I woke up this morning to Erin standing shivering in our room, “It’s so freaking cold.”  Five minutes later we stared out the window as snow swirled by (in sizeable chunks).  We immediately thought of our other two roommates who had woken up this morning to go out in the field to do field work.  Blaize and Moira are yet to return and it is almost breakfast time.  So like the caring concerned roommates we are, we sit down with some cranberry pie, hot tea/coffee and watch the snow fall on the river from inside the warm barge.  We fear our planned trip to Duvannyi Yar this evening by barge may be postponed or cancelled.  Also field work may not be allowed in this cold weather, but we’re still hopeful.

Twenty minutes after 9:00, and the girls are not yet back from their excursion.  Our coffee is gone along with our pie.

Besides this morning, we have been working really hard in the field and in the lab.  Yesterday, the lake team, although down two people, found some of the most exciting invertebrates yet.  We found fresh water clams, an abundance of arthropods (little shrimpies), caddisfly cases and flatworms in Tube Dispenser Lake.  Nikita showed us a new method of collecting a diversity of insects by wrapping birch branches together, sticking them into the lake and returning to shake them out into a bucket.  Using this new “Brakita” method we more than doubled the amount of different taxa we know are in Shuchi Lake.  Sifting through sediment and detritus for bugs until 1:30 in the morning was much more exciting than usual.  So, we are showing a greater diversity and amount of insects in the bigger, deeper lake, Tube Dispenser.  Also, this lake is showing a much greater difference between the eroding and non-eroding side as the lake moves one direction.  What could be the reason for this?

It’s now 9:35 and Moira and Blaize have returned victorious!

The stream team (also know as the X-stream Team) has also had a successful start to our research. Yesterday we did our first salt and nutrient addition at Tube Dispenser Outlet! The experiment went incredibly smoothly, although it took a lot longer than we had expected due to the low discharge of the streams here. It would have been too lucky to have the whole day go well though, and we hit our bump in the road when we got back to the lab. Due to some difficulty reading Russian labels, we were adding the wrong proportion of nutrients to our stream. Once we translated this error, the funky lab results suddenly made sense! So we have adjusted our fertilizer cocktail and have high hopes that it will work better today (if we can get out in the field that is). We hopefully will brave the cold and attempt another addition experiment to Giraffe Lake Outlet today!

Bonus of snow in July: NO MOSQUITOES!

-Erin and Kayla