Moose!

I was very upset when I missed seeing my first moose because I was singing along to "Like A Prayer" too loudly to hear the grad student in our lab tell me from the backseat when we drove past one. Luckily a few days later I was in the car when these three burst out of the woods and ran right past the car, and I finally saw my first moose. And three at once! I couldn't be mad at Madonna for long anyway. In this one you can see the trees in the background are still all burned from the huge forest fire they had there a few years ago. There were actually several forest fires when we were there, too, but they weren't as bad.

Kashwitna Lake

This is Kashwitna Lake, which we stopped at on the way back from Talkeetna. This is just about the darkest I ever saw it get in Alaska, it was about 12:30am when I took this. Plus I was underexposing to get more cloud detail, so it was lighter out than it looks in these images, especially the first one. It was just such a striking lighting condition! I can't wait to print out the panoramic image really huge when I get back to the printer that can handle doing it for me. It was my first time trying to stitch images together, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be, although it did take a little bit of fixing afterwards. Hopefully the trouble areas aren't too apparent!

Talkeetna

This is in Talkeetna, a small town we drove to for a day trip, stopping off at a bunch of lakes on the way there and back to make collections and do a little observation. There was almost nothing there except a few shops, a few restaurants, and a place where you could take horseback rides. None of us rode the horses, but being fresh out of other things to do we spent some time with these two. They were the only ones free in their little paddock, and not saddled up. Maybe they were particularly temperamental? In any case, Jana had had very little contact with horses before and clearly had no idea what to do when this one reached out and blew in her face!

All manner of sea creatures!

Well, lake creatures, really. This is a just a snail that Jighnasha found at Pup lake and held out for me to take a picture of. This one was sort of a happy surprise, it was just a point-and-shoot-without-much-thinking moment. She wanted me to take a pictures of the snail so I did, and then when I was scrolling through all the pictures it just jumped out at me. Maybe it's the colors I like so much.

Morvro Lake

There's no public access to Morvro Lake, so we were looking over our shoulders for the owners of this property the entire time we did water quality. Luckily they didn't show up while we were carefully tiptoeing through their yard to get to the lake! Of course we did knock on the door first to ask them if they minded, but no one answered. It was very nervewracking to be watching over my shoulder while pipetting water from the lake into tubes in the back of our van, which we'd parked next to their two old pickups in their huge gravel driveway which bordered on parking-lot size. They probably would have thought we were crazy if they'd come home! It didn't help thinking about what a rural place we were in; one of my professors has had a couple guns pulled on him before in Alaska while trying to get to one lake or another. Funny, a bunch of fish scientists doesn't seem very threatening to me!

Lazy Lake

Ironically, if you're actually lazy, you'd never get to Lazy Lake. To take these pictures I was struggling to hold two jars of fish and the plankton tow in one hand while
grabbing my Rebel with the other from around my neck. I couldn't zoom with only one hand, but I managed ok. Jana is carrying her macroinvertibrate net to catch bugs and Lauren is carrying ten quarter-inch minnow traps, which is what we use to trap the fish we then collect and study. She and Jana are wearing waders because Lazy Lake is so swampy that if you don't wear them you can't get close enough to the bank to throw the traps, let alone collect. I was wearing regular boots and barely made it without getting my boots full of water.

South Rolly

Wow, I'm really awful at this every-day thing! I think it's because I'm not on a regular schedule up here, so it's hard to remember to do much of anything except eat. And even that I sometimes forget to do!

Anyway, this is at South Rolly lake, which has a campground on it, so there are people everywhere. It was actually kind of awkward pulling out the water quality stuff, test tubes and pipettes, because everyone looked at us like we were insane. We did the algae tow off of this dock which (as you can see) had kids crawling all over it - Jana had a hard time not hitting them swinging the tow! It was really gorgeous, as you can see, although Lauren told me I was creepy to take pictures of other people's children. :)

The dock.

These are also at Camp Lasda, on Kelly Lake. In the first image Jana is filling bottles of water so we can do our water quality tests on them. We actually have a cooler full of pipettes and test tubes and even a portable suction unit in the back of our car to do the water quality, it's really pretty cool. Well, cool in a horribly nerdy sort of way, as we sit at the edges of these lakes and squirt water into test tubes and erlenmeyer flasks with our pipettes! In the second one, she's collecting algae in her tow, which requires her to swing the tow around her head before throwing it out into the water and then dragging it back to shore (or in this case, dock) to collect the algae in the tow's net.

Camp Lasda

Not trapped in a petri dish yesterday! :) This was actually at a seemingly abandoned camp that has lake access. We had to cross these tracks to get to the lake front from the main bit of the camp, which made me a little nervous. Visions of campers scampering across railroad tracks to get to the beach... It's probably better that it's been abandoned!

Been a bit lacking lately...

Sorry I've been so bad lately about posting! I've been sort of in a photographical rut, by which I mean I've been trapped in the lab for the past few days. BUT tomorrow I'm going out to trap a few lakes, so I should have some more material to go on than test tubes and petri dishes. So I give you this one to last till then - This is how we've been amusing ourselves in the evenings. Lauren (the one in the baseball hat) is the reigning champion thus far, being beaten only by Matt, who's since left for Massachusetts.

Hope you're not weak stomached...

So a few days ago two of the people I'm working with got to go fly in a small airplane and get to some lakes inaccessible by road. Cool, right? Cool until they dropped their traps and came back with leeches as well as fish. They brought two of them back to the lab, too. I was and continue to be disgusted that we have two leeches, two GIANT leeches in a tupperware tub in one corner of the lab. Of course, being somewhat of a science geek (heh), I can't help but be weirdly fascinated as well. Mostly because they just disgust me so much, but... you know. Sometimes you're just drawn to the things that make you the most queasy. And so I give you, Portrait of Leeches. I shudder to think how close I was to make this image, it's barely cropped. It's funny how being behind a lens can feel like protection even when it's not at all, especially when it comes to something like leeches! As if they wouldn't latch onto me either way. Looking at my images, I definitely got closer and closer as I was taking the images. Maybe it seemed so much less real through the lens, or I forgot all about their blood-sucking tendencies while focusing more on how their little bodies were contorting and moving and waving in the weirdest ways. It's really amazing how invertebrates can contort themselves.

Anchor Point continued

I got around to editing the other Anchor Point photos while in the lab today. In the second image you should be able to see three bald eagles. We think we saw at least seven there at once, all circling around. Of course the two guys that worked there thought nothing of it while we all freaked out. One eagle actually swooped right in front of our van while we were all eating lunch, and its wingspan was looked longer than the van was wide. It was incredible. The third image is a tractor backing into the ocean to pull out a boat, which is what the two guys that work there do. I guess there's no way for the little fishing boats to get out of the water without being pulled out by these tractors that wait by the ocean with a radio for calls from the boats. They have these hitches, two of which can be seen (sans tractor) in the last image, that the boats drive straight into once the tractors are in the water. It's really an amazing sight, the tractors just drive straight into the ocean until you'd swear the engine must be submerged and completely destroyed, but then they manage to come back out again, while towing a boat.

Anchor Point

This is the westernmost highway point in the United States! Unfortunately (note the ominous clouds) the weather was a bit nasty, so we didn't stay overnight like we'd planned so I'm back in Anchorage. We went, we collected the fish, and we came back. Ten hours of driving in one day is a little exhausting, but luckily the driver, a post-doc named Matt, was a fellow photographer, so he kept stopping the car and we'd all get out and photograph the scenery. He and I have matching rebels, but he's got several lenses and I only have the kit lens, so I developed a bit of lens envy every time I couldn't get a shot as wide or telephoto as I'd like. Once I'm actually making money I'll be able to trick out my camera, too! Anyway, I have a lot more images from the trip, but I don't have the energy to edit them all, so this is all you get for today. It's definitely my favorite of the day, though.

Back in the lab.

I guess the lab side of things doesn't produce such bad images, either. These are all of Justin's petri dishes full of embryos. They were stacked on top of one of the lab benches, and I placed the camera on the bench aiming at the dishes and snapped this without even looking through the viewfinder. I couldn't decide whether to crop out the foreground, and eventually exhaustion won out and I did nothing to it!

And now it's off to bed because we're leaving for Anchor River at 5am tomorrow, and I'd love to squeeze in a shower before we do so, which means I have to get up at like 4:15. Which is in four hours. Ahhh!

The field!

Today I was in the field. The field that scientists are always talking about, yet I had never been to. It was great fun! I clambered around three different lakes and pulled in traps and then sorted and collected stickleback. Then we took them back to the lab to run trials on, some of which I also did today, but still. NATURE! It was fun. I even got to see Anna Lake, which was lovely. Here are three that I feel are sort of a series. The second two are Justin, a grad student, wading into Lynne lake to fill a cooler full of fish with more water for transportation back to our University of Anchorage lab. See all the little stickleback fish in the closeup of the cooler? I love the way they huddle together. And I love the reflections of the sky in the water.

Much better than flying over the ocean.

So because it's all I have so far, I give you the view out of my plane window. Lovely, huh? I about died when after seeing patchwork fields for hours I looked out of my window and saw this. Now it's time to go do some quality researching!