2004-2005 Expedition Luke Sandro

Luke Sandro teaches high school biology at Springboro High School in Ohio. He

has collaborated with Dr. Lee several times in the past, including helping to write the educational outreach portion of the grant proposal for this trip. DECEMBER 2004 December 16, 2004 - Springboro, Ohio (39° N Latitude):

Ten days until we leave. I have to admit I'm a little nervous...I still have so much to do to prepare! I'm writing lesson plans for my substitute teacher, making sure she knows how to teach my classes — buying some supplies (a warm hat, waterproof boots, sunglasses) — also finding more and more teachers to put on our mailing list. I hope that a lot of teachers and students read our updates and go to our website. The other teachers are having a going-away party for me after school today, with cake for everyone! Our plane leaves on the day after Christmas. My friends keep asking me if I'll bring them home a penguin, and I have to tell them that even if I was allowed, I don't think a penguin would fit very well in my luggage. December 27, 2004 - Punta Arenas, Chile (52° S Latitude):

I got on a plane yesterday at 5 pm in Cincinnati, flew to Dallas, Texas, and then took a 9-hour flight to Santiago, Chile. I slept a little bit on the plane. Also, I sat next to somebody famous. Peter Yarrow, from the folk music group Peter, Paul and Mary, who wrote and sang "Puff the Magic Dragon". Very nice guy. Then we had to go through customs, where our passports and bags were inspected. Then, we got on another plane that flew from Santiago to Punta Arenas, Chile, near the southern tip of South America. There were about 20 people on this plane that will also be on our ship to Antarctica — some of them are scientists, others will help run the ship. Now we're in Punta Arenas, Chile. The first thing I noticed here is that the trees and bushes are all leaning quite a bit to one side. This is because the wind is very strong, and usually blows in the same direction. It’s amazing how the environment an organism lives in really shapes how it looks. It’s 10:00 at night and it's still light out! In the Southern Hemisphere, they have summer in the months that are winter where I live in the Northern Hemisphere — because the way the earth is tilted on its axis aims the Southern Hemisphere more directly at the sun during these months. That means the days are long here right now, and it’s pretty warm, about 60°F. As we go south, the days will get longer, but it will also get colder (even though it's summer) because we’ll be moving further away from the equator. December 28, 2004 - Punta Arenas, Chile:

We're getting worried. One of the chemicals we need to do our research in Antarctica hasn't arrived at the ship yet. We leave tomorrow at 8:00 pm, so if it doesn't get here by then, we may have to do without it. The chemical is called Trizol, and we need to use it to preserve and extract the RNA of the insect larvae we’re studying before we can study the genes and proteins they use to survive all the extreme conditions they live in. Without it, a big part of our research will be impossible. We have also been able to talk by phone with the people that are living at Palmer Station right now, and they tell us that we may have another problem. A lot of what's called brash ice — floating chunks of melting Antarctic ice that can be up to two meters long — has been blown by the wind into the harbor and pushed tightly together, blocking the harbor. This isn't a problem for our ship, which is an icebreaker — but it means that once we're there, and the icebreaker is gone, we may have trouble piloting the small motorboats, called Zodiacs, out of the station's harbor to get to the islands where we want to collect the insect larvae. This could delay our research until the ice moves out.

Before we get on the ship, they give us a big duffel bag with ECW gear — ECW stands for extreme cold weather. Some of the things in the duffel bag are: a heavy coat and snow pants, long underwear, a hat and mittens, and some really cool sunglasses. If you want to see what else was in it, look at the lesson plan called “Getting Ready to Go!” (click here). Also, before we leave Punta Arenas for good, we make sure to go to the center of town, and touch the statue’s toe for luck on our journey.

December 29, 2004, 9:55 pm - R.M.V. Laurence M. Gould, in the Strait of Magellan, bearing northwest:

I'm on the ship now. It's called the R.M.V. Laurence M. Gould. R.M.V. stands for Research Motor Vessel, which means this ship is used only for scientific expeditions. It’s a really big ship, 230 feet long, painted orange on the bottom and yellow on the top. It is an icebreaker, too, which means that it can make it through many types of ice without being damaged.

The chemical we needed got here just in time! It was flown to Punta Arenas and got here at 6:00 pm today, two hours before we left.

The ship used a crane to load our luggage, and the food and supplies for our trip, onto the boat. Scott and I helped them load the fruits and vegetables this morning. All the fruits, vegetables, and other new food for the trip are called freshies, and these will be not only for us, but also for the people who are already in Antarctica at Palmer Station — they'll be glad to see fresh food! I sleep in a big metal box on the bottom level of the ship called the berthing van. It holds 5 people, and can be moved on and off the ship when there are more people on board than will fit in the ship's normal cabins (45). There are 51 people on board now, which leaves six of us without normal cabins, which means we needed two berthing vans for the trip.

The captain taught us today about what to do if there is an emergency on the ship. He showed us

how to get to the lifeboats, and how to put on our immersion suits, which keep you warm and dry if you have to jump into the cold water. Tomorrow we're going to have something like a fire drill, where bells and alarms ring, and everyone has to grab their life jacket and immersion suits and run to the lifeboats.

December 30, 2004 - Strait of Magellan, almost to the Atlantic Ocean:

I woke up in the berthing van at 3:30 this morning and couldn't sleep because I was so excited about our trip. I got up and watched from the deck outside the ship as the sun rose from 4:30-5:30 am. It was really beautiful. I saw lots of different animals, too — a whole bunch of Commerson's dolphins were swimming around us — they are beautiful, colored black and white and very easy to see.

Today I also saw a giant petrel, a cape petrel, and a storm petrel. These birds (and many other seabirds) have adapted so they can survive by drinking salt water! The way they can do this is by using special salt glands in the tops of their beaks that excrete the salt that was in the water. I have also seen

some black-browed albatrosses, and a young wandering albatross, which is the biggest bird I've ever seen. The wandering albatross has wing-bones that can lock into a gliding position, and it is very good at gliding on air currents without using very much of its energy. Because of this, it is able to stay out at sea, in flight, for many months at a time without coming back to land.

There are a lot of big, ugly floating platforms that drill for oil in this part of the Strait of Magellan. I counted 16 of them this morning.

The ship has a lounge with big, comfy chairs and a huge collection of videotapes and DVD movies to watch if we get bored. That's where I am right now, typing this on my laptop computer. The televisions on the ship can show movies, but we can also change the channel to see different camera views outside the ship, or a picture that shows where we are on the map — I like to look at that one. We also have an exercise room with a treadmill, rowing machine and weight bench, which is fun.

We had an emergency drill today, which is like a fire drill — bells and alarms ring, and everyone has to run and grab their immersion suits and life jackets, and go to the top of the ship — this is so if there's a real emergency, everyone will know what to do. Everyone did fine.

More good news today. The people at Palmer Station say that the brash ice has moved out of the harbor, and that we should be able to use the Zodiac boats with no problem.

New Year’s Eve Day, 2004 - about 90 nautical miles (1 N. M. = 1.2 miles) south of Cape Horn, well into the Drake Passage (57° S Latitude):

We are now in the Drake Passage, which is between South America and Antarctica. It has been famous throughout history for being one of the roughest and most difficult areas to sail across in the world. The ship is very unstable and hard to walk on right now, rolling from side to side, and pitching backward and forward. The rule when you're walking around the ship in these conditions is "one hand for yourself, one hand for the ship", which means you should always be holding onto part of the ship with a free hand. Things like serving a meal and washing yourself in the shower are very difficult. It is also getting colder, because we are moving south, away from the equator. We will be in the Drake Passage until we get to Palmer Station in Antarctica on January 2nd, 2005.

I'm in the ship's lounge, and the magazines on the table keep falling on the floor. Some people are seasick right now, which isn't fun. I'm glad I don't get seasick, but even if I did, there are medicines that can make you feel better.

While we're in the Drake Passage, scientists on the ship are using something called an XBT (expendable batho-thermograph). It releases little measuring devices called probes that record the water temperature at different depths in the water of the Drake Passage, and send the data back to a computer on the ship. Every time this ship crosses the Drake Passage, they use the XBT, and it’s been crossing several times a year for about ten years. The data collected from the XBT has helped scientists understand a lot more about climate and ocean currents, and especially the way global warming is changing the earth. JANUARY 2005 January 1, 2005 - Drake Passage, bearing south (59° S Latitude):

We (Rick, Dave, Joe, Scott, and I) celebrated the New Year on the bow (the front) of the boat, looking out at the ocean. It was great. We have now passed into the circumpolar current, a current of cold water that moves in a circle around Antarctica. You could feel the temperature get lower as we passed into it. Also, the ocean is a beautiful shade of midnight blue now. We're not sure why that color change happens — probably something to do with different nutrients and small organisms present in the water. We saw whales and icebergs this morning.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

January 2, 2005 (62° S Latitude): The food on the ship is really good. Marcus, the cook, is very good at keeping the menu

interesting. Here's today's menu: Lunch: Blackened catfish, Philly steak sandwich on baguette, Mixed vegetables. Dinner: Clam chowder, Kahlua pork and cabbage, Chicken Alfredo, Pasta primavera. These are pictures of the galley, or kitchen and dining area. Notice the steel container bolted to the tables so that the condiments don't slide off.

I've seen the most beautiful scenery

today. In the morning we saw some distant snow-covered islands and an iceberg every once in a while. By afternoon, they were everywhere — so many icebergs, snow-covered islands with huge mountains of white, in places difficult to see what is part of the island and what's just ice.

I've also learned where icebergs actually come from — many islands have glaciers on them, huge masses of ice — as the weather gets warmer here, the glaciers that are near open water crack, dropping huge chunks of ice into the water that become icebergs. This is called glacial calving. Icebergs already in the water can calve too, cracking loudly into smaller chunks. Below are shots of spots where glaciers have calved.

Some smaller icebergs roll back and forth, sending up spray as waves hit them. The shapes are beautiful, carved sheer white faces, gracefully swooping bridges of ice between islands and between icebergs, then eventually high, black rock mountains, fog-covered on top, rising above all the other stuff. This is the most beautiful place I have ever been. I always thought it was a little strange that people take luxury cruises down here, but now I understand. I've been on deck so long today that I can barely feel my fingers.

At about 8, we see more icebergs, and a huge patch of brash ice, the loosely packed chunks, in our way. This is the stuff that at Palmer Station would have prevented us from taking the Zodiacs out to islands and collecting larvae had it not blown out again. There is about two square miles of it, and the pieces look really big. However, since the Gould is an icebreaker, this is not a problem.

See? No problem.

Finally, at about 9, we come to Palmer Station. Here's what it looks like:

Everyone is very glad to have arrived, but there are very high winds, and the ship can't pull into the dock safely. It takes about two hours of trying before we can dock — we have to sleep on the ship tonight, but we go over and visit with people at Palmer for a little while before we go to bed. More tomorrow.

January 3, 2005 - Palmer Station, Antarctica (64°46' S Latitude, 64°05' W Longitude). Rainy, winds 30 mph:

We are finally here, and I am having a hard time keeping my balance! When you're on a ship for a long time, you gradually get accustomed to the pitching and rolling of the boat — your body begins to compensate, and pretty soon it's not a problem at all. This is sometimes called getting your sea legs. But when you get off the ship, as I just have, your body is still expecting the ground to be moving under your feet. This causes a very strange feeling — it seems like the ground is moving when it’s not. The people here call it dock rock. I'd like to lose my sea legs now, thank you very much.

We begin the day by getting moved into our rooms at Palmer from the ship. My room is big compared to the berthing van on the ship, and there's plenty of room for all my stuff. Then we go through a series of orientations. Antarctica is a dangerous place in lots of ways, and so the staff and scientists here have very specific ways of doing pretty much everything — these have been sort of figured out from many years of experience. It's a lot to remember, though.

First Vinny, the guy who keeps the boats running (among other things), gives us our first boating orientation (there will be three of them) and teaches us how to use some survival equipment. The weather changes very quickly here, and so sometimes people boat out to an island and get stuck there for a while, even days, because of high winds or brash ice. For this reason, most of the islands have survival caches on them. These are barrels, well anchored from the wind, containing things like food, water, a stove and a tent. Since it's really windy outside, Vinny takes us outside to practice setting up the tent and lighting the stove — which turns out to be a lot of fun.

Vinny also teaches us that we when we go out in a boat we should always wear a float coat, which is a waterproof, buoyant suit in vivid safety orange that I'm pretty excited about trying on. It has a part that snaps on at the bottom between your legs so that if you fall in, the coat won’t float up over your head. We also need to bring a rubber dry bag containing a change of warm clothes and extra sunglasses and sunscreen. If the boat were to overturn or be punctured, it would be important to have these things — cold, wet clothes really suck the heat out of your body. Vinny is a good teacher, and is very, very patient with us. Next Kerry, the station administrator, teaches us a bunch of things about how things work at the station — we are shown how to sign up for gash duty once a week. Gash is a naval term (a lot of the slang down here is naval in origin) — it's a combination of the words "garbage" and "trash". The five people that have gash each day do a thorough cleanup of the galley (kitchen) after dinner. There's a big list of the stuff you have

to do on gash. Also, every Saturday everyone does housemouse duty, which means you do a housekeeping job that you draw at random from a bowl.

Then the two computer guys tell us about how to use the station's computer network, and I give Chris my laptop so he can set it up to connect wirelessly to the network.

Our next orientation is with Tim, who is in charge of waste management here — this is a very important job. U.S. Antarctic stations leave almost none of their waste in Antarctica. This means that all of Palmer's waste has to be shipped back to Chile in special containers, and it all has to be sorted very carefully. The waste from the science labs requires the most caution, because some of it can be toxic or radioactive — we have to fill out paperwork whenever something like that is disposed of. The toilets are flushed by seawater, just like on the ship. Almost all food waste

is put down a really big garbage disposal, which you can see here.

I notice that people here do whatever they can to keep themselves entertained. There are funny nicknames for things, funny signs and computer-printed photos of people on just about every door and wall — people even like to draw things on the backs of their Carhartt coats. The more I think about this, the more it makes sense — when people live at a station like this for a year, it can feel very isolated. During the winter there is almost no daytime at all, and you can't really leave the station because the ocean freezes over. It would be very easy to get depressed here in the winter, and I imagine that keeping a good sense of humor is pretty important to everyone's morale.

This place is amazingly efficient and well-run, and also very well-funded. We get all the lab equipment we need. Some of it we pre-ordered, but some of it we didn't realize we needed — not to worry, they find everything we need, and in one case actually build something for us — more on that ahead. They have supplies for everything you could possibly want to do around here — skiing, snowboarding, hiking up the glacier, camping out. The galley is staffed by two great chefs, and they cook incredibly good food all day — aside from breakfast, lunch and dinner, there are: a leftovers fridge, which also has deli meats and other sandwich fixings; three or four big jars of big, tasty cookies of all kinds, baked daily and smelling great; and some other type of fresh baked good lying around. Today it was soft pretzels, yesterday cinnamon twists. Here are pictures of the galley.

There's a sauna, an outdoor hot tub (right this minute, out my window, I can see a group of people making the most of it), and a bar with a pool table adjoining a lounge area with a HUGE screen TV and wall of DVDs and videos. Again, the people here understand the importance of morale. I can see why a lot of the staff (and researchers, for that matter) seems to basically have fallen in love with it, and do whatever they can to be allowed to keep coming back every year. January 4, 2005:

Today begins with our last boating orientation, with Vinny. After we've all got our float coats and dry bags, he takes the 6 of us out in a 10-man Zodiac — basically a really big inflatable boat. He instructs us on the finer points of not getting killed while piloting it through choppy and windy conditions and through various areas of brash ice that could break the propeller and/or slit the boat. Again, Vinny proves to be a great teacher — no matter how many mistakes we make. He just calmly and patiently points out a better way to keep from dying while not accidentally killing everyone around us. We do okay, though, even in the man overboard drill, which involves the heaviest dummy you can imagine, clothed in a float coat, being heaved into the water and getting pulled back in on its stomach. We all have radios — the last thing Vinny teaches us is how to make comms, which means radioing Palmer whenever we leave or arrive at a new island. We can also hear everyone else's radio transmissions.

Then Vinny drops us off at Bonaparte Point, the closest island to Palmer. The vegetation is all mosses, lichens, algae and some grasses — that's the only kind of vegetation that can grow on extremely cold, rocky, frequently snow-covered terrain like this.

We brought along Ziploc bags and hand lenses, so we get to work looking for Belgica antarctica larvae. We are excited to find both larvae and adults (which is pretty cool, as the adults only emerge for two weeks every two years), and we stuff some gallon Ziplocs full of handfuls of the soil, algae and moss

the larvae like to hang out in. In this process we see some great skuas and an elephant seal (neither of which are shy at all). This was a great first field collecting trip. Below are photos of Rick on Bonaparte, and Scott and Joe collecting samples:

While we're finishing up, we get to listen and watch as some drama unfolds at Palmer. A hydraulic hose on the Laurence M. Gould (LMG) actually breaks, and there is a spill into the harbor. All of Palmer’s support staff and a fair number of its scientists respond quickly, coordinated by Tim The Waste Guy over

the radio. Immediately booms (see photo) to corral the spill, and absorbent stuff to soak it up. It wasn't a big spill, and they hadn't had a chance to run a practice drill yet this season because of brash ice, so it was good experience, they say.

At this point, finished collecting, we radio for someone to take us back to Palmer, and are pleasantly asked to wait until everything calms down with the spill, which is fine. Except I realize now that

I am getting sunburned. The ultraviolet radiation here is very intense, partly because there is a big hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere (probably caused by pollution) that opens periodically over Antarctica. I put on sunblock this morning, but I guess it wasn't enough. Lesson learned.

We are picked up eventually, and we burst triumphantly into the lunchroom and celebrate by eating loaded baked potatoes. The rest of the day is spent setting up our lab — various stuff is arranged in the

right spots, Joe Rinehart starts to set up their molecular biology equipment, we figure out various things we'll need for the lab and Cara, the lab manager, finds it for us. I start setting up our osmometer, which we’ll use to measure the water potential of bits of insects or soil, and we get a Berlese funnel from the carpenter who just built it for us.

Our version of the Berlese funnel is a very simple, effective device that works like this: instead of having to collect insects that live in soil or vegetation one by one in the field, you just grab a bunch of the stuff they live in (containing a bunch of your insects, you hope) and bring it to the lab. Then you spread the soil and moss over the top of a wire screen, with holes in it big enough for the insects to crawl through. Bright lights are pointed at the soil and moss to dry and heat it, and a large tray is placed underneath the screen to catch the insects. We fill the tray with ice water, since Belgica are accustomed to cold weather.

The idea is that these insects like an environment that is cool, wet and dark, not warm, dry and bright, so they'll move downward away from the light, and end up falling through the mesh into whatever you've put under it. In this case that's ice, and so we set that up and run it until 11 pm — it’s still pretty wet and probably full of our larvae, so at 11 we shut off the lights, cover it and move it outside, so we can run it some more tomorrow.

Oops — I forgot — the LMG left Palmer today, to take scientists on a research trip around Antarctica. The scientists on board will be taking lots of samples of krill and other things to study. It will come back in early February to take us home. Today when it leaves Palmer, in keeping with tradition, people here actually jump off the pier into the harbor. Looks scary and cold, but also fun. I might just end up doing that before my stay is over, just to be able to say I took a swim in Antarctica.

January 5, 2005. Brash ice everywhere you look:

We spend the morning in the lab. I, personally, spend it trying to get a consistent reading from the Wescor HR-33T Dewpoint Microvoltmeter.

This is a machine that, supposedly, will give you a reading with which you can determine the vapor pressure of any sample you lock into its chamber — in our case, samples of Belgica or of the substrate (soil, or algae, or water) in which they live. Vapor pressure, essentially, is the tendency of something to give off moisture (as water vapor) to its surroundings. Knowing the vapor pressure of Belgica in different situations will help us understand things about how it dehydrates, and whether the dehydration is a cryoprotective mechanism (something that helps it survive the cold.) The problem is that the

machine is a little bit hard to work with. Readings using known standards of NaCl (sodium chloride) are inaccurate, and not that consistent. I e-mail the company with a description of my problems, along with the basic procedures I'm using with the machine. Hopefully they'll get back to me soon.

At this point there is a scary amount of brash ice in the harbor, and in a lot of other places. Here is a movie, created by someone staying at Palmer, showing how the ice moves in and out. It was shot over about a month then sped up. You can see ice blowing into the harbor, then out again four or five times (ice movie coming soon).

However, despite the ice and thanks to the boating skills of Rick, we make a safe trip to Torgersen Island, and have very good luck there. First of all, there is a colony of Adélie (rhymes with smelly) penguins on this island — I don't know how many are in this one, but it's more than I could have imagined. They're everywhere you look, waddling around, hanging out in groups, flapping their wings, and making lots of noise (penguin movie coming soon). It's amazing to watch. Penguin guano (waste) is everywhere, and it's a disturbing shade of pink, because much of the krill that penguins eat is that color. It’s breeding season, so a bunch of them have their chicks right in front of them.

While we watch, a brown skua (predatory bird) grabs a chick, goes about 6 feet away and starts eating it, which is a little sad to watch — we just have to remember that the skua has its own chicks, and this meal will help feed them, too.

A big fat elephant seal is close enough to touch, sleeping and burping and with what I could swear is a peaceful smile on its face. These animals have specially adapted nostrils that they close when they're in the water. This one is closing first one, then the other, in its sleep.

We find lots and lots of Belgica, living right in the mud and penguin guano, and fill up our Ziploc bags. This is what the larvae look like. We think they clump together like this when they're exposed to a dry environment, possibly to decrease the amount of water they lose by evaporation.

Then Rick turns over a rock and immediately calls us over. He has found Ixodes uriae, a tick that parasitizes various seabirds, in this case the smelly Adélies. They are all over the bottom of this rock, and a bunch are engorged (filled with penguin blood) and just enormous, the size of dog ticks in the Midwest. We’re interested in them for some of the same stress-tolerance reasons as Belgica, and because they survive Antarctic winters and two or three warm blood meals (an unbelievable temperature swing from as low as –22°F to as high as 104°F, which is the temperature of penguin blood) during their lives, and finally because they sometimes parasitize the Arctic tern. This tern is a little fork-tailed bird that somehow migrates from the Arctic to the Antarctic every year. Because of this, Ixodes populations exist in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, and it would be interesting to see how different the two populations are. We’re all very excited about having found it, and we put some in a vial to take back to the lab. Ixodes have three life

stages — a larva, a nymph (young adult) and an adult, each of which take a blood meal from a different bird, then drops off to and crawls under a rock to move to the next life stage. In this picture, you can see engorged nymphs and adults.

So it's a heck of a trip — better than we could have asked for. Bags and vials full, we head back to the boat, and even more ice has moved in. Seeing our boat tied up in the middle of that much ice it’s hard to believe we’re going to make it home, but somehow we do. Once again, we celebrate by eating a great meal. I'm beginning to realize why most people gain weight when they spend time at Palmer Station.

January 6, 2005. Weather calm: Today we spend in the lab, and much of the work we do is pickin' bugs — hunting through the ice

water in the Berlese tray, sucking up Belgica larvae with a little squeezy plastic transfer pipet, filling little plastic tubes with lots of them. Dave is doing heat shock treatments on groups of them — this means he keeps different groups of larvae at different temperatures for different amounts of time, and then puts them back in their normal temperature to see how well they survive. Right now we are using 77°F and 86°F for heat shock temperatures. Just for this experiment, we need around 50 tubes of 10 larvae each — so we have a lot of pickin' to do.

Joe is running a Northern blot on some of the heat-shocked Belgica larvae — it’s a type of gel electrophoresis (in which you use electricity to move molecules through a gel filter, sorting them by size and weight) that allows us to see what kinds of RNA a critter is making. This is important to know, because it tells us which genes it was actively expressing. There is a gene for a heat-shock protein called HSP-70 that Joe is looking for. HSP-70 is a protein that almost all animals make, which helps protect cells from the damage caused by heating, chilling, dehydration, and many other kinds of stress — it's called a chaperone protein, meaning it actually wraps around important cellular molecules, protecting them from damage. If Joe finds that HSP-70 is being expressed in our Belgica, that's a starting point for testing what causes the midge to produce more or less of the protein. The northern blot is a difficult technique, and is one of Joe's specialties. It takes two or three days from start to finish, and is referred to by scientists as "an art form", meaning it's very complicated and easy to mess up and that people who are good at it are valuable.

Rick and Scott are looking at lots of scientific journal articles, trying to decide which questions about Belgica and Ixodes have been answered already, and which ones we should be investigating. We are slowly planning out what the scope of our work is going to be — since we only have a month here, the first thing is to get usable data quickly in order to publish a few articles in scientific journals. Showing results quickly is important; it helps us show that our work is worthwhile and should get continued funding. Then we start to think about what we can do when we return to Ohio — we do plan to bring back some live samples of larvae and ticks in a chilled container, and there is much work that can be done analyzing them at home. Finally, since our work is funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation) for three years (one

month in Antarctica each year), it is important to get some ideas about what should be done on the next two trips.

I'm still trying to figure out how to make the HR-33T dewpoint microvoltmeter (I'll just call it an osmometer from now on) work right, and am close to bashing it against a glacier when I finally get an e-mail back from the company that makes it — there are some very small adjustments I can make that help the machine read more consistently, and I also need to make a calibration curve — a mathematical equation that I can use to correct errors in the machine’s readings. This will solve most of the problems I was having, but it takes some time to get the calibration curve right. So now the machine is working pretty well — which is a big relief. I was getting pretty frustrated with it. January 7, 2005:

Again today, there is an amazing amount of brash ice in the water around Palmer, so much so that Vinny has decided to pull all the boats out of the water. When we want to go out in a boat, he takes a small crane and lifts our boat up, then drives it to the dock and lowers it into the water.

We head out to Norsel Point, the farthest away from Palmer we've been (still not very far, maybe

two miles). Another amazing place for wildlife — we see a lot of elephant seals — this part of Antarctica is not a breeding ground for these seals, but we see them sort of practicing a lot of their breeding season behaviors — some young males are sparring in the water, and lots of females are laying around in wallows — areas with pools of water where large groups of females stay. At breeding grounds, a wallow with many females has just one breeding male (these are enormous — we haven't seen any here), and the male is very territorial — if another male comes near, they will often fight for control of the area. But here it’s just practice, and it’s fun to watch the young males play around. It’s also interesting to watch the females move around on the island. They aren't built very well for travel on land, so they have to sort of heave themselves along the ground.

On Norsel Point we find very few Belgica larvae, but a huge number of Belgica adults — these are basically little wingless flies. Belgica adults live for less than two weeks, and their only job is to mate. We see hundreds of them, and observe their mating behavior, too. Unlike the elephant seals, in these midges it’s the males that group together, and then one female enters the mating aggregation to be. Midges where you live probably work like this, too. Ever seen a little swarm of tiny flies in the summer? It's most likely an aggregation of male midges, waiting for a female to enter.

I am given the job of collecting as many adults as I can for us to study — the tool I use for this is called an aspirator — entomologists often call it a "pooter". Scott made this one from spare parts we found around the lab — it’s just a plastic jar with a thin hose coming out the side to suck up insects — you create the suction by drawing in air through the bigger hose coming out of the top of the jar. Don't worry, the hose you put your mouth on has a gauze filter on it, so you don't breathe in any bugs. I am able to collect lots of adults, enough for Dave to do some heat shock experiments.

January 8, 2005:

Today we take another trip to Bonaparte Point in search of more larvae — the samples we've taken are not giving us as many larvae as we'd like — we think we just need to find some better spots, and perfect our Berlese techniques a little. Sure enough, we find some really good areas, and take samples from each, which look like they're crawling with larvae. I should mention that we're not affecting the population numbers of these insects at all — the population of Belgica around here is enormous — they have literally been on every island we've visited. The samples we take make no significant difference in their numbers, and even collecting a few thousand is the equivalent of swatting mosquitoes in the summer. However, though our research is not affecting Belgica's numbers, it appears that something else is. Rick studied these larvae 25 years ago, and on this trip he has noticed a big difference in the Belgica's population density (number of larvae per unit of area). He says it was much easier to find large numbers of them in 1981. It appears that something is decreasing the population. There are two aspects of the Antarctic environment that have changed drastically in the past few decades the average temperature has gone up about 9°F and the amount of ultraviolet light coming through the atmosphere is much higher. Most scientists think that human pollution is the cause of both of these changes. Regardless, these changes are affecting most Antarctic species, in some cases causing them to move from their normal habitats. It is possible that this is the case with Belgica. January 9, 2005:

It's Sunday — the support staff pretty much gets the day off here on Sundays — everyone makes their own meals (although there are always lots of leftovers to choose from). We can’t really afford to take a day off from science — we have so little time here — but I do find time to take a short nap, which I really need. Since it doesn't get dark here, I am getting much less sleep than I'm used to — it is starting to wear on me. We get things done today, but in a pretty slow-paced, relaxing way. January 10, 2005:

Today Scott and I begin to test the dehydration of Belgica larvae. We put many groups of the larvae into chambers that have 98.2% relative humidity — we weigh the larvae after different lengths of time in the chambers, so we can tell how much water they are losing. Believe it or not, after 12 hours in 98.2% humidity, the larvae had lost 10% of their water, and they'd lost 20% of it after 24 hours! They dehydrate even in very humid air, which is interesting. We are very interested in dehydration, because it is possible that Belgica uses protective dehydration — loss of water that helps an insect survive things like freezing, heat shock and other stresses. January 11, 2005

Today we take another trip to Norsel Point and Torgersen Island (“Torgie”). We have two jobs — first, we place several devices in the places we've found larvae. They're called HOBO temperature loggers, and they will help us find out what range of temperatures larvae actually experience on these islands. We can test the temperature limits of larvae in the lab, but it’s useful to know what they really go through in nature. The HOBOs automatically take temperature readings as often as you program them to, and when you finally bring them home they transmit the data right to your computer. Cool, huh? Secondly, Scott and I collect samples of soil and larvae from three different sites on Torgie — a low, wet site, a medium site, and a high, drier site. Our goal is to find the vapor pressure of both the soil and the larvae that live in it from all three sites. Remember that my arch-enemy the osmometer is the device we’ll use to measure the vapor pressure of these samples. Vapor pressure is a function of how much water a sample contains, but more importantly of how many solutes are dissolved in said water (like salts). The more solutes, the less the water wants to evaporate. So we take samples of dirt and larvae from the various points on Torgie, then tomorrow I’ll measure the vapor pressure of the dirt, then of the larvae, from each spot. We’ll also bake some to get an idea of their dry weight, so we know how much water was in them. The comparison of the larvae vs. the soil will hopefully tell us some stuff about how and why water moves from soil to larvae and vice versa — if we find that Belgica decreases its vapor pressure in drier soils, it may mean that the larva is altering the concentration of solutes in its blood to protect itself from dehydration in conditions where the soil tends to suck out its water.

This trip is still fun, but it is cold and muddy and rainy, so by the time we're done, we are soaked and cold and smell strongly of penguin guano. It's good to get back. January 12, 2005:

Today is a great day. We spend most of it in the lab — everyone is starting to get real data from their experiments that look really interesting. The osmometer readings on the Torgie soil samples and larvae are consistent with what we expected — the next step is to take readings from larvae that we dehydrate in the lab, to see if they're increasing their solutes in response to getting dried out. We’ll start that in the next couple of days.

Joe has found some amazing stuff with his Northern blots. Most animals only turn on their HSP-70 gene (to produce the heat-shock protein, remember?) in response to some environmental stress — the rest of the time the gene is turned off. However, Joe's blots are showing that Belgica may produce HSP-70 all the time. This is unusual, to say the least — the only other comparable animals are some species of Antarctic fish — makes sense, right? Also, as Dave has been heat-shocking larvae, Joe has been analyzing them, too. We expected them to upregulate the gene (produce more HSP-70) in response to heat, but it looks like they don't. In fact, after 24 hours at room temp, all the larvae die, without increasing their HSP-70 at all. So it looks like they produce a very constant level of the protein, and would sooner die than increase it in response to heat — of course, in nature they would almost never experience room temperature. Joe would like to find some other stress that does cause HSP-70 upregulation.

Rick gives a science presentation with a slide show in the evening for the other folks here, to explain some of the work we're doing. As he explains that Belgica is Antarctica's largest terrestrial animal, he puts this slide on the screen, which he and I have created with some fancy computer tricks. It gets a good laugh.

It has been drop-dead

gorgeous outside all day, so after Rick's talk, Joe and Scott and I hike up the glacier behind the station. It is about a mile, and from the top we get an incredible view of the surrounding area. Joe has made it his mission to throw a football in every unusual place he can, and this is about as unusual as you get — we toss the ball around for a good half hour. We stay until the sun sets at 11:30 pm, then head home.

January 13, 2005: So much happens in a typical day here that I'm having trouble keeping up with this journal. Today

I take the morning off from science to catch up, writing and formatting photos to for the website. I get almost completely caught up, which is great. Around noon, we get a visit from the first of many cruise ships that will be visiting the station this week. It is by far the biggest ship I've ever seen. It makes me think of the star destroyer in Star Wars movies. 780 feet long, 106 feet wide, carrying 1,294 passengers and 600+ crew. The thing takes up half the horizon. Everyone's invited to go aboard, but we have lots of work to do, so Rick goes and the rest of us stay. Apparently they have cocktails, eat sushi and then some folks from the station talk about what they do, and Rick talks a little bit about our research. We give him a hard time when he returns, doing our best to make him feel guilty for leaving us to schmooze with the wealthy folk — it doesn't work very well.

January 14, 2005:

At 2:07 am, I wake gradually to a fairly annoying buzzing noise, followed by a loudspeaker voice saying, "Alarm is in the pump house. Alarm is in the pump house." I roll over and notice that my roommate Tad is getting his clothes on.

"What is that, man?" I ask groggily. Tad replies, "Fire alarm," very calmly. People who have been to Antarctica a lot tend to do

everything very calmly. So I jump into my clothes and we head out to the boat house, which is the muster station — that means whenever there's any emergency, that's where everyone's supposed to go — Kerry, the station administrator, starts taking roll, and then Bill comes over the loudspeaker: "Stand down, repeat, stand down. It’s a busted pipe in the pump house." And we all groan and make our way back to our rooms to go back to bed.

It is another perfect day, and we take a trip in the Zodiac to an island called Stepping Stones. I'm the driver today, and it's a long, fun drive. It is the prettiest island yet, with skuas and giant petrels all over the place. In one case we are actually close enough to see salt dripping out of the salt gland on the giant petrel’s beak (the salt gland removes salt from the seawater the giant petrel drinks).

We find some adult Belgica, and since we brought the thermocouple reader — a machine with a wire that tells you the exact temperature of anything it is touching — we are able to measure the temperature of the different places it is crawling around on. The readings knock our socks off. The dark green moss some of these adults are ambling around on is up to 68° F — unbelievably hot for this insect.

This is really interesting, because Joe is in the preliminary stages of proving with his Northern blots that Belgica adults upregulate their HSP70 gene in response to heat shock, even though larvae don't. This would make sense, since it's only the adults that crawl around on the surface in the summer, whereas larvae are almost always below rocks, or buried under mud or water.

Also, we notice that there are limpet shells everywhere on this island — limpets are mollusks that

live in the water, usually just offshore, clinging very tightly to rocks so as not to be washed away by the strong waves. We sightsee, take pictures, and still can't believe how great it is here.

Meanwhile, back at Palmer, the cruise ship Mesner has come in, full of Japanese tourists. It's not even half as big as the Amsterdam. Palmer Station staff gives tours to small groups of them, accompanied by translators. The tourists are very nice, bowing to us a lot when we meet them.

I climb the glacier by myself at about 10 pm, and watch the sun set at 11:15. Another beautiful one.

January 15, 2005: Some days here feel more like two or three days. Today is definitely one of those. We spend the morning in the lab, taking some readings on various experiments, recording data, and pickin' bugs. There is another cruise ship in the harbor today, the Orion. This one is full of M.I.T., Harvard and Yale alumni. They visit us and are shown around. They seem nice, ask great questions, and are very enthusiastic about what goes on here.

Also, it is I think the third clear, sunny day we've had so far, and the warmest and most beautiful yet. We have dinner on the balcony — someone has brought chipped bar ice from the harbor for our drinks — bar ice is very clear ice that has been compressed in a glacier for thousands of years and then calved into the water, and sometimes it makes little hissing noises as compressed gases escape from it. On the balcony everyone seems especially relaxed, and then I realize it's because most of us are wearing T-shirts. You sure adjust to temperatures fast here — our high today was only 38° F.

After dinner our whole team plus Cara the lab manager take a Zodiac and boat out to the big iceberg we've been seeing out the window. Amazing to be so near such a huge mass of floating ice. We take some pictures then head to Loudwater Cove, with some beautiful glacier views, then to Torgie to see the penguins. First, we come upon two penguin species we hadn't seen before — the gentoo and the chinstrap penguin, hanging out with all the Adélies.

We see nesting Adélies feeding their chicks — what happens is that the mother and father take

turns going out and eating krill, and then coming back to regurgitate and feed it to the chicks. In the picture below, you can see the chick about to reach into the parent's mouth to get food. We also see a dead penguin that has literally been turned inside out by a brown skua.

Then back to the iceberg in better light, with the moon overhead. Since it's been fairly warm, there

is also a lot of glacial calving happening — it sounds like a thunderstorm as huge pieces of glaciers miles away fall into the sea. We spend a good three hours out, and get lots of pictures.

January 16, 2005:

Today is a good day for field work, so we head out to Norsel Point first, in search of Belgica adults. We found a ton of them on our last trip to Norsel, but now there are hardly any! The Belgica adult’s 10-day lifespan can be inconvenient that way — on this island, the adults have come and gone. However, we go next to Humble island, and find more adults than we've ever seen, and we actually get to see adults emerging from their pupae (like caterpillars pupate and emerge as butterflies) and mating (see picture below). And finally, as if this weren't enough, we finally get to see Belgica's egg clusters! They are the yellow round things in the picture below. This is very cool, and we fill up various containers and Joe and I both have aspirators and are able to collect enough adults to keep Dave busy with his heat-shock experiments for a while.

Meanwhile the birders (the team of scientists here that studies seabirds, mostly penguins and giant petrels and brown skuas) are on Humble with us, measuring brown skua eggs and chicks. This is very interesting to watch. The brown skuas are probably my favorite birds here — they are built like fighter planes, fast and maneuverable, with a mean-looking beak — they can actually steal a meal from another bird's mouth in midair. When one slices by, you can see its head swiveling from side to side like radar, seeing everything. They build their nests on the ground, so the birders are able to get in and measure the chicks with no problem, although skuas like to dive-bomb people, so the birders have a tall stick planted in the ground that keeps them from getting buzzed too closely.

So imagine our excitement when we get home to find out that in fact someone on another island has found a recently dead brown skua and retrieved it for the birders, who have in turn donated it to us to check for parasitic ticks and mites, which are arachnids (in the same class as spiders and ticks). Getting a close-up look at this beast is amazing. Apparently they found it in front of a rock with its wings still spread, suggesting that it may have died from flying into the rock. Sure enough, Joe, in full CSI mode, finds a dent

in the skull at just about the right angle to indicate that the skua timed one of those cool head-swivels exactly wrong and, looking the other direction, crashed right into the rock. I guess they really are like fighter planes — making one little mistake can be disastrous.

Joe, wearing rubber gloves, picks through the bird's feathers (which are amazingly dense, because skuas spend lots of time swimming around in very cold water and need lots of waterproof insulation) — and for a half-hour's work gets three mites. Oh, well. It’s sort of cool that skuas are that parasite-free, actually. I pick it up, and am completely surprised — it weighs like as much as I would expect a pigeon to weigh. Pound for pound, the brown skua is one seriously tough bird.

January 17, 2005:

My morning is spent typing up a detailed protocol for the HR33T osmometer. Keeping in mind that it’s the teacher that takes my place who will probably be tasked with operating the blessed thing next year, I write it as clearly and in as much detail as I can, and before I know it I've filled 3 single-spaced, text-packed pages. The lab tech has expressed interest in learning how to use this thing, so I give her a copy, too. She comes back after reading it and says, "Never mind."

The second half of the day I get to set up a fun experiment — Scott and I have been dehydrating larvae in the lab and measuring their osmolality, but we have yet to sample field-dehydrated ones. So I grab a bunch of the larvae-packed Torgie soil and stick it in a plastic tray, attach a sign that says "Please don't touch!" and put it under a mill van just outside our lab. The plan is to take osmolality readings and wet/dry weights of soil and bugs every couple of days as the thing gradually dries out. This will simulate how the larvae actually dehydrate on the islands, when there's no precipitation for a while or it’s so cold that the air is bone dry. We'll see how it goes.

Another beautiful sunset that lasts an hour and a half. I catch some of it on the roof above GWR, sipping a soda and listening to music. Very nice. About halfway through, up climbs Will the station doc. He talks to me for a couple of minutes, tells me the names of some of the mountains I'm looking at (William, Moberly, Francois) and how they were named — we agree that humans sure do like to lay claim to everything they see.

January 18, 2005:

Last night a yacht showed up in the harbor. We knew it was coming, but I guess I was expecting something a little bigger. These people have basically come to Antarctica in a sailboat. It has tied up off Bonaparte Point, about 11 yards across the harbor from our dock. There is a ton of brash ice in the water at this point, and we have a good time watching them paddle their little mini-Zodiac across the harbor through 3-foot fragments of ice to us. They seem nice, and the language barrier proves surmountable. They leave a nice note in French on the white board.

In the lab, a major piece falls into place. Belgica adults, which we didn't even expect to collect enough of to work with, are showing evidence of thermoprotection. In short, this means that if you put them at a certain temp for a certain time, say 30°C for one hour, they die. But, if you put them in 25°C for an hour, then 30°C for an hour, they live. Since we've already seen upregulation of HSP-70 in the adults in response to heat shock, this isn't necessarily a surprise, but it's a big piece of our story about how this insect does what it does.

So we take the evening off and are all in a fine mood. Looking out into Arthur Harbor, we can see a leopard seal ("leps"; these are sleek, muscular, graceful seals with nasty-looking teeth) floating on a chunk of ice, with a half-eaten penguin right next to it. He is apparently sleeping. I have probably seen 40 seals by now—a couple of leps, one crabeater and the rest elephant seals. Of those 40, three of them have been doing something besides sleeping. I’m starting to wonder how they are able to survive. Mammals, being endothermic (warm-blooded), generally take quite a bit of fuel to stoke their metabolic fires, meaning they have to eat a lot. How do these guys get away with behaving like they’ve been shot full of tranquilizers for most of their lives?

January 19, 2005:

This morning I get to have fun playing with the digital microscope camera, which is great for getting good clear shots of Belgica, Alaskazetes (mites), Ixodes (ticks) and the Collembolae (primitive insects) we've been seeing — provided I ice them first. With the lights pointed at them they heat up fast, and before long they're running around like a sped-up video and all the pictures are blurry. But I get the hang of it, and get enough pictures to make a new page for the website, a bestiary (list of animals) of the

critters we find on land around here. The staff here has been really amazing.

They've made sure all along that we have whatever we need to do our work, even bringing down little speakers so we can listen to music while we do some of the tedious work like picking larvae out of the mud. We've found all the miscellaneous lab equipment we needed in the storage containers, including squirt bottles, glassware, tubing, spare parts to build aspirators. And of course there's the three makeshift Berlese funnels that they basically custom-built for us. The point is, this is the best research support I've ever seen, and these folks deserve a big thank you for it.

As I type, I can see another leopard seal sleeping on a floating chunk of ice. The interesting thing this time is that there are maybe 8 Adélie penguins waddling around on a chunk right next to it, completely ignoring the fact that they're in easy grabbing range of what is basically a penguin-killing machine. It occurs to me that maybe seals get away with being so lazy because penguins aren't very smart. In the afternoon I make a trip out to T5 — a small building up the hill a bit from the station. T5 is the domain of Johan, whom I've met already and has volunteered to give some of us a little talk about what he does. Johan is in charge of keeping track of several different research projects at once, mostly monitoring the earth and its atmosphere and involving heavy instrumentation. The data from these projects is sent right to the appropriate investigators in the US. Johan is a remarkably good teacher, and goes as deeply into the science as we want him to without confusing us at all. The projects include: A fairly old system of trapping and analyzing air particles for radioactivity — basically a fallout meter that tells us if there have been any nuclear explosions or other events. This, like most of the other equipment here, is part of a worldwide network of many similar instruments, all sending their data to the same place to be analyzed. A machine that monitors the levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation coming from the sun.

This instrument helps us keep track of the hole in the ozone layer caused by ozone-damaging pollutants

called CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). This hole lets more potentially harmful UV rays strike the earth, and it opens every winter and closes every summer. This is because of something called the polar vortex, a circular air current that keeps a lot of air here in the winter but lets it disperse in the summer. Also, apparently the hole has an oblong shape that sort of wobbles, so that different parts of Antarctica are exposed to the increased UV radiation at different times. This year, the hole was open for a shorter duration than it has been in recent years. This could be a fluke, or it could (we hope) be a sign that the hole is shrinking and has begun to go away. A very sensitive seismograph, on which it was apparently possible to see the quake that caused the tsunami disaster. Johann elaborates on how waves travel through and around the earth, which is really interesting from him but would probably bore the heck out of you if I described it in detail. A VLF (very low frequency) antenna that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It has its own little hut, and if you go in and Johann turns up the volume, you hear this loud continuous static-sounding roar. As you listen, the sounds separate a bit, and you can pick up some individual bursts when it slows down a little. What you're hearing is, get this, every single lightning strike on the planet. Plus the occasional burst of encoded submarine communication, and some other stuff even Johan can’t identify. Finally, there is a GPS system that is much more accurate than the handheld ones, and is actually used to help calibrate the GPS satellites, among other things — it is accurate down to a few centimeters, instead of the few meters accuracy you get with the handhelds. I have a lot of fun learning from Johan, and there are still some projects that I haven't seen yet, so I plan to go back It’s Wednesday, and so time for the weekly science lecture. This time it’s Heidi, part of the group we call “the birders” — they're studying Adélie penguins, brown skuas and giant petrels (“Jeeps” for short. Get it? G.P.?) I learn a lot — Adélie populations are declining rather quickly here, and the center of the population is shifting further south in response, they think, to warming. There are 2 likely reasons for this: first, penguins feed on krill (small ocean crustaceans), and Antarctic krill depend on floating sea ice, under which they breed and raise their young. The total amount of sea ice has decreased in response to warming, so — less krill. Secondly and probably more importantly, warming has increased annual snowfall in Antarctica (the short version is that warmer air holds more moisture, which precipitates as more snow). When Adélies lay their eggs on bare ground, they are not expecting to get blanketed by a meter or more of snow, but that happens quite a bit these days. The parents are fine, but when the snow melts, it immerses and kills the eggs, which need air contact to carry out gas exchange. Gentoo and chinstrap penguins, by contrast, which never used to hang out this far down the Peninsula, appear to be thriving, and could end up replacing Adélies here if the trend continues. January 20, 2005:

Science-wise, Scott has decided he should do some work on analyzing larval lipid content (to see if they're changing their cell membrane composition to help them survive heat or cold), which he'll do back in England, but for which he will need more larvae. So we head out to Torgie, where we've found the best density of critters, and fill up some more Ziplocs. Also, these larvae are a deep purple color, and we realize pretty quickly after we mash a few up that the pigment is in their hemolymph (blood) rather than in their exoskeleton. There's a possibility that this is an adaptation to block UV radiation, so Joe's going to use a spectrophotometer (device used to find which wavelengths of light a sample absorbs) and see if we can find anything out.

We climb the glacier in the evening, and Joe and I throw a Frisbee at the top, which gets difficult when the wind picks up. January 21, 2005:

Another breakthrough today. Dave's experiments on Belgica larvae appear to show that they are able to do something called rapid cold-hardening (RCH). This is pretty much the same thing as thermoprotection, which the adults are able to do, except with cold temperatures. So if you put the larvae at -10°C for an hour they die, but if you put them at -5°C for an hour and then at -10°C, they're fine. This is great news, and fits with what we've seen of their environment — adults don't really have to deal with much low temperature for the brief time they're out, so they don't cold-harden, but the surfaces they walk on (moss, rocks) can really heat up in the sun, so they thermoprotect very effectively. The larvae stay buried in mud under rocks most of the time, so don't have to deal with high temperatures much. Therefore, they don't thermoprotect, but they do overwinter (albeit under the snow, in the subnivean [under the snow]

air space where they are fairly insulated from the really extreme cold) and so it makes sense that they can do RCH. January 22, 2005:

We have refined our pickin' methods now that we have the fine, clayish, larvae-packed mud from Torgie to work with — each of us does it a little differently, but I'm having good luck with the swirling-and-pouring technique that Rick has devised to get rid of the fine particulate, in combination with a three-level sieve that gets the big chunks out. After that it is relatively easy to get the larvae crawling around in the sandy stuff, after which we do a few transfers from container to container to really get the grit out. It takes a while, and now that Scott is doing lipid work we have a lot to pick. We listen to a lot of Johnny Cash while we work, and Scott confides to us that these days he can't hear Johnny Cash without thinking about larvae. I've been having dreams about them. At dinner I start to see things squirming in Joe's beans, which look a bit like the mud we're picking from. We need to go back out in the field, and soon.

Saturday evening is fun — we have a champagne toast and celebration because Jeff has proposed to Cindy, and they are now officially engaged. Both are scientists studying the seabirds around here. January 23, 2005:

I spend the morning in the lab taking osmolality readings. The number of sleeping leopard seals floating around on chunks of ice is high today (maybe that

should be part of the local weather report), and in the evening one floats really close to one part of the shore, which is a good photo opportunity. It actually yawns, and you can see its very sharp-looking teeth.

January 24, 2005:

Today we get back out in the field, and head to Torgie to see if any adult Belgica have come out there yet. On our way, we finally see a leopard seal in the water, active. It circles the boat, checking us out, for about 15 minutes — this is actually a fairly scary animal — they've been known to bite through Zodiacs when messed with, but we are very careful.

Lots of cool photos, then on to Torgie — where somehow we can't find any larvae. Weird. We

have fun anyway. My backyard dehydration of the Torgie soil and larvae is going slowly — this mud really hangs onto its water — maybe that's why the larvae are so thick there.

Grilled T-bone steaks for dinner — we're calling it the "gain a pound a day" diet. Everything is just so good. The rest of the day is good but fairly uneventful.

January 25, 2005: In the afternoon we travel to Stepping Stones and Cormorant Island to look for adult Belgica.

We’ve been to Stepping Stones before, but Cormorant is absolutely beautiful — big jagged cliffs with bright orange lichens and bright red iron deposits all over them.

There is more different vegetation and lichens here than we’ve seen so far — and of course, nesting blue-eyed shag cormorants all over the place. These are graceful, very beautiful birds.

We also see one of the only two types of flowering plant that exist on Antarctica, and it is in bloom. It’s a cushion plant called Colobanthus — it kind of looks like a moss with little green flowers, and is very pretty.

Back home in time for dinner — a full-on Thanksgiving feast. Also, Scott gives us the news that the larvae that have been dehydrating for a week at 98.2% humidity have "turned the corner", meaning they have lost over 50% of their water, and are now beginning to actually reabsorb some moisture from the air, probably by changing the number of solutes dissolved in their blood. Yet another cool, successful result. We really have an amazing amount of data, and seem to be finding out new things every day.

January 26, 2005: Today it snows like crazy — big, fluffy, beautiful flakes that don't stick much and melt pretty

quickly, but are fun anyway. We get about half an inch. Joe builds a snowman right in front of the "Hazardous Waste" sign, which makes for a nice picture. There is a snowball fight or two.

Also the cruise ship Endeavour visits today for the second time this summer, bearing Bob the station manager's parents — they've booked themselves on this cruise so they can see him, and his birthday was a couple of days ago — that works out well, and we are allowed to take a Zodiac out to visit the ship, which is fun.

January 27, 2005: The soil from Torgie I put in the backyard to dehydrate is still not even close to dry enough, and

the larvae are still very plump looking. This is not very much soil at all, and it's shielded from precipitation, and it has been in relatively dry air for ten days. Torgie's soil sure does hold on to its water effectively. We go out in the morning towards the south islands, and about halfway to them we start seeing whales. Humpbacks, two of them, surfacing and blowing air out their blowholes incredibly close to us, making a whooshing sound when they blow that I wish I could record. We follow, hoping for that classic humpback view of the whole tail sticking up as they dive, which we eventually get.

Finally we land at Limitrophe Island, which has little to offer us Belgica-wise, and then to Hermit, which is better, and also has a lot of other wildlife. Our landing site is pretty close to a bunch of Antarctic terns, which are beautiful little fork-tailed, orange-beaked, black-capped, incredibly graceful fliers. They are almost indistinguishable from the Arctic tern, which migrates from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. Ixodes uriae may have been carried between hemispheres by parasitizing these terns.

Hermit is a big, craggy, beautiful island, and really brings home the fact that each island here is really its own little world, with a unique combination of geology and biology. We see a Weddell seal (sleeping, of course), which apparently is quite rare around here — it has very cool coloration, and wakes up a little to essentially thumb its nose at us and heave itself into a position about 10 meters further away.

Here there is another fur seal, which by the way is a very different animal from leopard, elephant, crabeater and Weddell seals. Taxonomists (biologists who classify organisms into groups) classify fur seals as eared seals – all other Antarctic seals are true seals. The fur seal is also the only seal that can really move well on land, and some are fairly aggressive and can hurt you if they catch up with you. This one notices us, but merely gets up on its flippers (which really are pretty close to legs — it’s basically standing on all fours) and growls and stares us down. Still, we are somewhat startled by a seal that actually does stuff, and we make sure to bother it as little as we can.

After we get back, it is announced that it's Josh's birthday, and that it might be a good time to jump into the harbor. Six of us take the plunge, right off the big rubber bumper that docking ships butt up against. It’s a long way down, and the water is about 33°F, and lots of involuntary, unintelligible noises come out of your mouth when you surface. But it’s fun, and we then head straight for the hot tub to bring our body temperatures back up. When I get back inside, Joe points out the water temperature in the weather room (which has lots of weather displays and information about the local conditions, gathered from a weather station that is right here). We have just immersed ourselves in water that is 32.9°F.

January 29, 2005:

Today we are visited by yet another cruise ship, the Crystal Symphony. I am part of a group from the station that goes aboard in a Zodiac to talk to the passengers about what goes on at Palmer Station. The ship is as big as the Amsterdam, just absolutely enormous.

There is a little door in the side of the boat, just above the waterline that we pull our Zodiac right up to and get out. The place is like the biggest, fanciest floating hotel I've ever seen. The crew welcomes us, and we go to an auditorium, where lots of passengers have gathered to hear three of the Palmer Station staff give a slide show presentation about the Antarctic. The passengers are very interested and attentive, and afterwards we answer lots of questions, pose for pictures with passengers — a few people actually want our autographs! We decide that this is our chance to be celebrities, and enjoy it while it lasts.

We are treated to a very nice buffet lunch afterwards, and then say our goodbyes — as we pull away from the ship, lots of passengers are waving from the decks that seem hundreds of feet above us. The whole thing is a very strange experience.

When we return, we go to our last Sunday station meeting (we leave Palmer on Wednesday), at which folks are very nice and say they’re going to miss us, and we are given cool red baseball caps that say "Palmer Station" on them. I'm going to miss them, too.

January 30, 2005: I'm running out of time to write — today we went to some beautiful islands, saw an old shipwreck sticking out of the water, and sledded down a hill on our butts. We also witnessed a glacier calving, which was very exciting and sent out a huge wave.

We are beginning to pack up our lab, in preparation for leaving the day after tomorrow. January 31, 2005:

Today we finish packing up our lab — all of us are definitely sad to go — we will miss the people and the place very much. The Laurence M. Gould arrives tomorrow morning at 8 am. February 1, 2005:

The LMG has arrived, bringing with it many people moving on to the station as soon as we move out — it’s a big personnel change here, and there is much rushing around and activity. We are preparing to say our goodbyes — we sleep on the ship tonight, and it leaves at 8 am tomorrow.