Quiet week
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon... er... in Sede Boqer. Yup, that about sums it up. Quiet. I've managed to do most of the things I can do here without permits, and without the collaborators around. I've still got a bit of setup for lizard housing that I can do, but I've been procrastinating on that as it will probably involve a lot of digging.
In the meantime, I've been trying to make some progress on writing. Not writing on this thing obviously, but writing up papers from my research. I've got one that's been hanging over my head for over a year now. Actually, it's the revisions that have been hanging, the paper is about research from 1999. Got to get this on back onto someone else's desk. I will say that the quite atmosphere here (particularly when Berry and others are gone) is conducive to writing. On the other hand, the boredom of being in a very small place with not much to do, isn't.
I did manage a good walk in the wadi this weekend. That was fun. The walk into the wadi is nice, though it's a bit steep getting in and out. It's a couple hundred feet down (and up), and the path is not one for people afraid of heights. the bottom of the valley is nice and hot, and surprisingly humid. It is also very pale, which makes for a lot of reflected sun beating on you.
I saw a fair number of interesting critters, including a very cool gecko that seems to be pretty common around here. I have no idea what it is because I haven't managed to get my hands on the field guide to Israeli reptiles, and even when I do, it will be in hebrew. I'm pretty sure i saw 4 species, but maybe only 3. Catching the gecko was a comedy of errors. It posed for a photo, then dove into a crevice about head high on a crumbly rock face. I used a stick to convince it to come out, which started a comic run along the wall for about 30 feet, with me slapping at it the whole way. Every time I touched the wall, I was showered with white dust and rocks. At one point it ran right in front of my face and then disappeared - poof. I still don't know where it went, but it did show up again and I managed to catch it. that was when I realized that my camera had died. I couldn't even get it to retract it's lens. (it seems to have healed itself since yesterday though) So I got a good look at the little guy (yes it was a male), and let him go. There was another lizard just above him in another crevice, but there was no way to get to him. I tried climbing up and ended up mostly buried in a pile of dust and rocks. I don't recommend trying to climb out of this wadi.
there is a fair bit of vegetation in the wadi, but once you get out of the stream bed, there really isn't much of anything. it's really barren. and hard to walk on because it's just rocks. The soil is interesting - it's basically layers of clay loam and rocks. When you look at the banks of the wadi, they look like a wall of rocks held together by dust, and that's what they are. If you rub your hand against them, you get showered with a pile of rocks and dust. there are also a lot of ibex in amongst the vegetation. I saw a group of about 30 on this walk.
So, in case you're wondering about the project I'm doing while here, I'll do a quick summary. It's part of a big project on nutrient uptake in the intestines of vertebrates. The idea is to look at a lot of different species of birds, mammals (mostly bats and rodents) and reptiles (mostly lizards), and see how important a particular nutrient uptake pathway is. The paracellular pathway is a form of passive absorbtion of nutrients that hasn't been studied much. The idea is pretty simple. many nutrients are actively taken up by the gut by transport proteins on the intestinal surface. this takes energy, but can move nutrients and concentrate them inside the intestine tissues (as opposed to the lumen, which is the space in the tube). Then nutrients get passed out of the intestinal cells into the bloodstream and the fluid between the cells. This means that there is a concentration gradient, with high concentrations inside the tissue, and lower concentrations in the lumen. Water flows along this concentration gradient into the tissues, by going between cells (paracellular), and it drags small molecules with it. We're looking to see how much gets in by this pathway and what sized molecules can come in.
Okay, that's pretty technical, so I'll stop now. Maybe later I'll talk about how we go about doing all this.
In the meantime, I've been trying to make some progress on writing. Not writing on this thing obviously, but writing up papers from my research. I've got one that's been hanging over my head for over a year now. Actually, it's the revisions that have been hanging, the paper is about research from 1999. Got to get this on back onto someone else's desk. I will say that the quite atmosphere here (particularly when Berry and others are gone) is conducive to writing. On the other hand, the boredom of being in a very small place with not much to do, isn't.
I did manage a good walk in the wadi this weekend. That was fun. The walk into the wadi is nice, though it's a bit steep getting in and out. It's a couple hundred feet down (and up), and the path is not one for people afraid of heights. the bottom of the valley is nice and hot, and surprisingly humid. It is also very pale, which makes for a lot of reflected sun beating on you.
I saw a fair number of interesting critters, including a very cool gecko that seems to be pretty common around here. I have no idea what it is because I haven't managed to get my hands on the field guide to Israeli reptiles, and even when I do, it will be in hebrew. I'm pretty sure i saw 4 species, but maybe only 3. Catching the gecko was a comedy of errors. It posed for a photo, then dove into a crevice about head high on a crumbly rock face. I used a stick to convince it to come out, which started a comic run along the wall for about 30 feet, with me slapping at it the whole way. Every time I touched the wall, I was showered with white dust and rocks. At one point it ran right in front of my face and then disappeared - poof. I still don't know where it went, but it did show up again and I managed to catch it. that was when I realized that my camera had died. I couldn't even get it to retract it's lens. (it seems to have healed itself since yesterday though) So I got a good look at the little guy (yes it was a male), and let him go. There was another lizard just above him in another crevice, but there was no way to get to him. I tried climbing up and ended up mostly buried in a pile of dust and rocks. I don't recommend trying to climb out of this wadi.
there is a fair bit of vegetation in the wadi, but once you get out of the stream bed, there really isn't much of anything. it's really barren. and hard to walk on because it's just rocks. The soil is interesting - it's basically layers of clay loam and rocks. When you look at the banks of the wadi, they look like a wall of rocks held together by dust, and that's what they are. If you rub your hand against them, you get showered with a pile of rocks and dust. there are also a lot of ibex in amongst the vegetation. I saw a group of about 30 on this walk.
So, in case you're wondering about the project I'm doing while here, I'll do a quick summary. It's part of a big project on nutrient uptake in the intestines of vertebrates. The idea is to look at a lot of different species of birds, mammals (mostly bats and rodents) and reptiles (mostly lizards), and see how important a particular nutrient uptake pathway is. The paracellular pathway is a form of passive absorbtion of nutrients that hasn't been studied much. The idea is pretty simple. many nutrients are actively taken up by the gut by transport proteins on the intestinal surface. this takes energy, but can move nutrients and concentrate them inside the intestine tissues (as opposed to the lumen, which is the space in the tube). Then nutrients get passed out of the intestinal cells into the bloodstream and the fluid between the cells. This means that there is a concentration gradient, with high concentrations inside the tissue, and lower concentrations in the lumen. Water flows along this concentration gradient into the tissues, by going between cells (paracellular), and it drags small molecules with it. We're looking to see how much gets in by this pathway and what sized molecules can come in.
Okay, that's pretty technical, so I'll stop now. Maybe later I'll talk about how we go about doing all this.
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