The Barrow wet site has been turned into a lemming home. To me, lemmings are like wild Arctic hamsters.
When they make their home, they destroy everything in their path. The Barrow wet site has a few plots that have been completely destroyed. Essentially, they look like a lawn mower went through and cut down all of the vegetation, and then piled all the dead leaves up so something can live under them. That something, is lemmings. This is not good for science. We have marked individual plants in our plots that we measure every ten days or so, and have been measured for many years. When they get eaten, we can’t measure them. Come on lemmings, stop destroying science! Tim and I did growth measures at the Barrow wet site, and it made me sad the number of times I had to write “Eaten” instead of a number… but, it did make the measures go faster… still, NOT GOOD. So, of course when Tim and I saw 2 lemmings under the boardwalk while we were working the other day, we did what we were told to do… or tried. We are supposed to catch the lemmings in one of our favorite tundra tools, and then release it far away from the site. What tool might this be? Well, it looks like this:
Pringles cans. Dr. Bob Hollister loves these. So, first step is to eat all of the Pringles. Second step: lemming catch and release… if you can. Tim and I spent a lot of time chasing two lemmings around the site. The first one escaped out into the open tundra, so we followed. It made it to some holes and we lost it, after a short struggle, so we went back to work. When we finished, we saw another lemming, ready for round two. We had it cornered, and it still escaped. Turns out lemmings are too fast for us. Dr. Hollister would be disappointed. Better luck next time I suppose…
Other than measuring grass and counting flowers and chasing lemmings, we do get to do some things inside. One project we are working on this year is casting plants in resin to have a sort of 3D representation of our plants. It is actually really cool, and they look pretty awesome when they are done. We collect plants and dry them by hanging them upside down or using silica beads:
This is our resin desk in the lab. You can see all of the plants we are drying currently. Once the plants are completely dry, it is time to cast them in the resin:
The resins are currently hardening in the hood in the lab. We have to use the hood because of the smell. It’s not good. I look forward to seeing the finished product, and I will be sure to post pictures when they are done.
Well, after an 8:30AM to 5PM field day, it is time to relax.
For those of you who are interested, Tim and Chase are also blogging this summer. Feel free to check out their posts:
Tim: http://arcticresearcher.wordpress.com/
Chase: http://chaseinthetundra.wordpress.com/
Let's just sit back and watch the plots grow... 