Journal Entries

2004-05

 

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Click here to access journal entries by Marianne Kaput or Giancarlo Lopez-Martinez.

 

January 4, 2005:

Today begins with our last boating orientation, with Vinny. After we've all got our float coats and dry bags, he takes the 6 of us out in a 10-man Zodiac — basically a really big inflatable boat. He instructs us on the finer points of not getting killed while piloting it through choppy and windy conditions and through various areas of brash ice that could break the propeller and/or slit the boat. Again, Vinny proves to be a great teacher — no matter how many mistakes we make. He just calmly and patiently points out a better way to keep from dying while not accidentally killing everyone around us. We do okay, though, even in the man overboard drill, which involves the heaviest dummy you can imagine, clothed in a float coat, being heaved into the water and getting pulled back in on its stomach. We all have radios — the last thing Vinny teaches us is how to make comms, which means radioing Palmer whenever we leave or arrive at a new island. We can also hear everyone else's radio transmissions.

Then Vinny drops us off at Bonaparte Point, the closest island to Palmer. The vegetation is all mosses, lichens, algae and some grasses — that's the only kind of vegetation that can grow on extremely cold, rocky, frequently snow-covered terrain like this.

We brought along Ziploc bags and hand lenses, so we get to work looking for Belgica antarctica larvae. We are excited to find both larvae and adults (which is pretty cool, as the adults only emerge for two weeks every two years), and we stuff some gallon Ziplocs full of handfuls of the soil, algae and moss the larvae like to hang out in. In this process we see some great skuas and an elephant seal (neither of which are shy at all). This was a great first field collecting trip. Below are photos of Rick on Bonaparte, and Scott and Joe collecting samples:

While we're finishing up, we get to listen and watch as some drama unfolds at Palmer. A hydraulic hose on the Laurence M. Gould (LMG) actually breaks, and there is a spill into the harbor. All of Palmer’s support staff and a fair number of its scientists respond quickly, coordinated by Tim The Waste Guy over the radio. Immediately booms (see photo) to corral the spill, and absorbent stuff to soak it up. It wasn't a big spill, and they hadn't had a chance to run a practice drill yet this season because of brash ice, so it was good experience, they say.

At this point, finished collecting, we radio for someone to take us back to Palmer, and are pleasantly asked to wait until everything calms down with the spill, which is fine. Except I realize now that I am getting sunburned. The ultraviolet radiation here is very intense, partly because there is a big hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere (probably caused by pollution) that opens periodically over Antarctica. I put on sunblock this morning, but I guess it wasn't enough. Lesson learned.

We are picked up eventually, and we burst triumphantly into the lunchroom and celebrate by eating loaded baked potatoes. The rest of the day is spent setting up our lab — various stuff is arranged in the right spots, Joe Rinehart starts to set up their molecular biology equipment, we figure out various things we'll need for the lab and Cara, the lab manager, finds it for us. I start setting up our osmometer, which we’ll use to measure the water potential of bits of insects or soil, and we get a Berlese funnel from the carpenter who just built it for us.

Our version of the Berlese funnel is a very simple, effective device that works like this: instead of having to collect insects that live in soil or vegetation one by one in the field, you just grab a bunch of the stuff they live in (containing a bunch of your insects, you hope) and bring it to the lab. Then you spread the soil and moss over the top of a wire screen, with holes in it big enough for the insects to crawl through. Bright lights are pointed at the soil and moss to dry and heat it, and a large tray is placed underneath the screen to catch the insects. We fill the tray with ice water, since Belgica are accustomed to cold weather.

The idea is that these insects like an environment that is cool, wet and dark, not warm, dry and bright, so they'll move downward away from the light, and end up falling through the mesh into whatever you've put under it. In this case that's ice, and so we set that up and run it until 11 pm — it’s still pretty wet and probably full of our larvae, so at 11 we shut off the lights, cover it and move it outside, so we can run it some more tomorrow.

Oops — I forgot — the LMG left Palmer today, to take scientists on a research trip around Antarctica. The scientists on board will be taking lots of samples of krill and other things to study. It will come back in early February to take us home. Today when it leaves Palmer, in keeping with tradition, people here actually jump off the pier into the harbor. Looks scary and cold, but also fun. I might just end up doing that before my stay is over, just to be able to say I took a swim in Antarctica.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 5, 2005. Brash ice everywhere you look:

We spend the morning in the lab. I, personally, spend it trying to get a consistent reading from the Wescor HR-33T Dewpoint Microvoltmeter.

This is a machine that, supposedly, will give you a reading with which you can determine the vapor pressure of any sample you lock into its chamber — in our case, samples of Belgica or of the substrate (soil, or algae, or water) in which they live. Vapor pressure, essentially, is the tendency of something to give off moisture (as water vapor) to its surroundings. Knowing the vapor pressure of Belgica in different situations will help us understand things about how it dehydrates, and whether the dehydration is a cryoprotective mechanism (something that helps it survive the cold.) The problem is that the machine is a little bit hard to work with. Readings using known standards of NaCl (sodium chloride) are inaccurate, and not that consistent. I e-mail the company with a description of my problems, along with the basic procedures I'm using with the machine. Hopefully they'll get back to me soon.

At this point there is a scary amount of brash ice in the harbor, and in a lot of other places. Here is a movie, created by someone staying at Palmer, showing how the ice moves in and out. It was shot over about a month then sped up. You can see ice blowing into the harbor, then out again four or five times (ice movie coming soon).

However, despite the ice and thanks to the boating skills of Rick, we make a safe trip to Torgersen Island, and have very good luck there. First of all, there is a colony of Adélie (rhymes with smelly) penguins on this island — I don't know how many are in this one, but it's more than I could have imagined. They're everywhere you look, waddling around, hanging out in groups, flapping their wings, and making lots of noise (penguin movie coming soon). It's amazing to watch. Penguin guano (waste) is everywhere, and it's a disturbing shade of pink, because much of the krill that penguins eat is that color. It’s breeding season, so a bunch of them have their chicks right in front of them.

While we watch, a brown skua (predatory bird) grabs a chick, goes about 6 feet away and starts eating it, which is a little sad to watch — we just have to remember that the skua has its own chicks, and this meal will help feed them, too.

A big fat elephant seal is close enough to touch, sleeping and burping and with what I could swear is a peaceful smile on its face. These animals have specially adapted nostrils that they close when they're in the water. This one is closing first one, then the other, in its sleep.

We find lots and lots of Belgica, living right in the mud and penguin guano, and fill up our Ziploc bags. This is what the larvae look like. We think they clump together like this when they're exposed to a dry environment, possibly to decrease the amount of water they lose by evaporation.

Then Rick turns over a rock and immediately calls us over. He has found Ixodes uriae, a tick that parasitizes various seabirds, in this case the smelly Adélies. They are all over the bottom of this rock, and a bunch are engorged (filled with penguin blood) and just enormous, the size of dog ticks in the Midwest. We’re interested in them for some of the same stress-tolerance reasons as Belgica, and because they survive Antarctic winters and two or three warm blood meals (an unbelievable temperature swing from as low as –22°F to as high as 104°F, which is the temperature of penguin blood) during their lives, and finally because they sometimes parasitize the Arctic tern. This tern is a little fork-tailed bird that somehow migrates from the Arctic to the Antarctic every year. Because of this, Ixodes populations exist in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, and it would be interesting to see how different the two populations are. We’re all very excited about having found it, and we put some in a vial to take back to the lab. Ixodes have three life stages — a larva, a nymph (young adult) and an adult, each of which take a blood meal from a different bird, then drops off to and crawls under a rock to move to the next life stage. In this picture, you can see engorged nymphs and adults.

So it's a heck of a trip — better than we could have asked for. Bags and vials full, we head back to the boat, and even more ice has moved in. Seeing our boat tied up in the middle of that much ice it’s hard to believe we’re going to make it home, but somehow we do. Once again, we celebrate by eating a great meal. I'm beginning to realize why most people gain weight when they spend time at Palmer Station.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 6, 2005. Weather calm:

Today we spend in the lab, and much of the work we do is pickin' bugs — hunting through the ice water in the Berlese tray, sucking up Belgica larvae with a little squeezy plastic transfer pipet, filling little plastic tubes with lots of them. Dave is doing heat shock treatments on groups of them — this means he keeps different groups of larvae at different temperatures for different amounts of time, and then puts them back in their normal temperature to see how well they survive. Right now we are using 77°F and 86°F for heat shock temperatures. Just for this experiment, we need around 50 tubes of 10 larvae each — so we have a lot of pickin' to do.

Joe is running a Northern blot on some of the heat-shocked Belgica larvae — it’s a type of gel electrophoresis (in which you use electricity to move molecules through a gel filter, sorting them by size and weight) that allows us to see what kinds of RNA a critter is making. This is important to know, because it tells us which genes it was actively expressing. There is a gene for a heat-shock protein called HSP-70 that Joe is looking for. HSP-70 is a protein that almost all animals make, which helps protect cells from the damage caused by heating, chilling, dehydration, and many other kinds of stress — it's called a chaperone protein, meaning it actually wraps around important cellular molecules, protecting them from damage. If Joe finds that HSP-70 is being expressed in our Belgica, that's a starting point for testing what causes the midge to produce more or less of the protein. The northern blot is a difficult technique, and is one of Joe's specialties. It takes two or three days from start to finish, and is referred to by scientists as "an art form", meaning it's very complicated and easy to mess up and that people who are good at it are valuable.

Rick and Scott are looking at lots of scientific journal articles, trying to decide which questions about Belgica and Ixodes have been answered already, and which ones we should be investigating. We are slowly planning out what the scope of our work is going to be — since we only have a month here, the first thing is to get usable data quickly in order to publish a few articles in scientific journals. Showing results quickly is important; it helps us show that our work is worthwhile and should get continued funding. Then we start to think about what we can do when we return to Ohio — we do plan to bring back some live samples of larvae and ticks in a chilled container, and there is much work that can be done analyzing them at home. Finally, since our work is funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation) for three years (one month in Antarctica each year), it is important to get some ideas about what should be done on the next two trips.

I'm still trying to figure out how to make the HR-33T dewpoint microvoltmeter (I'll just call it an osmometer from now on) work right, and am close to bashing it against a glacier when I finally get an e-mail back from the company that makes it — there are some very small adjustments I can make that help the machine read more consistently, and I also need to make a calibration curve — a mathematical equation that I can use to correct errors in the machine’s readings. This will solve most of the problems I was having, but it takes some time to get the calibration curve right. So now the machine is working pretty well — which is a big relief. I was getting pretty frustrated with it.

 

- Luke Sandro

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