

The Spectacular Pacific Northwest

Waking from my slumber on the flight between Dallas and Seattle, I lift my window shade and glance outside. I'm greeted by a sight I haven't seen for seven long months - mountains. But this is not some small hill; it's Mt. Rainier, a huge peak, over 550 m taller than New Zealand's tallest, Aoraki (Mt. Cook). An intense feeling of excitement instantly takes me over. My heart starts beating faster, breaths become heavier, and it feels like a kaliedoscope (yes, that's the correct term) of butterflies have been let loose in my stomach. Before delirium sets in I try to remind myself that this is just the first of many awe-inspiring sights I'll be seeing over the next month.

My ultimate destination is Juneau, Alaska, where I'll be spending a little over three weeks helping to teach and conduct small research projects with a group of LSU undergrads who chose to spend the summer semester studying somewhere other than hot and humid Baton Rouge. Of course, it won't be all work - we intend to have a pretty good time while we're up there too!

But before I arrive in Juneau, I had a couple of days to tour around Seattle and its surrounds. I spent Tuesday evening downtown, walking along the waterfront before launching up the famous Space Needle to view the awesome sunset. The city kind of reminded me of Auckland, with the downtown area being built on steep hills beside a harbour. But I wasn't really interested in the city so much during my short stay here, rather I wanted to check out Olympic National Park, home to the mountain ranges behind which the sun was setting.

I rented a car and decided I would drive around the entire Olympic Peninsula loop, around 1000 km total. So the next morning I took a ferry across Puget Sound and promptly started my adventure by getting lost. Luckily it wasn't for long thanks to Google Maps, and soon I had made it to the first stop of many, the spectacular Hurricane Ridge. This spot provided beautiful panoramic views of the Olympic Mountains and also into Canada. I climbed to the highest point the walking tracks nearby would allow, stood there, and took it all in. The mountains weren't as singularly breathtaking as Mt. Rainier, but there were so many that it more than made up for it. My next stop was Lake Crescent, where I walked a couple of kilometres to check out a waterfall, before cooling off with a swim. The water wasn't even that cold and I could stay in for a few minutes!

One of the greatest things about Olympic National Park is the variety of landscapes and ecosystems it contains. Within little more than an hour of driving you can get from the top of Hurricane Ridge to the coastline, and I spent the evening checking out the many beaches on offer. Rialto Beach and Ruby Beach were the most picturesque, with towering sea stacks housing their own forest communities, trees dead from sea spray lining the forest edge, and the shoreline littered with giant logs washed ashore during storms.

The forests in the park are also extremely pretty, filled with spruces, cedars, firs, hemlocks, and maples, all clothed in dense swaths of hanging moss, with an understory dominated by ferns and other small trees and shrubs. Photographs can't convey just how green and lush the forests are, especially on the west side of the peninsula, where they are classified as one of the world's few temperate rainforests (another being New Zealand's west coast hardwood forests). Hoh, Sol Duc, and Quinalt forests were all particularly pretty, and I spent a few hours wandering their many trails.

Wildlife highlights included a big black bear (actually outside the park), a herd of elk, some black tailed deer, lots of large and colourful slugs, the discarded skin of a garter snake, a single bald eagle, and what I think were a few sea otters playing in the surf. Other than the different species of flora and fauna, the whole park bore a striking resemblance to many places in New Zealand. The mountains made me think of the Southern Alps, Lake Cresent looked just like one of the Nelson Lakes, the beaches were as wild and rugged as those on the west coast, and the rainforests may as well have been taken right out of Lord of the Rings. It was a great feeling to be reminded so much of home.

Today begins the three day ferry trip to Juneau, where more exciting new adventures await!