Moving On

On Tuesday, we packed up camp and left our refuge in the willows for new adventures. The season with C. sociabilis went fast, and tomorrow, we head for the north part of Argentina to investigate another social tuco-tuco. The past few days were spent outside a small town, El Maiten, south of Bariloche. Years ago, some professional animal collectors found a bunch of tucos living in a valley. Their report was that these tucos were up everywhere and "chirped like birds". That's classic sociabilis. Since then, some local mammalogists checked out the area and found burrows but did not see the animals. We went to see for ourselves just what tuco was living there. As it turned out, it was C. haigi, a solitary tuco known around Bariloche. Even though this species is found close to where we find soci, I had not yet met haigi up close and personal. We caught a mom and her pups and two males. They communicated more with grunts, rather than chirps, and were quite docile.

Today's picture shows John and Eileen on one of our last nights in camp. Like I said, the weather finally turned warm and we were often eating dinner outside. John has taken up guitar playing and brought his travel guitar with him, practicing all the time. Eileen, of course, continues to work even "after hours". By 9 pm or so, we hunker down in the truck for our nightly video of House. We're now on Season 3, and watching it has become our favorite tuco team past-time. I am hoping to post some more from Jujuy and parts north, but until then, I send my wishes to you all for a wonderful Christmas. Cross your fingers for me on Tuesday... we head to 14,000+ feet altitude and I am hoping that I don't get sick! From Bariloche, Felices Fiestas!!

Spring, Glorious Spring

Finally, spring has arrived in the Limay River Valley! It has turned wonderfully warm, so warm that the wind is a welcome friend. We’ve had a few sprinkles of rain but the temps are good enough to take a bath in the stream. We are now upon our last week of field work for C. sociabilis. It has been an interesting field season, surprising with who we’ve found has survived. Overall, older females seemed to do better than yearlings and even more of a surprise, there has been an adult male in nearly every colony! Those of you who know the tuco-tuco story know that male survival is quite low in this species, and in fact, we rarely encounter an adult male. It’s a good year when about 40% of the colonies have a male. So why such a difference this year? While they had rain in May (their Fall), they had little rain through the winter when tucos are mating. Perhaps, mortality was very high for last year’s litters, but I’m not sure if lowered competition for the males gave those remaining a better chance at survival. Who knows? But we also have seen a strong male sex ratio bias in the pups. And finally, I have only come across one lone female. The rest are living in groups this year. I have seen this downward trend toward fewer and fewer females living alone over the past 6 years. I am anxious to go back over the data to see if there may be a pattern that emerges with weather, yearling survival, sex ratio and number of lone to group colonies.

Today’s photo show a little pup and his generous donation to my dissertation cause. I do need more than one poop to get a sufficient sample of CORT hormones but he came through with more! I’ve collected a fair amount of samples and will add it to what I’ve already analyzed in the lab. In general, I have found that group living females have lower baseline CORT (or stress) hormones than females living alone. I have also found that CORT in pups is also high or low depending on living with a lone mom or group living moms. How much of that is inherited or passed through mom’s milk is yet to be known, but it is interesting to me. With the help of the best undergrad “wranglers” ever, I continue to run behavior tests with the pups in the lab at Berkeley, looking to see if behavior and hormones are correlated. Specifically, I am testing exploratory or bold behavior in an open arena in which they have the option of running around or hiding in a refuge. We have found in the adult lab females that there’s a strong correlation with CORT and boldness. That is, lower CORT, higher exploratory behavior. We’ll see how this holds with the pups.

We leave in about 5 days for a place called Chubut to check out a possible population of C. sociabilis. It’s been rumored that there use to be some living in this region south of Bariloche. We’ll be breaking camp on the 15th, head down to Chubut for a few days and then back to Bariloche, where we catch the bus to Salta. There we will rent a truck and head into the mountains near Jujuy and I will get to meet another social tuco-tuco!

Wind-worn

We made a last minute decision to come into town today, only because we´ve gone two days now with such high winds and intermittent rain, that we´ve been unable to trap tucos. The good news is that the weather is suppose to turn warm. Cross your fingers! We have about 5 more colonies to go.

Meanwhile, I do a lot of bird watching when I´m not watching the tucos or the holes from which they pop up. This little girl in the pic, Fio Fio, in Spanish... and I think from the genus, Elainea, or something like that, has been the most noticeable visitor around camp and the field. They´re cute little buggers, which hang on to sticks and watch for bugs, quickly popping down to the ground to snag a bit and then back to their perch. They remind me of kinglets but Claire, you might have to hunt this one down for me. Anyway, they´re quite the chirpers and fun to follow. We also came upon a Loica´s nest. They are like the southern hemisphere´s version of a meadowlark but with a brilliant red chest. They nest on the ground and this nest had a cowbird chick in it and what looked like another cowbird egg along with its own two eggs. Unfortunately, the parents abandoned the nest. I continue to watch our kestrel pair feeding in the lower hollow of a tree and hope to post a short clip soon. They are quite the beautiful birds and their hatchlings are getting quite the gourmet meals, usually consisting of large juicy lizards. Finally, we´ve had our "regular" little gray bird (Doica) show up to fight himself in the truck side mirrors. It´s funny to watch as he flies at the mirror over and over again. From the condors to the swallows, this place is full of amazing birdlife.

We bought our bus tickets for Salta today. It´s a two day bus ride to where we pick up our rental truck and head into the mountains near Jujuy. Should be fun. Also, we will be checking out a site about 150 km from here on reports that another population of C. sociabilis may be there. We´re all doubting this but gonna check just in case. That´s all for now. I´m probably going to be out of touch until Dec. 11 or so as we hope to take advantage of the promised good weather. Hope you´re all staying warm during the winter. I´m betting my spring is colder than your (i.e. California) winter... at least right now. Missing you all ... Julie

Oh How the Wind Doth Blow!

We’ve been here nearly 3 weeks and only have about 3 to go. It’s a shortened season at this site, but come Dec. 18th, we’re headed to north central Argentina to a place called Jujuy (said Who-Whoee and put some zing into it when you say it). John and Eileen and my labmate, Rachel, went there last May to check out another report of a social tuco. You may recall that we checked out one last year in Tierra del Fuego, but as it turned out, the tuco was a solitary one, though still quite cute (which goes a long way in my book). However, the one in Jujuy IS social and we are headed there to do some serious radio telemetry to better understand group size and composition.

Here, though, we have a lot of work to do in a little time… and the weather is not cooperating. It’s been raining quite a bit and the wind… well, I’ve written plenty in past years about the Patagonian wind. It’s like no other. On top of that, it’s downright freezing. I know I was spoiled last year with warmer than usual weather but really, does it have to be this cold??? Still, I am enjoying the open spaces and the relative quiet.

We’ve caught animals in 4 colonies so far. I even noosed an adult female… thinking it was a large pup! Oh well… she survived my ignorance, though not too happy about it. There have been some cool “Attenborough” moments this past week. We have a pair of American Kestrels nesting in one of the trees in our camp. There´s a hole entering into the cavity about ½ meter from the ground… seems low for a kestrel but they are taking turns flying in and out of it with dead mice and lizards. Fun to watch. Can´t wait until I see baby Kestrel fledglings! Also, the annual mating “fly-off “ of a local ant species happened when I was suppose to be standing very still watching for tucos. I noticed one of the senecio bushes “moving” and saw hundreds of ants crawling their way to the top. There were wingless ants, small winged male ants with their “gifts” to be given to the large winged reproductive females. As soon as the females reached the top of a stem, off they flew and before I knew it, there was a whirlwind of flying ants all around and above me. It´s rather spectacular! There are many more, which I hope to write on next week.

Today I am posting a rather shakey clip of walking back to camp after a long day in the field... to give you an idea of how it feels. Eileen and John are ahead of me and when I stop and turn to take a panoramic view, you can see the Andes, across the "highway" toward the field site, and back toward our camp. Thanks for the emails and comments. Wishing you all a very Happy Thanksgiving!!

First Week

Well, we’ve had our first full week in Argentina and I’ve already had female tucos calling at me, pups showing me their furry little faces, tero teros (southern lapwings) squawking at me when I cross the malline (meadow), hares running from me, beetles crawling around me, lizards scurrying past me, rain spitting at me, and you guessed it, wind blowing like only a Patagonian wind can do. I’ve even been to an asado, which, for those of you who have been following my adventures know, is one of my favorite Argentina experiences. It’s wonderful. I’ve traded bleary-eyed 5 am commutes for a ½ mile walk through the steppe to the population site. I’ve traded an alarm waking me up for the songs of birds and bubbling sounds of the stream that flows past my tent. Sure my room is small and I have to dress stretched out on my sleeping bag. Ok, there’s no bathroom; just a bush that I hide behind after jumping the stream. No, no showers either but we’ve a sun heated water bag that will do when it’s not too cold out. I do use the stream to wash my hair but have to watch out for head freezes. I am out of doors from sun up to sun down and I feel the stress melting away. My kids, my wranglers, and my labmates know what a crazy week I was having just before I left, but now I am in a different world and the lovely Patagonian wind is blowing all the craziness away.

This week, I’ve posted a clip of the first pup I saw in a colony we call mid-malline. We’re pretty sure there are at least two females and perhaps a male. We’ve now found pups at 3 other colonies. The place is hopping and ready to be caught and poops collected. I’ll be in about once a week to town and will update as I can. Sending my love from the bottom of the world… Julie

Never say Never

I know. I know. I intimated that last year was my last year doing field work in Argentina but I take it all back and will never say never again.

We arrived in Bariloche, Argentina, on Monday morning, Nov. 9, the wind blowing and the mountains shining with the previous night’s snowfall. It is spring and freezing… and was not hard to justify staying in a hosteria for our first night! There was much to do, supplies to pick up which had been stored at our friend’s, Gustavo, house, and a trip to Centro Atomico to fill our liquid nitrogen tanks (the better to freeze the poops with!). By mid-day, Wednesday, we had made our way to the camp and began setting up the tents. It is strange to be here with out John, but he will soon join us and our team will be complete. This first week will be spent scouting the site, assessing which colonies are occupied, collaring select females with radio transmitters for colonies in which we cannot determine boundaries, and finishing writing a grant. Why is it that, at the start of every field season, I am working on a grant?! This one, however, is a big NSF grant that will seek funding to continue looking at the relationship between the social environment, stress hormones (glucocorticoids), and behavior… and who knows? If funded, I may be coming back for a long time yet.

Day 1 on the field and I saw a tuco immediately. Day 2 and I saw pups. It should be a very good year. I have attached a picture of my Argentina bedroom, much different than the one I have at home in Sebastopol. This first post is short but more to come later. I will say that it is good to be back in my southern hemisphere home!

Packing to Leave

It is nearly 10 pm and I am still packing my stuff! I've posted a picture of what my room looked like just a couple of hours ago. Now nearly all that stuff is in a trunk and a backpack. Tomorrow I leave my little town of Sebastopol and take the airporter to SFO, fly to Dallas-Fort Worth and then on to Buenos Aires, arriving around 9 am their time on Sunday morning. Eileen, my advisor and good friend, will be with me. We will meet our dear friend, Ana Paula, from Mar del Plata, for a quick hello and lunch and then we grab a bus to Bariloche, which is southwest of Buenos Aires and in the region known as Patagonia. When I tell people that our bus ride is 19+ hours long, they feel sorry for me, but really, the buses in Argentina are amazing! The seats are huge and lie nearly completely back. They give blankets and pillows, feed you, and play movies. I actually catch up on my rest during the bus trip!

Anyway, stay in touch! Email me or make comments here. As much as I love going, I do get homesick and like to hear a word or two from all my friends and family. The next time I write will be from the southern hemisphere!

My Other Favorite

So, I'm going to switch gears and post about my other favorite animal, the animal that lured me into this wonderful world of biology and animal behavior, Orcinus orca, the killer whale. Like most people, my first experience seeing an orca was at a marine park, but it wasn't 'til I saw a free-living killer whale that I was truly smitten. As much as I love the tucos, nothing takes my breath away like this magnificent blackfish. I had signed up for a whale watching trip while camping in the San Juan Islands off Washington's coast and found myself on a boat with whales jumping and spyhopping (like you see in the pic to your left) and tail lobbing and swimming under our boat. It was the most amazing thing ever.... until I discovered kayaking.

Kayaking opened my eyes to the world of sea life in an up-close personal way. Whales, birds, inverts, and all manner of critters who made their living in a salty environment thrilled me. One day I was looking through a book and saw a picture of a kayaker with an orca swimming right by him. I said to myself, "I want to be that kayaker someday!". And those of you who know me, know that is exactly what happened and what I do every summer. I become that kayaker... enjoying the beauty of the Pacific Northwest in the presence of orcas.
It has changed my life. Really. Kayaking with orcas inspired my return to school and though I chose not to study them (for reasons I won't go into now), I find that each year, hanging out with orcas in the San Juans, I am re-energized, re-focused, and reminded why I study biology in the first place. We live in a magnificent world, one which we share with the most amazing beasts. How lucky we are! And what responsibility we have to make sure that we care for this great, blue planet that houses us all. I could write a ton more on this topic but the last thing I want to mention is that the Southern Resident Killer Whales, the pod I am privileged to paddle with, has been struggling for some time now because we've interfered with their food supply, the salmon. There's a lot of work to be done to be able to save that supply, which means sacrifices on our part so that both fish and mammal have a better chance at survival, and that, selfishly, I'll get to continue to find my joy in their midst for many summers to come.

Pups in the Field

So, even though I will miss most of the early days of the pups' lives in the lab, I do get to see pups and catch them in the field. They are pretty darn cute! I've attached my most popular video of two little pups emerging from their hole that I took several years ago. The clip gives a good idea of just how little they come out. Mostly, we are staring at holes, hoping for someone to show their face.

Things are moving rapidly for me now as it is only 2 weeks away. I'm gathering field equipment and packing for 2 1/2 months of living in a tent. It's amazing how fast the year has gone. I notice it more with each field season. Anyway, I'm not sure if anyone is reading this right now but hopefully, you will once I start posting from Argentina. For now, it's back to packing!

Puppies in Tuco World!

Every morning, when I arrive on campus, I go up to "Tuco World", located in the Behavior Suite of Valley Life Sciences Building and check to make sure no one escaped their system and that everyone is happy and healthy. However, as we enter into the austral spring season (aka spring in Argentina), I eagerly check the pregnant females to see if anyone has dropped their litter. I knew we were expecting a litter or two this week and was SO excited to find that female 7405 had come through! Five little wriggly cuties, covered in dark hair and waving short tails. Some have eyes already open and others are in the process. They crawl all over each other when mom isn't there and when she is, there's only one thing on their mind: FOOD! This is my favorite time of year and I am lucky to get to enjoy the first days of a litter before I head to Argentina. As much as I love going, I often miss the births of the pups in the lab. And of course, we don't get to see that part of the free-living tucos since they are all underground. I've uploaded this short video of what I saw this morning and answered those of you who have wondered, what is a tuco?

favorite critters

Today I am showing a picture I took this morning of one of my favorite critters. Those of you reading this probably already know me well enough to know that tucos and orcas top the list. Tucos came into my life unexpectedly when I went to school to finish my undergraduate degree in biology. They became the focus of my graduate work and I can proudly say that this critter, very similar to a gopher, will be the reason I can be called Dr. Woodruff some day. It's a crazy world.
This female tuco is pregnant and in about 1.5 months will produce a litter of ~4 pups, hopefully 2 females and 2 males so that I can look at early environment experiences in a gender-balanced way. I'm mostly interested in social behavior, and these animals, well the females anyway, live in kin groups. However, some disperse to live alone. My advisor, Eileen Lacey, looks at things like reproductive success and survival between those living in groups and those living alone. I, look at their poop. Well, I collect their poop and extract the "stress" hormones (the metabolites of corticosterone) that get excreted. I've found differences between the two social systems... what do you think? Which do you think might carry the higher concentrations of stress hormones, group living or lone?
The cool thing about my study is that I get to look at animals we have at Berkeley in the lab as well as the free-living ones in Argentina. Every year, for the past five years, I've traveled down to the southwest Patagonian region to catch or wait for tucos to pop up. Below is a picture of one in the process of digging her burrow. It's a pretty cool adventure and I'll be telling you more about it once I get down there next month. If you'd have asked me 10 years ago what I'd be doing with my life as I near the 50 year old mark, the last thing I might have said was going to South America to collect rodent poop, but there you have it... life's a funny thing.

Rain, rain, rain...

As anyone knows living here in northern California, we've had a storm sweep through with lots of rain, a bit unusual for this time of year. Because I live so far from school, I often try to stay at my advisor's rental house (dubbed "Catshack, a title bestowed honoring the former renters). However, they just filled their 3rd room with a guest from Indonesia and I thought it might be in poor taste to have some old lady bed down for the night in the living room. He may not understand. Thus, I missed the traditional night of watching "House" with John and Eileen and came back to my own house in Sebastopol. It was fortuitous... and I didn't hesitate one millisecond in clearing my Tuesday schedule so that I could "ride" out the storm that came blustering in the night in my own cozy space. That's it, pictured above. Yes, it's a mess. Yes, I study on my bed (supposedly not smart). Yes, I share my room with my daughter (saving money by renting out two other bedrooms in the house). But yes, I actually get stuff done once in awhile, and I did so today, working on one of my dissertation chapters, which has to be fixed to be acceptable for publication.

So, I'm relishing this day at home with a tummy full of thai food and the promise of some brownies with mint chips, which Beth is suppose to be making any time now ... tomorrow, I'll be back on the freeway at 5:30 am.

October 11, 2009

Today is "Day One" for this blogging thing. I'm not sure it's for me but I want to try this format for updating friends and family on my adventures. I feel very lucky to be on what I call my second journey. Having raised a family on my first journey, I returned to school and ended up finding a whole new life. More on that later, but for now, I'm going to play around with this thing. If anyone starts to actually read it, let me know what you think and give me suggestions. I will be headed to Argentina again (year 6) for field work and would like to post on this site instead of my 125+ emails I usually send out. Anyway, here we go...!