DAY 2: Getting Out in the Field

Do You like Easter egg hunts? I sure do. Which is good because I did a lot of searching today for tadpole traps among wetland grasses which is a lot like hunting for Easter eggs. But first a quick summary of the day.

I officially got out of bed at 7:15 despite having light creep around our blinds at 4:30 am. Breakfast was continental...but the oatmeal bar was my favorite part. We spent the morning reviewing the the different types of field tests and how to fill out our data sheets.

After donning our very attractive waders, our team set out to collect data from our first pond.

 I was assigned to collect data from the traps which are pretty much just two plastic bottles stapled together with a little fishing line with some tagging tape attached which floats.
 The scientists would set 10 of these around a wetland pond and my fellow data collector, Ericka and I would have to go around and use our GPS to take the coordinates before dumping the trap into a bin where we would identify the tadpoles as Wood frog or Chorus frog and try to distinguish between two types of stickleback fish. I loved this process cause as not only was like an Easter egg hunt in that you had to look around on the ground (in grasses and in this case water) for the traps but you also got excited to find out what was in them! Most of the time there were just diving beetles and some fly larvae but we would get excited when they had tadpoles or fish in them.

The hardest part was after unscrewing the bottle cap on the trap, was then identifying the frogs.

According to Steph, the researcher studying frogs, the Chorus frog tadpoles have bulgy eyes on the side and the wood frog tadpoles have less bulgy eyes on top of their head. All in all I really enjoyed the task of checking traps and gathering tadpole and fish counts.

 There were so many other jobs like scooping sediment and identifying organisms in it, measuring the size and water quality of the pond, and then measuring growth rate of tadpoles. I will get my chance to do all of the different data collection types at some point during my trip.

Lunch was pasta, high in carbs which was crucial. We went out for a second set of data collection on a deeper pond.

This was fun because not only was the Easter egg hunt harder with the deeper water, and increased sedge, but we got to really put our waders to work.
I also learned about Butterwort a carnivorous plant and took a picture with one of the trees. They call them flag shaped because only one side of the tree has needles this is from the abrasive westerly winds of the winter.

Also notice the full basal skirt around the bottom of the tree. That was covered by snow in the winter so it was not exposed to the abrasive winds and therefore has it's needles/branches all the way around.

Once back at the lab, some groups had to finish processing their data but my group just had to clean the bottles. Because this wasn't a huge job, some of us were asked to collect data on the mesocosm tanks just up the road.

Mesocosoms are simply medium sized ecosystems where experiments are done in a controlled manner. For these mesocosms, temperature, tadpole concentration, and nutrient level were all used to create a 3x3 factorial design. I got to measure the depth of each tank during our data collection today while another volunteer looked for the presence of tadpoles and another checked to be sure the heaters still worked in the tanks that were receiving that variable.

Dinner was vegetable sweet potato curry over rice. Really delicious. Got to enjoy another of my Canadian beers during our lecture on climate change. I found this lecture fascinating. I always knew that the surface temperatures of the planet are increasing and scarily at a faster and faster rate. I always knew that greenhouse gases and the increase of them in the atmosphere was a contributing factor to the increase in temperatures. I even knew that so many components contribute to this increase in greenhouse gas levels (volcanic activity, solar activity, internal variability, and of course human actions like burning fossil fuels, and poor farming practices to name a few. But what I didn't know is the mechanism by which the greenhouse gases trap the heat. I never realized that certain molecules like carbon dioxide and methane actually absorb the energy from the suns rays and then get stretched or bend as a result only to snap back into their normal shape and remit the energy back into the atmosphere as infrared wavelengths (heat.) So fascinating. No talk yet about the effects of climate change and what we can do about it, but I'm sure those conversations are coming and I look forward to learning even more.