Summertime

Here in the northern hemisphere summer is in full swing, and for people of my age that means one thing: weddings. This past weekend a science-friend and I attended the wedding of a mutual friend, who is a rising star in the world of acarology, so naturally we ended up seated at the table with a bunch of other scientists. What ensued bore some resemblance to a mini-conference, with light banter about our research, and how we knew Wayne. Nautrally this entailed a trip down memory lane to my undergrad (Wayne and I were labmates during my honours project), when summer meant something very different - it meant field season.



Back in my younger days field season was a big part of science for me. In my undergrad I made massive collecting trips across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the North West Territories (camping out on some collecting trips, and jumping out of helicopters on others), and during my masters I visited many lakes to gather inocula for my outdoor mesocosm experiment. Aside from providing the chance to be outdoors, an element of field work that I think we all like, this active field involvement also allowed my data to have at least a sheen of ecological realism. Both of these reasons make the call of the field beguiling, almost irresistable. The trade-off, however (there's always a trade-off...), was that it can be incredibly hard to assign any kind of mechanistic explanation to the complicated, ecologically-relevant systems that we often study in the field.



As a result I now spend less time outdoors, less time invested in ecologically relevant systems, and more time with 125 mL erlenmeyer flasks and two species diatom systems. In terms of data, things are lost (like the realism), but things are also gained (explanatory power and control). The same is true on a personal level: I've lost the sheer fun of playing in the mud and paddling madly to get off a lake before the thunderstorm hits, but I've gained the ability to engage in journal clubs, concerts, and movies during the soft summer evenings. And, who could forget, weddings.

Turbo Eco-jargon

Language is fluid and ever-changing, and the creation of new scientific terms can be useful if it makes the language more precise, but it also makes our work less accessible for those unfamiliar with specific literature and to the general public. When we start using overly specialised words as a substitute for more commonplace words, it becomes “turbo eco-jargon”.

An example of eco-jargon that works is the term ‘biodiversity’. It shortens ‘biological diversity’ to one word and still retains its meaning. However, most times we create and use terms that are not intuitive and/or not well defined. This can be especially problematic when terms have a common use, but a very specific scientific use, which may also differ among disciplines. Some examples are: stability, productivity, resilience, traits, and function(ing).

I am probably one of the worst in our lab for using eco-jargon (I was actually scolded by an editor once for my use of ‘turbo eco-jargon’ – his exact words!). But I like creating and using highly specialised words because I think they are fun.

Here are a list of some of my long-term favourite turbo eco-terms; how many do you know? (see comments for definitions)

• cursorial
• vagile / vagility
• phoretic / phoresy
• inquilinism / inquiline
• corticolous
• detrital

Currently I'm working on a manuscript to coin a new eco-term. I'll keep you posted!













Thanks to Biodude for feedback on this post. I look forward to your comments.

rockpool europa

At first glance it is not obvious what this is a picture of. I struggle with my poor photographic skills almost as much as I struggle with biodiversity, and yet these are still the kinds of pictures I take. I won't call it a metaphor.

The fact is this is a picture of a pool of freshwater on a rock face along the Finish coast, and it was teeming with cladocerans - tiny crustaceans that feed on pretty much whatever they can filter from the water column. Rock pools just like this one were made pseudo-famous (at least in the ecological world) decades ago by Ilkka Hanski and other researchers as textbook examples of metapopulations (spatially discrete populations of organisms that are linked by dispersal between the populations). When you pause to think about it, the concept is really cool. The pool is very isolated, may or may not be ephemeral, and yet it is packed with organisms. How did they get there? I occasionally remember that if we cut through all the technical jibber-jabber of spatial ecology, metapopulation ecology, and metacommunity ecology we are left with just such a curious question that could have been posed by anyone and interests everyone.

Many members of the Gonzalez lab, like myself, research nature in a fairly abstract way, tackling theoretical systems or heavily simplified model systems. There are all kinds of advantages to such approaches, but a minor tragedy that results from such minimalist science is a loss of the sheer wonder that you might experience 'out there' were to you stumble upon one of these pools on a morning's walk. The question is rhetorical, but how do we deal with the desire to pin down mechanisms that drive ecological processes, with the sheer wonder (and a skeptic might say incomprehensibility) of reality?

happy canada day all!

The littlest HOBO

“An hour in the field is a week in the lab” was the warning I was given as an M.Sc. student. Which means that Jon and I have enough samples to process for a year.

It has been a highly productive week. I can tell because I’m tired and sore all over. The snow has almost melted, and I escaped before the mosquitoes became too fierce. For the past week we have had a neighbourhood puppy follow us into the bush each day. We call her Georgia – she is very cute. She chases squirrels and takes naps while we measure nitrogen fixation.

P.S. The title of this post is somewhat of an inside joke, as we use HOBO dataloggers to record temperature & relative humidity year-round at the experimental site.  "The littlest Hobo" is also a mainstay of Canadian family television from the 1980s, featuring a wandering dog who helps everyone he happens to meet during his wandering.  Thanks for the company, Georgia.

Snow

Jon and I survived the 2 day trip to our northern Quebec field site near Schefferville.
This morning we left the McGill sub-arctic field station in almost all the clothes we brought, and my feet were still cold by 9:30am.




What can we say, there was a lot of snow.  The upside is that there are no bugs.

Where is Schefferville, Anyway?

Cross-posted from my other blog

Yes, I'm spending the next 2 full weeks at the McGill Subarctic Research Station in Schefferville, Québec, sampling my field experiment with moss & their associated micro-ecosystem. And the most common question I get is: “Where is that?” *sigh* If only I'd found a reason to do research at the Bellairs research institute in the Barbados, I might have avoided this question :P

Schefferville is in northern Québec, near the border between Québec and Labrador. So close, I could easily walk to Labrador in a few hours from town. Getting to Labrador City would take a little longer ;-)

Vital statistics:

• 54º48'00” N, 66º50'00” W
  
• Government of Canada Topographic Map reference: 023J15
  
• Declination as of 2009: 23° 9' West
  
• Population as of 2006: 202 (actually closer to 800-1000 people in town)
  

Formerly known as the town of Knob Lake, Schefferville was home to a mining community until the iron mine closed in the 1980's and most people left. It has since been a destination for hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities, facilitated by the outfitters based in town. There is, however renewed interest in iron ore mining in the area, though not by the same company that built the railway. As far as I know, Schefferville has one school, an arena, sports field, one general store, a hardware store / snowmobile repair shop, a combination Dépanneur & SAQ Express (alcohol counter), much of it owned by the same man. There are also at least 2 bars in the area, although I was told not to go to a certain one unless I wanted to get into a bar fight. The airport is actually much closer to town than the train station, although there is a taxi from the train. It doesn't look like one, and is in fact an old ambulance past it’s prime, but you can ask around and someone will point it out when it comes.

I've been impressed with the depth of the scenery here: the land and the sky have a distinctly more three-dimensional appearance and feeling than in an urban environment. Even the sky has more depth than I remember in Vancouver, with usually at least 3 layers, making for some striking and beautiful sunsets.

I made a little flyby tour of the area in Google Earth, including my study site. I am such a nerd.

Why Biodiversity?

Living systems are repleat with variation at every scale and level of organization.  We are interested in how such diversity is maintained (coexistence), and what the consequences of varying levels of diversity are for system dynamics (process rates, functioning, stability).  

How many species are needed for a system to persist for multiple generations? 

How many species can survive without going extinct in areas with limited resources? (coexistence)

How does the number of species affect ecosystem processes such as productivity, stability, or other measures of functioning?

How do ecosystems respond to environmental changes or other external forces such as pollution, fragmentation, or climate change? (stability, resistance, resilience)

How do evolutionary processes affect ecological patterns and processes and vice-versa?

Gazing at Gaia's Navel

On a more philosophical note, studying biodiversity sometimes feels like "navel-gazing", while you are studying minute details of an immense biosphere, of which we are a part.  But, it's like looking at Gaia's navel, which so much more interesting than your own.

A diversity of reasons

Although our lab shares some common approaches to studying biodiversity, we each have our own personal reasons for choosing to work in this field.  We invite you to post your personal reasons in the comments section of this post.