Day 2 - August 5, 2009

Today was the first full day we spent here at the center. It’s really comfortable in home like. All the scientists are incredibly friendly and helpful. However they all seem to revel in the disgust on our faces when they tell us how they haven’t bathed for days. This morning after a delicious breakfast of pancakes, eggs, sausage, cereal, and just about every other breakfast food ever cooked we went to the back of the cold lab to put on our bug jackets and waders for the first time. For this first field session we didn’t do much actual scientific stuff. We mostly just tried to get accustomed to being in waders.

This didn’t look as hard as it really was. On first glance it looked like the water couldn’t be more than 1 or 2 feet deep. I was surprised when I took my first step in and found myself submerged to my knee. The floor of the pond we were in, like all the ponds in the area, was organic and made up of a loose sort of mud that virtually sucked people into it.

After field work and lunch, we had a short lecture from Dr. Cash on what we were specifically going to be doing. Our main objectives were to get samples of frogs, fish, and the wetland water. In this lecture we learned about the mysteries of how the fish and frogs stayed in these ponds that were comprised entirely of melt waters. The frogs apparently use a sort of biological antifreeze to allow their blood to super-cool rather than freeze. They do this by ramping up their glucose levels thus changing their bloods specific heat and allowing it to have a lower freezing point.

After this lecture, we went and made fish traps which were made out of two 2 liter soda bottles assembled in a way that made it so the fish could go in but could not go out. Apparently when the fish entered the trap they were completely disoriented and couldn’t figure out away to exit the trap. We first had to clean out a whole bunch of bottles that were from the recycling center. Then we had to put cut them and put them together.

We then went out and placed the traps in ponds around the wetland and then came back to the center for dinner. After dinner we attended a lecture by the Canadian Parks and Wildlife Society on Caribou which was interesting but everyone was so tired that we were more like zombies in the lecture hall rather than inquisitive students.

-Joe