Travel Log: Caitlin Cleaver, "Contingency Planning 101"

There are quite a few mottos that you hear relatively regularly in field science – “we’ll do what we can”; “c’est la vie”; “let’s just give it a whirl” – to name a few. The Waller Lab has been using quite a few of these over the past week as the reality of doing deep sea field science in the Antarctic came into focus. We’ve honed our problem-solving skills, channeled our creative side, and are ready for whatever the ocean has to throw at us!

When we first arrived in Punta Arenas, we spent the first three and a half days wandering the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) dock where multiple warehouses and containers store science equipment for the ongoing and upcoming research projects happening in the Antarctic, many at Palmer Station.

Sooooo happy all the supplies arrived!

First, we were most concerned with whether or not the glassware (vials and 20-gallon aquarium tanks) for housing the coral larvae (a.k.a., coral babies) during the experiment had made it from Maine to California to Santiago, Chile to Punta Arenas in one piece. We also had to make sure that the supplies and equipment we needed for the trawl surveys and CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) casts were accessible during the cruise rather than stored down in the hold of the Gould and not accessible until we reached Palmer Station.

Next, we began to focus on sample collection scenarios and experimental design, which would be implemented as soon as we reached Palmer Station, Antarctica. This entailed multiple meetings and a lot of coffee and chocolate consumed in Dr. Waller’s cabin, where we were equipped with a white board and couch.

We took several factors into consideration when developing our Plan A – the “optimal”, Plan B – the “OK”, and Plan C – the “things didn’t go as planned, but we can still save the experiment!” We worked backwards from the total number of coral larvae needed to carry out each of the three plans. Basically, it was an exercise in elementary arithmetic with adjusting the number of treatments (or the different water temperatures of the aquarium tanks that we’ll eventually put the coral larvae into at Palmer Station), the number of replicates (or the number of individual coral larvae per tank) and the number of sample points (or when samples are taken throughout the period of the experiment – in this case, samples would be taken every 3 or 5 days over a 30 day period). We rearranged these factors in certain combinations that would still preserve the integrity of the experiment in terms of having enough replicates to make any experimental results statistically significant. Once we determined the number of coral larvae needed to successfully implement each plan, we calculated the number of adult coral we would need to collect and, viola, we arrived at the magic number of adult coral we needed to collect! I have to admit, we all were pretty brain dead after working through these different scenarios, but the hard work paid off and we are super prepared for the actual fieldwork, which is exciting!

Our planing efforts laid out in black and white.

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Loads of gear aboard the Gould (with a furry tribute to the University of Maine - Go Black Bears!)

A day or so after our contingency planning meeting, a few bumps in the road appeared… we found out the aquarium tanks that we need as soon as we set foot at Palmer Station to set up the experiment were going to take longer than initially anticipated to be off-loaded from the Gould. This information changed our strategy and helped us zero in on which plan we would go with. Due to the increase of time between collecting the adult coral and being able to start the experiment, we’ve decided to collect fewer adult coral and keep them happier by giving them more space in their buckets, which is what we’re transporting them from collection site to Palmer Station in. We also created bucket dividers out of vial racks so that the individuals would be less likely to interact – apparently they can be aggressive and sting each other if kept too close. Given the fewer adult coral, we have opted for Plan C - 3 treatments or aquarium tanks with different water temperatures. All in all, we feel ready to tackle the CTD casts and trawl surveys which are getting underway today! Onward!

Travel Log: Caitlin Cleaver, "The Cape Shirreff Schlep!"

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The Lawrence M Gould waiting "in the ice" off of Cape Sherriff

On Sunday night, we completed our crossing of the Drake Passage and were “into ice” (a.k.a., closing in on Antarctica!). Many of the people who have crossed the Drake before said we had an extremely smooth crossing with relatively mild waves. The Drake is notorious for large waves moving in different directions since there are few landmasses in the Southern Ocean to slow winds or water movement, which results in washing machine-like waves. I was quite grateful for the calm seas to say the least! 

When I woke up this morning (Monday, October 26), we were definitely in ice… icebergs were in the distance and floating chunks of ice were right up against the Gould. We were slowly making our way through the ice, and the fog, to Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island, to drop off five pinniped (or seal) researchers for their five-month field season. We had to wait a bit for the fog to lift, but the seas and weather were favorable for the off-loading to begin or what I now call the Cape Shirreff Schlep!

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Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island, Antarctica: the black star marks the location of Cape Shirreff on Livingston Island.

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Unloading the Zodiacs on Livingston Island, Antarctica

If you’ve ever been to Hurricane and helped unload a grocery run, this effort was about 10 times as intense… there were approximately 30 of us working for about 3 – 4 hours. It was an epic production that involved all hands on deck. First, the Zodiacs (or small inflatable boats that can carry gear and 10 passengers to shore and back to the Gould) were craned over the side of the boat and one crew headed towards the field base to start clearing the beach where we land the gear. On deck, the rest of us started moving boxes of food – both fresh and preserved, propane tanks (40!), drinking water and gear to prep for being loaded onto the Zodiacs.

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Caitlin Cleaver performing the "Cape Shirreff Schlep"

On the second trip, we climbed down the side of the Gould and onto one of the Zodiac so we could be onshore to meet incoming boats, off load their gear, and then schlep the gear about 400 meters to the buildings on Cape Shirreff. We used toboggans with harnesses to drag multiple boxes or pieces of gear at one time. Maggie and I did about 10 round trips each while others helped shovel snow away from the buildings. 

Penguins beginning their own trek across Livingston Island, Antarctica

Some major highlights included seeing a group of penguins hike behind the buildings, across the island towards the known penguin colony on Livingston island – we definitely took the time to admire the passing wildlife. One of the researchers said that hiking, rather than swimming around the island to the penguin colony, has become their strategy for avoiding leopard seals that frequent the waters around the Cape. We also successfully got an ATV from the Zodiacs onto the Cape with many hands working together to pull the ATV up the snow berm from the boat.

The Cape Shirreff team has been monitoring the seal populations on the island and over the last few years, have noticed a marked increase in the number of female leopard seals inhabiting the Cape. They aren’t sure why this increase is happening, but they are studying the seals’ habits in terms of their diet, how they’re hunting, and individual behavior and health. They sedate seals, place a tag on some of them, and then take measurements of the length, weight, and girth. In addition, they’ve teamed up with National Geographic Critter Cam to put high definition video cameras on a leopard seal’s back when they’re sedated to film the seal’s activities once they recover – it provides a perspective the researchers have never before been privy to. With this video footage, they have a better understanding of the seal’s hunting and foraging behavior, which has implications for the populations of penguins and other seal species on Livingston Island. 

All in all, it was a tiring, but rewarding day. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to stretch my legs and hike after being cooped up over the last few days on the boat. Also, now that this job is done, it’s time for us to start collecting samples for our experiment at Palmer Station!

Travel Log: Caitlin Cleaver, "Cold Corals in Hot Water" – An Expedition to the Western Peninsula of Antarctica

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Hurricane Island Director of Science and Research Caitlin Cleaver. 

You may be asking yourself how Caitlin Cleaver, HICSL Director of Science & Research ended up on a month-long research cruise to Palmer Station in Antarctica…. Well, let’s just say, I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to participate in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Basically, I am serving as “extra hands” to help with the field work and experimental setup for Dr. Rhian Waller’s project, funded by the National Science Foundation, entitled: “Cold Corals in Hot Water: investigating the physiological responses of Antarctic coral larvae to climate change stress.”

For some background – the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where we will be working, is experiencing some of the most rapid climate changes in the world which is evident from the retreating glaciers, snow and ice loss, and ice shelf collapses.

The two major questions this project seeks to answer are:

• How will Antarctic corals cope with climate change?
• Will coral larvae be able to develop normally under conditions predicted for the next 100 years?

To begin testing these questions, we will collect adult individuals of the species Flabellum impensum, a scleractinian coral that is solitary and found on mud bottom. We will spend three days trawling from the Laurence M. Gould (a 230’ NSF research vessel) to collect bottom water and the coral for the experiments. At Palmer Station, we will dissect the adult coral and extract their living larvae to be used in a month long climate change experiment – larvae will be placed in treatments replicating 1 to 4 *C increases of water temperature; these temperature increases represent the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions from three different possible climate change scenarios (B1, A1B, & A2).

The team includes: 

Dr. Waller: A tenure-track professor at the University of Maine, School of Marine Sciences based at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, ME. She specializes in deep-sea coral biology and has worked all over the world including Antarctica, the Arctic, Chile, and Alaska to name a few.

Dr. James “Jay” Lunden: A post-doc working in Dr. Waller’s lab. He received his Ph.D. from Temple University and spent three months at McMurdoh Field Station during the last field season. He brings important logistical experience having participated in a previous Antarctic field expedition.

Maggie Halfman: A senior in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. She is majoring in marine science with an earth and climate science minor. She’s worked in Dr. Waller’s lab for two summers and will analyze data collected during a biological oceanography transect on the Western Antarctic Peninsula for her senior capstone project. In addition, Maggie would like to explore the prominence and characteristics of a deep, warm water mass that contributes heat to the Antarctic shelf and may be facilitating glacial melt.

The team arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile after 36 hours of travel, which started on Saturday morning, October 17th. We drove from Brunswick, ME to Portland then caught a bus from Portland to Logan International Airport in Boston, MA. Flew from Boston to Miami, FL and then from Miami, FL to Santiago, Chile. We had an 8-hour layover in Chile before boarding our third plane for Punta Arenas. The landscape changed drastically as we flew south – Santiago is a large, sprawling city of 5.1 million - then we briefly stopped in Puerto Monte and finally reached Punta Arenas which looks to be windswept grasslands or scrub with vast ocean stretching to the south. When we arrived at our hotel around 7:30 pm (Chile is an hour ahead of the east coast), we got news that the Laurence M. Gould (affectionately known as “the Gould”), our vessel couldn’t dock due to high winds – it was sitting just off the pier waiting for the winds to die down.  Later that evening, while we were having dinner, we saw a number of people with Palmer Station t-shirts with logos of the US Antarctic Program and found out that the vessel had been able to dock and the crew able to disembark. Many of the crew had been at Palmer Station since the end of March having spent the last 7 months “on the ice.”

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On Monday, we went down to the dock to tour the Gould, check to make sure the glassware and other science equipment that Maggie and Jay had shipped arrived in Chile in one piece, and pick up our issued gear. We spent an hour trying out out our issued gear just to make sure it fit. We were issued rubber boots, snow boots, flannel pants, insulated bibs, non-insulated bibs, a non-insulated rain jacket, a parka, fleece hat, fleece neck-warmer, rubber gloves with liners, glove liners, leather gloves, wool gloves, ski goggles with a spare lens. We were also able to get an extra pair of rubber gloves and insulated Carhart overalls. Really hoping all those layers will keep us warm while we work on deck to sort the trawls!

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Issued extreme cold weather gear. 

The Laurence M. Gould is a 230’ ship outfitted with two wet labs, dry lab space, a computer room, microscope room, galley, laundry room, lounge, dorm space, the wheelhouse, an aquarium room with a grated floor, large door to the deck, and flowing seawater so you can rinse and sort catch off the deck if the weather is too rough to do the sorting directly on deck. Pretty excited to call it home for the next week and a half!

Tuesday we started moving on board and we’re shipping out by Thursday – stay tuned!

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Our vessel: the Laurence M. Gould AKA “the Gould”.  

Hurricane’s Herbarium – A How To Guide

Post by Chloe Tremper, Science Educator

What’s a herbarium you ask? A place full of herbs? Sort of!  A herbarium is a collection of dried plants, systematically arranged, sometimes filling entire buildings or in Hurricane’s case filling a large plastic bin. 

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Throughout this past season on Hurricane, I have been collecting, pressing, and mounting plant specimens from all over the island. Not only are these dried specimens beautiful, but they also hold a lot of utility.  Properly done plant collections are both a really useful teaching tool and provide information about the taxonomy, phenology, genetics, evolution, ecology, historical context, and systematics of each species and the environment it was collected in.  All that from one single plant!

Plant collecting as been around for centuries and many of those historic collections, despite some being over 300 years old, are still completely intact and stored in herbariums across the world.

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Tall Buttercup or Crowsfoot

Want to start your own plant collection? Here’s how!

Step 1.  Build, purchase, or borrow a plant press. If you want to build your own, it’s super easy! All you need is two wooden boards of equal size, corrugated cardboard (same size as boards), newspaper, rope or straps blotter paper (or other very absorbent paper – i.e. watercolor paper) the size of the boards decides the size of your specimen so keep that in mind! I recommend boards that are about 12”x17” because if you decide to purchase acid-free herbarium mounting paper it’ll be easy to make sure your plant specimen will fit on the mounting paper.

Step 2. Explore! Go outside and locate flowering or fruiting plants – if you’re collecting on land other than your own (your neighbors, a state park, etc.) always get permission before you start digging up plants & check to make sure your local laws don’t require you to have a collection permit. Bring field guides and a hand lens so that you can properly identify your plant to species! Be sure to take detailed notes of where you found your plant and to record the date.

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Hedge Bindweed

Step 3. Once you’ve chosen a plant that you want to collect, carefully remove it from the ground – making sure to collect it with at least some of the roots intact.  I always find it helpful to have a pocketknife or something else that you can use to dig up the plant with.  Carefully clean off any dirt from the roots or any other debris from the rest of the plant.

Step 4.  Get your plant into the press as quickly as possible! The longer it is out of the ground without moisture, the quicker it will begin to wilt and wilted plants tend to not press as well.  If you are far from your press when you are collecting, bring a plastic bag with a damp paper towel at the bottom of it to store plants in until you can press them (make sure the bag stays relatively sealed & that the plants aren’t in there for more than an hour or two).

Step 5.  To put your plant in the press, arrange it how you would like on a piece of newspaper.  This piece of newspaper should be stacked on top of a piece of blotter paper, a piece of cardboard, and one of the pieces of wood.  I find it helpful to use a piece of newspaper the same size as my mounting paper so that I know it’ll fit the right dimensions.  Make sure that at least a leaf or two is flipped upside down and that the plant is arranged as neatly as possible.  Once arranged, fold over the other half of the newspaper or place another piece of newspaper on top of the plant and then place piece of cardboard on top of it. 

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Mountain wood fern

Step 6. Keep pressing! From here you can press as many plants as your press can hold. The key is to just keep layering with the pieces of wood always on the outside and layers of cardboard, blotter paper, newspaper, the plant, more newspaper, cardboard, and on, and on. Check out this helpful diagram.

Step 7. After you have put all the plants you want in the press, using the rope or straps tightly cinch the press so that as much pressure is put on the plants as possible.

Step 8. Check on the plants after a day or two – if they aren’t completely dry change their newspaper and put them back in the press for another day or so.  If they are dry – you are ready to mount your specimen!

Step 9.  To mount your specimen, first make a mix of half Elmer’s glue and half water.  Lay your specimen on top of a piece of mounting paper (generally a thick piece of acid-free white paper) and arrange it how you like.  Then either carefully apply the glue mixture to the backside of the plant specimen or dip it into a thin layer of the paint.  Then, carefully place it on the mounting paper – be sure to not glue down any of the fruiting or the flowering parts.

Step 10. Make a label and attach it to the bottom right corner of the mounting paper with your specimen on it. See what a proper label should look like here.    

Step 11. CELEBRATE! You now have your very own plant collection! Don’t worry if it’s not perfect – it gets easier with more practice!​ 

Digging Holes and Identifying Earthworms

Post by Ben Lemmond, Resident UVM Field Naturalist Masters Student

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“Pieces, patterns, processes” is one of the fundamental mantras of the field naturalist program, some of the others being “don’t be a bird plow” and “use the layer cake approach.” About a week ago, one of my committee members by the name of Josef Gorres came to visit my project in situ here on Hurricane. Josef is a soil science professor and earthworm researcher at UVM, and, accordingly, we spent the weekend digging holes and identifying earthworms. Ever since his visit, I’ve had one such process on my mind: how have the soils formed here? And, perhaps more precisely, how has enough soil formed here to support a dense spruce-fir forest, after most of the trees were cleared around the turn of the 20th century?

Not being a soil scientist myself, I can’t give a totally satisfying answer to this question. But here are some of my observations so far.

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First of all, I am surprised at how visible the disintegration of granite is. I always thought of granite as some sort of superlatively hard type of rock, but standing on some of the outcrops by the ocean on Hurricane, you can scuff a shoe on any of the rocks and feel the granite flake away; look around, and whole sections of the rock seem to be missing, sliced away in deep cuts by the waves or pulled out horizontally like pieces of some geologic game of Jenga. Standing on granite by the shore gives one the feeling of standing on a giant sugar cube, not on solid rock.

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Secondly, the making of soil – that slowest-of-slow process, the inchworm on the ecologic freeway – seems to be happening very much in real time. On the south end of the island, near the old cutting shed, there are a number of rocks that were cut and left behind sometime very close to 1914. You can actually look from one rock to another and see the story of succession and soil development: crust lichens give way to foliose lichens, foliose lichens collect granite fragments and plant debris, eventually enough accumulates to host pincushion mosses, and then finally you start to see vascular plants, who demand the most of their host soils, springing up through it all. As an added bonus, you get a tiny little experiment in island biogeography happening on these rocks, as there is an apparent correlation between the size of the rock and the complexity of the life forms on it.

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And, last of all, thanks to Josef, I’ve gotten a glimpse at what lies beneath. There are soils so acidic they expel the iron from the rock and ball it up into knotty concretions. There are weathered chunks of rock, rounded by water from a time when Hurricane Island stood below sea level. Near the cutting shed, there are flakes of granite chipped off by stone workers. Wherever Europeans settled, there are earthworms brought over in ballast soil or garden plants. I’ve got a few collections of soil that I’ll take to his lab now that I’m back in Burlington: I can’t wait to see what else I learn.