June stuff
I began this month on the road again. I finally managed to get out to the field site for our rock slime project. I don't remember if I've described this project before or not, but basically, we're looking at the communities of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that grow under translucent rocks (quartz, agate, etc.). It has a funny history - Keith is a bit of a rock hound, so periodically goes out to gather rocks to put in his tumbler. Well, I went with him one time to collect agates. When we got back, Keith washed off some rocks and noticed that some had a green slime on the bottom. Purely by chance, I'd read an article in an Ecology journal about a week beforehand that talked about algae communities under quartz rocks in the Mojave desert. They did several things, including measuring temperatures and light intensity under the rocks, photosynthesis rates of the aglae at different light intensities, and a molecular phylogeny of the algae. Unfortunately, I thought that they did some parts badly, especially the temperature measures and the conclusions from them, and had actually flagged the article as something that Keith and I could do better.
Thus started the rock slime project. We got together with Keith's wife Karen, who is a molecular biologist, Lindsey, a plant physiological ecologist, and Robert, a cyanobacteria ecologist. Once we'd all read the paper, we all thought that the authors had done something badly, and that we could do it better, so we started. So far, the molecular biologists have found that there is a huge diversity under those rocks, and that everything we've found is a new "species" (hard to call something a species when it is a single, asexual cell), all 40 or so of them.
This trip had two goals, first to put out dataloggers to measure the microclimate under the rocks, and second to measure the photosynthesis rates at different temperatures over the course of the day. Well, of course with field work, things don't always go as planned. I should mention that the field site is a 10 hour drive away from Darwin, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, right at the transition between the wet/dry tropical savannah of the Top End, and the Tanami desert. So, Robert and I drove out there on the first of the month, and set up to do our day of field work. Unfortunately, the actual field site we have seems to have missed out on the late season rains that came to the region. So it was a lot drier than we'd hoped - dry enough that that the algae were already dormant for the year. Bummer. Fortunately, that didn't make any difference for the setting of the dataloggers, so they're out there collecting data (we hope) as I type this. We also were able to collect enough rocks that we can make the photosynthesis rate measurements in the lab, and Robert has been busily doing that this week.
The trip itself was nice - the country out there is really beautiful (I'll post photos soon), and there were still a number of flowers around. We also got to see the aftermath of some of the flooding in this region during the wet season. There were some impressive high-water marks on the stream beds. And, since it's the dry season, we saw plenty of grass fires. One was impressive in extent - I figure it must have followed the road for about 100km or so.
In other news, looks like I've finally rounded up a roommate. There is a new postdoc coming here in July to work on systematics of aquatic things, mostly crayfish, I think. Her background is in lizard (skink) systematics, though, so we'll have scaly things to talk about.
Thus started the rock slime project. We got together with Keith's wife Karen, who is a molecular biologist, Lindsey, a plant physiological ecologist, and Robert, a cyanobacteria ecologist. Once we'd all read the paper, we all thought that the authors had done something badly, and that we could do it better, so we started. So far, the molecular biologists have found that there is a huge diversity under those rocks, and that everything we've found is a new "species" (hard to call something a species when it is a single, asexual cell), all 40 or so of them.
This trip had two goals, first to put out dataloggers to measure the microclimate under the rocks, and second to measure the photosynthesis rates at different temperatures over the course of the day. Well, of course with field work, things don't always go as planned. I should mention that the field site is a 10 hour drive away from Darwin, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, right at the transition between the wet/dry tropical savannah of the Top End, and the Tanami desert. So, Robert and I drove out there on the first of the month, and set up to do our day of field work. Unfortunately, the actual field site we have seems to have missed out on the late season rains that came to the region. So it was a lot drier than we'd hoped - dry enough that that the algae were already dormant for the year. Bummer. Fortunately, that didn't make any difference for the setting of the dataloggers, so they're out there collecting data (we hope) as I type this. We also were able to collect enough rocks that we can make the photosynthesis rate measurements in the lab, and Robert has been busily doing that this week.
The trip itself was nice - the country out there is really beautiful (I'll post photos soon), and there were still a number of flowers around. We also got to see the aftermath of some of the flooding in this region during the wet season. There were some impressive high-water marks on the stream beds. And, since it's the dry season, we saw plenty of grass fires. One was impressive in extent - I figure it must have followed the road for about 100km or so.
In other news, looks like I've finally rounded up a roommate. There is a new postdoc coming here in July to work on systematics of aquatic things, mostly crayfish, I think. Her background is in lizard (skink) systematics, though, so we'll have scaly things to talk about.
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