Seasonal variability in temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and nutrients content in the San Juan Channel in Fall, 2007

The most horrible moment of this quarter: “You’re a great speaker but that’s not worth anything because you didn’t make any sense. No one understood your presentation”
The most wonderful moment of this quarter: “Teddy, you totally nailed that. You did a fantastic job. I can tell you this time: EVERYONE understood that.”

Thank you thank you thank you JN. I am a better scientist now because of you, better than I ever would have been. It’s possible.

I don’t think I’ll ever be the same in many ways after this apprenticeship. My standards are higher for my approach as a scientist, my professional attitude, how much sense a paper has to make, how to use data, how to gather data and how to be a person in general. Now I go into the wilds of a science career, my pipetter in one hand and my guitar in the other. And I’m going to get paid for it!

My paper, to be bound and immortalized in the FHL library forever and ever and ever. Oh god.

Upwelling=productivity

I have this image of my brain all bandaged up in a hospital bed–one leg up in traction, a vase full of flowers on the table nearby–bravely pushing through recovery after a nearly tragic run-in with the 80-dimentional freight train called My Data. Though the writing has been going well, Breck’s exceedingly kind words about my ability as a writer were of no comfort to me this afternoon when I was up in front of my class trying to explain estuarine circulation in a well-mixed environment without ever having had a chance to discuss with Jan what I thought I understood, but what she tersely pointed out to me at the end of my lecture I did not. So it’s back to the flash drive and the Sigma Plot, trying to find patterns where there are none, trying to explain 70,000 possible influences on the variability of one dataset, and generally doing everything I can to short-circuit myself entirely. Yesterday evening I had so totally had it that all I could do was curl up on the couch on the bridge of the R/V Centennial on the ride home in the dark with my headphones in and play solitaire on my ipod listening to country music for an hour. It made me feel better but my brain still feels battered. I think I’m going to call it the weekend now.

99 phyla to eat in the sea, 99 phyla to eaaaaaat!

My previous consumption of Strongulocentrotus gonads in sake several years ago notwithstanding, I am proud to announce the addition of a new member of kingdom Animalia… to my diet!

Holothuroidea in the pan.

A sunrise and a sunset- can you tell the difference?

I am in the library. Sunshine glare is pouring in off the sea through the wide windows. It’s getting filtered through the linen curtains but still makes my hair and my shoulder hot, and the side of my face. To my right are the book stacks. I can see all the back issues of Science magazine, Zoomorphology magazine. Behind me are the titles like Neurobiology of Invertebrates: Gastropod Brain, and Standard Catalog of Shells. Octopus. Cephalapod Behavior. A Survey and Illustrated Catalogue of the Teredinidae. I have been in heaven all morning as I work on my paper. I can watch the light change over the water, see the divers come and go on the dock below me: one minute they are all standing around planning their day in their cute little fleece jumpers. The next time I look up they are in their dry suits, hefting air tanks and BCDs onto our little aluminum dive boats. Next time they are gone, the dock is empty, and there is the Aukelet buzzing off into the channel, a gleaming comet with the sun glinting off the windows and a frothy wake angling out to dissipate behind it.

Here are some pictures that I took, not of today, but from our cruise on tuesday. Sunrise and Sunset. Can you tell the difference?

sunrise?

Awake yet?

Sunset?

Livin’ it up in sunny Washington

stand back… I’m about to do some science!

I have always loved the sea, felt attached to it, can’t bear to be away from it for too long.  Now that I’ve been actually living by the sea for more than a month, studying it, being aware of the tides and winds and the currents, I feel more connected than I ever thought possible.  I’m starting to have a feel for the water column, for the subtlest fluctuations in temperature and salinity.  The swell under the boat speaks to me.  I can get engrossed in the epic tale told by the plots I work up on the screen of my computer, because all I have to do is look up and there is Old Man Ocean, who wrote the book I read.  That’s why I have to go swimming. 

 God it’s beautiful here.

How I know I love science

All hands on the Centennial at 8:00 this morning, gear on deck, minus the CTD. An hour getting the CTD on the deck, because the trawl nets are where the CTD is supposed to be. Almost getting my face bashed in by said $20,000 piece of equipment. 5′ swells, high winds. Sparkling sunshine and high cotton-ball clouds. Soggy hummus sandwich for lunch. Gonna barf? Maybe. 2.5 hrs on the transect back to North station. Sun’s going down. Getting hungrier. Call in to the dining hall to make sure they don’t put away the food before we get there. Get there, but put away all the gear first. Feet on land, head still rocking. Fifteen minutes for dinner. Everyone’s going out for Karaoke tonight but you know what TEDDY’S going to do? Oxygen titrations so I can have my data to look at first thing in the morning. That’s how I know I love science. I just haven’t figured out the why yet.

The next level

I am now a fully checked-out level-III dive boat tender.

And though I may have learned how to drive small boats and administer O2 to divers in trouble, all the sunny weather this weekend kept me from doing any actual work towards the completion of my research project.  Completion?  What am I talking about?  Aside from having detected an internal bore in the outgoing tide in the acoustic data, the significance of which I cannot even begin to describe because I don’t know, I really have no idea how to approach my research other than as the lowly uneducated fraud that I am, collecting more of exactly the same kind of data that has been being collected for the past two years and reporting back on my barest findings.  It’s all I’m qualified to do!  I’m staving off panic about my total lack of research experience, or even classroom experience in fields relevant to the project by having more fun than I’ve ever had in my life stuck on an island a thousand miles from home with a bunch of strangers.  And by telling myself that even if I had taken an ecology class, most of the material wouldn’t apply to what we’re researching now and the stuff that did apply I’d have to learn all over again because I would have forgotten it since passing my final.  But I still feel under-equipped because you never know what bits of learning are going to come in handy in the future, and even if they’ve been forgotten, at least you know where to go looking when you want them back.  It’s just those bits I sense I’m lacking when I’m trying to get a sense of where to look for questions in the water column that might amount to better answers than “The water got colder towards winter.  There was more fresh water when the wind was blowing from the north.  South station has higher salinity than North station.”  I keep on getting just to the edge of where I might start to find a way to understand how they all fit together and then it just slips from view again.  I’ve taken oceanography, but we never covered multi-layered mixing in channels with sills.  I’m climbing mountains of fluid dynamics publications, theoretical water physics, and that one switchback around which I’ll see some kind of view of where I’ve come from is always just a few steps ahead.  I’m not getting discouraged though.  Flashes of near-understanding are coming to me frequently enough to keep me climbing.  I hold on to my faith that my scientific incompetence will not be found out before I have a chance to correct it.  Meanwhile, there are always hot divers for me to chat with while I’m boat tending.   Amorous though I am not, the sight of a brilliant scientist vegetarian grinning on the dock, with his wet suit stripped down to his waist, rinsing his hair with the freshwater hose on a rare sparkling sunny afternoon never fails to get me flustered and grinning right back.

Seriously, kids

If you know me, and know that this is now the best grumpy face I can muster, surely you must be proud of how far I’ve come!

Not a planktonographer after all

I was placed into the oceanography group.  Now I am an oceanographer.  To celebrate, here are finally some photos from FHL!

Here’s my tool: the CTD

Here’s my project partner, Daniel. And my roommate, Venecia.

Here’s Randy and me and Sarah and Erin and Dena at the top of mount constitution.

Here’s me picking grapes

Topic choice submission

disclaimer: somehow I have gotten totally self-conscious and embarrassed about my writing. I hope no one thinks I am an idiot. Does this make any sense at all? Our topic choice submissions are supposed to be really informal. But I know that when I’m half-way-ing the scientific tone, I just sound overblown and undereducated. But the point is, you’re reading this because you want to know what I’m up to out here on the tundra and I’m going to tell you about it. I don’t do anything but think about marine science all. day. long. That, and how to retaliate for pranks by the diving class. And what the rest of the lyrics to “Shady’s Back” are at 7:00am in dining hall. Pictures and video to follow. For now: SCIENCE! sort of. ugh.
Topic choice sheet

1. Zooplankton
2. Physical Oceanography
3. Otherwise anything else is fine

I’ve gotten really interested in the net movement of water masses through the San Juan channel. I know that tidal signals in the fauna and physical oceanography of North and South stations are incredibly strong, but I also have a feeling that what happens to the zooplankton in the water as they are transported with the non-tidal currents is a story worth investigating. For example, Zamos’ research describes a decidedly bottom-up controlled ecosystem near South station. Nothing so definitive has been described for North station, and I am wondering if part of the answer might lie in the fact that the structure of the plankton community that passes South station is fundamentally changed by the time that same community reaches North station. This effect would never have shown up in any of the other plankton papers for PEF because no one took into account how long it would take a theoretical cohort of zooplankton to move from South to North, not with the tides, but with the circulation currents.
This is also a great topic for me because, as Leigh Van Valen said in 1973, “Evolution is the control of development by ecology.” I have been interested in development and evolution for a long time. Since larvae make up an important part of any zooplankton community, now is a perfect chance for me to learn a lot more about larval ecology!