A tollbooth??? NOOOOOO!!!

This past week was quite busy. We had many samples to collect and to count over the week. It was a fairly routine week. Well, as routine as any week is when you’re working in rural Iceland. I started my experiment, (which I will outline below) and since it was rainy toward the end of the week we stayed in the lab and counted samples. As much as I hate to say it, sometimes it is nice to have a grey day and just do some inside work. This was the closest thing we’d had to a day off for almost 3 weeks. We’ve been pretty much going balls to the wall.

Yesterday, we three research assistants, we who toil daily in the fields of black flies, collected our samples at our sites around Mývatn. It was some great team bonding. The drive around the lake is nice, our sites are on a number of farms around the shore and traversing some of the lava fields is always fun. Another nice thing about the Mývatn sites is that there is a conveniently located convenience store, or Verslun where we can pick up something like bulk candy (lots of their candy here is weird... very salty, not so sweet... some tastes like pure sea water), soft serve ice cream, or a hot dog. This trip around the lake I drove, which is special because our vehicle is a 1990 Mitsubishi Pajero SUV… “Born on the rally field, bred with the future’s technology and fashioned for the enjoyment of life” … which has a manual transmission. Before this summer, it has been quite a while since I had driven a manual. I think the last time was when my uncle Jeff taught me in his Camero in 2005 or 2006. I never quite mastered the art of getting it into first gear smoothly. Once I was going it was no big deal… after those lessons I had a new respect for Dad’s driving (or lack thereof) in France, where toll booths, stoplights and crosswalks were the bane of our existence…. Still I can’t help but laugh thinking about it. But anyway I was driving the Pajero, and I must say I’m getting much better. Something just sort of clicked. My confidence is up and putting it in gear while on an incline is even becoming no problem. There was one incident, however of attempting to take off from stopped while in second gear… oops… Kyle and Bre were kind and tried to hold back their laughter, but I knew there was nothing they could do. So Dad, I guess I’m saying I know how you feel, at least to some degree.

So I promised I’d explain my experiment… so here it goes… I’ll try to explain the science behind it in some clear terms. Background knowledge: Midges, which are small aquatic flies that have an aquatic larval stage and a terrestrial adult stage, come out of Lake Mývatn (midge lake) in large numbers… we’re talking billions to trillions of individuals per year. These midges effectively move nutrients from the lake (they only feed during the larval stage, where they eat algae mostly) to the surrounding shoreline. Predators, such as wolf spiders (my organism of interest) eat the midges or else the midges just die and fertilize the plants. All plants and animals are made of varying proportion of a few elements, with two of the most abundant being carbon (C) and nitrogen (N). These elements have a number of isotopes (atoms with a differing number of neutrons in the nucleus) that occur in varying proportions. These isotopes are incorporated into the tissues of organisms in varying proportions, which are often predictable, or at least show certain patterns. For instance, and of importance to my experiment, aquatic organisms usually have a much higher ratio of a heavy isotope of carbon than terrestrial organisms. And the terrestrial organisms that might eat the aquatic organisms will then have an isotopic signature closer to that that would normally be seen in an aquatic organism. What this all boils down to is that we can see what an organism has been eating by grinding it up and seeing what ratios of C and N isotopes are present. My experiment is taking spiders that do not have access normally to aquatic-derived organisms and feeding them midges from the lake. At certain intervals we will collect and analyze the spiders for their isotopes, so that we can see the rate at which the aquatic signature is expressed in the predatory spiders. Whew. It’s hard to explain, but I hope that was cogent.

In other news, we have a newly arrived, albeit temporary member of Team Midge 2010. Mireia, a post-doctoral researcher from Spain who will be at Wisconsin for the next two years, will be with us for about a month taking a few samples for her work and helping us with ours. So far she seems really nice. Only time will tell if she will be able to put up with our shenanigans. She is well on the way to winning our hearts, as she brought some indigenous cured meat in tube form from Spain. It was quickly devoured this evening.