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!

Snake Venom Self-Immunization

Do not try this at home! Browsing one of my favourite YouTube channels last night I stumbled across this interesting video. It's a documentary about a guy who has regularly injected himself with highly toxic snake venom for over 20 years. While it seems he's lucky to be alive, he claims that the venom has anti-aging and immunological properties, and gives him a burst of energy that lasts up to four days. He certainly doesn't look or act like a 46 year old, and claims he hasn't even had the flu for the last six or so years.

On initial viewing, it seems an incredibly stupid thing to do - handling the snakes the way he does is unbelievably dangerous (although he seems to know what he's doing) and injecting yourself with venom is even dumber - but I think it's very likely there is something to his claims. If ever there is a strong argument for urgent conservation, inventory, and research into biodiversity then this may be an excellent example of it; there are potentially hundreds of cures for major diseases to be found within nature. This is something impossible to put a dollar value on, and something we should be desperate not to lose. After all, these potentially useful biomedical resources are the result of millions of years of evolution, and once gone, may be lost forever.



The YouTube channel the video is from is really good. It is called VICE, and they produce a huge number of short documentaries on a diverse range of topics, ranging from . Here's a link to their main page if you feel like checking them out - VICE.

Sigur Ros in New Orleans

One of my all time favourite bands, Sigur Rós, is coming all the way from Iceland to do a North American tour later this year and will be playing on October 3 in New Orleans. I bought my ticket to go see them today and am excited to finally see them live! They have tons of awesome material and lots of music videos, like the awesome one below for the song Dauðalogn off their 2012 album Valtari.

Insect Taxonomy

This semester I took my final full time class to qualify for the Master's degree at LSU, and it was my favourite class I've taken so far. The class was Insect Taxonomy and taught by Dr. Chris Carlton and Victoria Bayliss. The class material consisted of learning the life history and key characteristics for identification of over 200 total families of beetles, flies, moths and butterflies, bees and wasps, and other insect groups. We also had a lab each week where we put this knowledge into practice by identifying specimens presented to us using dichotomous keys, our notes, pictures in books and on the internet (www.bugguide.net is an excellent resource), and the guide of our teachers.

One of the main requirements of the course was to assemble an insect collection. This needed to include 150 different insect families as well as additional specimens. Unfortunately I wasn't all that stoked with my final collection, which is far from a perfect example as you can see below. However, I enjoyed the course so much I intend to start my own personal collection, while the knowledge of identifying insects I gained from the course will also be immensely important for my research, where I am currently collecting many species of fly, wasp and beetle from inside galls of Phragmites australis, such as the cool-looking beetle and wasp in this post.

My First Publication

As I'm only just beginning an academic career, I only have a couple of publications to my name so far. One of these, the first paper I had published, is particularly important to me. I'm a strong advocate for conservation of rare and endangered species, but in order for conservation and restoration programs to be successful I believe they require one key ingredient: the active involvement of landowners and the general public.

For my Honours degree at Lincoln University I was lucky enough to work with Shireen and Francis Helps, the landowners of a large section of Flea Bay, on Banks Peninsula, New Zealand. As well as being a working sheep farm, the bay is also home to the largest mainland colony of little blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) in New Zealand, with over 1200 nests. However, the Flea Bay penguins are particularly special, as they have a distinctive white edge to their flipper, which is only seen in little blue penguins from Canterbury, New Zealand, and lead to them being given the sub-species name of white-flippered penguins (Eudyptula minor albosignata). There is some confusion as to whether they should be designated a separate subspecies or not, but in either case they remain a unique organism, worthy of conservation efforts.

Whereas many other penguin colonies on Banks Peninsula (and around all Australasia) are in decline, the Flea Bay colony has been increasing in size at a great rate, largely thanks to the many years of dedicated and tireless work by Francis, Shireen, various conservation organisations, and researchers. Over the years they have done some awesome work through trapping predators, building artificial nesting boxes, caring for sick and injured penguins, and monitoring colony size. Every breeding season, Francis consistently visited 50 nest boxes every two to three days (even including Christmas), collecting data on which birds were occupying each nest (he banded each bird for easy identification), and how their nest was doing in terms of breeding success. He was kind enough to give me the 13 years of data he had collected in numerous little notebooks. My job was to put this data into a digital format, and analyse it, with the goal of finding which factors were influencing breeding success in the colony from year to year.

I collected data on trap catch numbers, fisheries catch rates, climatic conditions, nesting box habitat, altitude, distance to sea, and a few other things, using statistical models to examine how closely it was correlated to annual breeding success. As it turns out, the most important indicator of breeding success at Flea Bay is guard period length. This is the period following hatching when at least one of the chick's parents remains to guard the nest while the other seeks food at sea. It is thought that guard period length is largely dependent upon the quantity and quality of food available in the feeding grounds of the colony, and so may be a good indicator of fish stocks in the area.

The Helps also run Pohatu Tours, where you can take an awesome tour of the penguin colony, head on a sea kayaking trip, stay in the farmhouse, and walk portions of the famous Banks Peninsula track. If you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend visiting Flea Bay, or just Banks Peninsula in general.

Here is a link to my paper should you wish to read it: http://www.nzes.org.nz/nzje/new_issues/NZJEcol35_3_199.pdf

White-flippered penguin (Eudyptula minor albosignata) in a nesting box

A Southern Spring Break

This past week was Spring Break at LSU, an entire week where the campus becomes a desolate wasteland as the majority of students head to the beaches of Alabama and Florida to party. That was what I did last year (can't believe that was a year ago already!), but this year I had too much work to do on my research project to head away for so long. However, all work and no play is boring and a good life needs balance, so I made sure I still got to do some fun stuff during the holiday, and coincidentally all of these activities seemed to have a very southern US/Louisiana theme to them.

First up on the festivities for Spring Break was a crawfish boil, which I was the host of. It was Anthony's (my late mate) idea to attempt a boil for our friends and I agreed to have it at my house thanks to the spacious courtyard and lawn. If you've never been a part of a crawfish boil before then I can tell you it is quite an experience, even if you aren't the one cooking. Crawfish are kind of like tiny crayfish and the people here in Louisiana are crazy about them. The most common way they are eaten is boiled in a spicy broth with all sorts of vegetables like corn, potatoes, celery, onions, and  garlic. The contents of the boil are poured out over newspaper spread on a table and then consumed busily. Eating a crawfish involves twisting off the crawfish tail to get the meat and then pulling off the head to suck the delicious juices inside. It's a lot of effort for such a small mouthful, and your hands can smell like crawfish for days, but it's totally worth it for the awesome flavour of a good boil!

The boil itself was quite an experience. We spent the entire day driving around Baton Rouge picking up various supplies and ingredients, then started cooking them around 6:30 pm. Because we had 80 lbs of crawfish we did the boil in four separate batches. Anthony, Fallon and I shared the job of master boiler and as first-timers we were lucky to have Forrest (a former PhD student from our lab, born and raised in Louisiana) around to give us some advice on the timing and amount of ingredients. I won't give away our secret recipe online, but needless to say it had lots of excellent southern spices. It was busy work, especially the first couple of boils. The first batch was quite spicy but a little bland in flavour, while the second one was even spicier but with excellent flavour. By the end of the night we had lowered the spiciness a little, all 80 pounds plus vegetables had been eaten, and the keg of Abita Amber was dry too.

Three labmates

The broth

Crawfish boiling

The three master boilers

Let the feast begin!

The next day, Fallon, Pradip, Bimesh and I drove down to New Orleans to spend a night at our friend's camp on Bayou Segnette. I've blogged about a trip there before for the 4th of July last year. This time we went to the birthday party of Whitney's friend at his fishing camp, went kayaking, searched for alligators while cruising in the waterways (we saw about 15), and played water fetch with a dog and toy duck. The highlight though was getting to shoot a 12-gauge shotgun. This was the first time I have shot a decently powered gun from what I can recall and it was a lot of fun. I even managed to hit my target - a Heineken bottle. Can't wait to go there again later in the summer!

Whitney

At a crab fishing camp

6 am fog on the bayou

Inside Whitney's camp

Pradip hanging at Whitney's camp

Small alligator

Nailed it

The next fun part of my Spring Break was a trip to the Sherburne Shooting Range out near the Atchfalaya Basin instead of working on Friday. Our advisor (Jim) was nice enough to take Anthony and I out to shoot his guns and ammo for the entire morning. We shot about eight different guns, aiming for targets and having shooting competitions. For my second time shooting I wasn't too bad, but it does help a little when some of the guns have laser sights. The coolest gun I shot was the AR-15, the standard gun used by the US army, which you can see me firing in a photo below. The bullet leaves the barrel at 1200 m per second, and you can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, which I imagine can do some pretty serious damage. Guns are a huge part of US culture, with almost one gun per person on average (imagine how much that increases in Louisiana...). However, as a non-citizen it's illegal for me to own a gun, so I definitely won't be buying one at the local sports store. Luckily Jim has agreed to take us out again sometime soon, this time to try clay pigeons.

Shooting handguns

The range

AR-15 action

To top off the southern themed week, I made a trip to the new L'Auberge Casino here in Baton Rouge. I'd heard it's pretty good so I went along with a group of friends to check it out. It was bright and loud with the sounds of pokie machines inside, but the beer was free so we stayed a while playing $3 roulette. All three of us came out with at least $20 profit each, and had a laugh as well. It finished the week on a nice note, walking out of the casino as a winner.

Now an exciting next month lies ahead. I will be running a series of experiments and doing a lot of fieldwork for my research (including a trip to the northeast; Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine), and my friend James is coming from New Zealand to visit for a week or so. But most of all I can't wait for this semester to be over and for summer to begin!

The new L'auberge casino/hotel