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Ecology and
Environmental Sciences |
Will Gray Finds Diatoms
My name is William Gray, and I am
an undergraduate student at the University of Maine, going into my
fourth year as an Ecology major. This summer, I have taken a job
working for Professor Jasmine Saros, a new professor at the
University of Maine. Professor Saros surveys and experiments with
diatoms (a group of phytoplankton that encase themselves in silicate
cases) to determine factors that drive changes in diatom species
composition in the alpine waters of the Beartooth Mountains, and in
addition places like Glacier National Park and lakes in the prairies
in the Dakotas and salt lakes in the western regions of the United
States. (Professor Saros shown here at Beauty Lake)
When I first went to work for
Professor Saros in the summer, all of the work was geared toward
getting unpacked from moving from The University of Wisconsin,
Lacrosse and getting ready for the trip to the Beartooth Mountains
in July, to gather data for the 2007 season. This consisted of
mainly putting away equipment and glassware, and putting equipment
for the trip in July along shelves to be picked up and shipped or
flown with us later. There was nothing more that we really could do
until the July trip actually arrived.
When the time for the July trip
actually arrived, we flew out to Salt Lake City with the equipment
that we hadn’t already shipped out to Montana. We stayed the night
in Salt Lake City, and drove up through Yellowstone National Park
the next day. One thing that I was unprepared for when I arrived
(since I had never been west of Florida before) was how open the
area was. When we finally arrived in Cooke City, Montana, we all
pretty much went to bed immediately. The next day we were set to
travel to the first lake Beartooth Lake, which was a lake that we
could drive up to. We paddled out into the lake and started
profiling the lake, taking reading with a device called a HydroLab,
which can measure pH, temperature, conductivity, and in vivo
chlorophyll levels. We took readings at 1 meter interval depths
until we reached the bottom of the lake. We then took out van dorn
Bottles, which are used to collect water samples from specific
depths to depths at roughly 3 meter intervals throughout the lake.
We took two bottles worth of water from each depth, and filled
portable collapsible containers that we brought to carry the water
back to shore for filtering. Once the water samples were completed
we took the sediment samples with a sediment drop corer, which is
basically just a tube with a weight attached to it. Since the
person who takes the core has to hold the bottom of the core in
place while one of us rows back, we always took the core just before
we headed back to shore. When we reached shore, we took the samples
that were needed and started filtering the water samples. To filter
the water samples, we took the manifolds (which are basically vacuum
pumps that small glass filters can be attached to. We filtered the
samples with two manifolds for both chlorophyll and particulate
carbon and nitrogen in the water samples. We took three samples for
the chlorophyll analysis, and two samples for the carbon and
nitrogen analysis. In the following days, we would travel to over 11
lakes, listed here I order. Beartooth Lake, Island Lake, Beauty
Lake, Kersey Lake, Heart Lake, Glacier Lake, Beauty Lake, Emerald
Lake, Fossil Lake, Dewey Lake, and Rainbow Lake. The trips to
Island and Beauty Lakes went well with the filtering and sampling
being completed for Island and the surveying being done for Beauty.
An experiment was also laid out in Beauty Lake, to be picked up at a
later time. (The raft is shown here in Island Lake)
The on the fifth of July we had
planned to go to Emerald and Glacier lakes which involve the
steepest hiking of the entire trip. Unfortunately both altitude and
motion sickness combined to make me sick enough so that I wouldn’t
be able to travel on that day. The others went to Kersey Lake
instead that day.
After a long day recovering from
being sick, I went out to the next lake with the rest of the group
and didn’t have any problems. On this trip I lowered the Hydrolab
when we went out, and we took the samples and filtered, and finished
just before storms blew up from the areas to the south of us. I
have seen plenty of thunderstorms in Maine, but they don’t look
quite as ominous as the ones that came up in Montana.
The next day we went to Emerald
and Glacier, and hiked up the switchbacks. I have never really seen
hills that were steep enough to warrant the use of switchbacks
before, it was quite a hike. When we got there we had all expected
Glacier Lake to be turbulent, which would mean that we would have to
go over to Emerald, and then return to Glacier at a later time.
Glacier Lake was calm, which apparently was a very odd occurrence.
We sampled Glacier, which took until the early afternoon, and headed
over to Emerald. Unfortunately, the weather decided to pick up at
this time, and ended up having to return to Emerald another time.
After a few days of sampling
lakes, we set out on the three day hike to sample
Fossil Lake,
Dewey Lake, and Rainbow Lake. Our backpacks were loaded onto mules
for the trip uphill to Fossil Lake. After a nine mile hike up to
Fossil Lake, we went out to sample the lake, and I used the sediment
corer to get our sediment samples. Once we got the sample back to
shore, we take the top of the sediment corer off, and take the
extruder and push it through the opening at the bottom of the corer
tube. We push the core up until it reaches the top of the tube, and
then suction off half centimeter increments for later analysis.
We then proceeded downhill two
miles to Dewey Lake and set up camp. We had macaroni ad cheese and
summer sausage for dinner, which was much better then I had thought
it would be. When we got up the next day, we had breakfast, and then
we sampled and filtered Dewey. Once this was completed, we hiked to
Rainbow, which involved some of the most beautiful terrain of the
trip. Unfortunately, all of my pictures from the
Fossil-Dewey-Rainbow trip went missing. Once we got to Rainbow Lake,
we set up camp and sampled the lake in the morning. One of the
things that made Rainbow Lake different was the fact that the lake
was bright blue, due to the fact that there is glacial sediment
running down from the surrounding mountains.
The next day we hiked out of
Rainbow lake to the parking lot at East Rosebud lake, which took
most of the day. Within half an hour after we left the parking lot,
there was a large thunderstorm that was over the mountains that we
had just left.
We
drove back to Salt Lake City the next day and flew back to Bangor
the morning after to start chlorophyll analysis in the next couple
of weeks.
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