Kayak Zen

For the last few weeks, I've wimped out on my Sunday morning paddle... for several reasons. One, it's been rather cold in the morning. It's hard to pull on all the gear in 40 degree weather. But mostly, the tug of spring gardening has tempted me to stay and play in my own backyard. I've loved it, but I realized, especially after today's paddle, that it's not the same as taking those two hours to lose myself on the sea. It truly is my meditation, my re-centering, my zen... as Sebastopolian hippy as that sounds.

Today was no different as the day started at a cool 39 degrees but quickly the temp began to rise and I knew that I needed to get out to the ocean. The sea was nearing the end of its flood and ready to pull out again. The water was ripply, not choppy, and the swells were just right, lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping. Out near sea lion rock, the waves came in sets of huge breakers between small splashes. I coasted between it and Bodega Head, enjoying the feel of the moving sea beneath me. Sea foam was everywhere. Sea foam results from kelp being broken up. The "goo" inside makes a soap, which foams up in wave action. I love paddling through it, especially with the sun shining on it. While I was looking out at the great expanse, I suddenly saw two spouts, very distinctive plumes rising much higher than the splashing of waves. "Gray whales", I shouted aloud, though no one was around to hear it. I was so excited! Two whales were cruising around the Head on their journey north to Alaska where they will feed all summer after having bred down in the warm winter waters off the coast of Mexico. I am always grateful to paddle where whales are near.

Finally, I turned to head back in though the jetty to the harbor where I started. Gulls, cormorants, willets, surf birds, oyster catchers, and black turnstones were hanging about, warming in the sun's rays. A sea lion was headed out with the tide, probably to join his buddies at the rock. I love taking people kayaking, but these Sunday mornings are special spent alone. My thoughts have had a chance to follow their path until nothing is left but the pure pleasure of being. How fortunate I am to be able to do this. I'll try not to forget what it means to me the next chilly Sunday morning.

Spring-Like Inspirations

Yesterday, I journeyed up to Sacramento to visit a friend, who actually was my invert zoology teacher when I was still an undergrad at Berkeley. Marlene is a great teacher, but she's also a fantastic friend, who I don't see enough of. I call her my laughing friend, because there's no one who I laugh with as much as I do when I'm with her. That's actually saying a lot... because I laugh with a lot of you! Anyway, our day together turned out to be, not only full of laughter, but inspiration for gardening this spring. I've been talking about turning my backyard into a "food basket" by growing lots of vegies and herbs and maybe a few fruit trees. When I saw that Marlene had put 22 fruit trees into her backyard, one that's half as big as mine, I was astounded! Plus, she still grows herbs and vegies and flowers too.

She took me to her favorite nursery and with the help of some very knowledgeable nursery guys, I purchased 3 fruit trees, some raspberry canes, and a few flowers. This morning I woke up to beautiful blue skies and sunshine and an eagerness to plant. I only got the fruit trees in but will hopefully get the rest in sometime during the week. Meanwhile, Jack, the dog, took a great interest in all my digging... and I'm afraid I will have to watch him closely so that he doesn't undo my hard work.

The goal is to eventually have enough fruit trees so that I am picking something ripe and ready every season of the year. Do you think it's possible? The nursery guy said it was!


Above is a picture of Beth, playing the role of Vanna White, pointing out the Peach, the Pluot, and the Plum trees... oh and Jack, the dog, wistfully wanting to dig!

Class Field Trip to Pt. Reyes National Seashore

One of my favorite things to do is to lead a class on an outdoor field trip. If I could get paid for any job in the world, that would be the job, that or being the next David Attenborough! Today, even though I didn't get paid and I'm not even an official GSI (graduate student instructor), I did get to co-lead the Behavioral Ecology class at Berkeley on a field trip to Point Reyes National Seashore, one of the most beautiful pieces of land here in northern California.

The class is learning about how biologists study animal behavior, in class, in lab and in the field. My advisor, Eileen Lacey, is the professor, and together with the two GSI's, we took them to a place called Chimney Rock, famous for the elephant seal haul out where male seals establish territories in order to watch over their harem. The students got a chance to observe males duking it out for access to the females who had finished nursing their pups and were going into estrous.




Elephant seals are amazing marine mammals. They can dive to depths of 2000 feet and hold their breath for half an hour. Some have surpassed even that. Their physiology is the subject of many studies and scientists are continually intrigued by how they are able to withstand the tremendous pressures of the deep sea. Elephant seals haul out for a period of time twice a year, in the winter for breeding and in the summer for molting. The rest of the time, they are out to sea feeding. The males head off toward the Aleutians while the females feed in the open Pacific or Hawaii. These animals were once hunted to near extinction but after given official protection, have rebounded to substantial population numbers and are still growing.

The purpose of today's field trip was to give the students a chance to observe elephant seal behavior, to construct an ethogram by naming and defining behaviors, and then to ask a question and develop hypotheses about interactions between males and females, males and males, females and females. Next, they were to choose one of 3 data collecting techniques they had learned about earlier in order to answer their question. Finally, they were to collect the data, which we would analyze later. Designing a research project is pretty difficult, even for those of us who do it regularly. For many of these students, it was the first time. However, they did great and I think they learned a lot. The seals did great, too, and gave us a lot of behaviors to watch. We saw some serious fighting. We saw some serious mating. We heard some crazy vocalizations. And we had a great time. On top of that, the sun came out! What a way to spend a Saturday in the middle of February!

Hyenas

So, I'm diverting a bit from Argentina to go to Africa... ok, not really. Believe it or not, we have hyenas in Berkeley! Today, our sophomore seminar class went to visit them at the field station in the hills behind campus. These are some of the most amazing beasts I have ever seen, and though I've been privileged to get to visit them fairly often with class field trips, it never ceases to amaze me how cool these guys are, especially for those of us who study hormones and behavior.

The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is native to Kenya but for the past 25 years, there's been a colony housed in a large facility above campus. One of their big claims to fame is the high levels of androgens that are present in females, causing masculinization of the genitalia. In other words, the girls don't look much different than the boys! Hyenas live in a female dominated society where the higher you are in rank, the better access to food and other resources you have. Males disperse from their natal colony to seek matings with females from other colonies. The lucky ones get the higher ranked females, whose offspring will inherit the rank of their mom.

The benefits of this abundance of androgens is that females are large and powerful but there are costs too. Birthing cubs is extremely difficult and often, the first cub to be born dies. If more than one cub is born, they come out fighting, sometimes to the death ... having been bathed in utero in this hormone that seems to be associated with aggression. Much of this research has been done using the hyena colony at Berkeley, and in fact, it is the only one of its kind in the world.

Hyenas are fascinating and as much as I would love to pet one, their massive jaws warn me off, especially after watching a demonstration of their ability to crush huge cow bones. Still, the Berkeley hyenas seem to have a playfulness that I can enjoy behind the fence. Their whooping and laughing and chasing one another are fun to watch on any day in Berkeley... as it was today.

Camelids and Cuys

So, while we were in the high mountains of central Argentina to study the tucos, they weren't the only mammal to inhabit that region. Two different camelid species can be found, the vicuna and the llama. Llamas are raised for their wool and meat, and they were everywhere. Often they grazed quite close to our tents and we would waken to the sound of crunching and munching. Vicunas were pretty abundant too but much more skittish. They resemble the guanacos we see in Patagonia and their behaviors are quite similar. We saw young males chasing one another with the typical style of lowering their heads and charging.

One of my favorite mammals, which we found scurrying around the galpon, or storage building where we did our cooking, was the cuy, a cute little wild guinea pig. I tried to get close but these guys are extremely shy and would run into a nearby hole or tunnel to hide. This picture was actually taken through the window of the galpon. We also saw lots of birds, many new species that I had not seen before, but also familiar ones. The area is known for a large laguna that attracts thousands of flamingos and we often saw flocks of them flying overhead. On the tuco field, an interesting combo of birds, lizards, and frogs shared the large gravelly bed and the holes where the tucos lived. We saw lizards chasing birds and birds hopping after tucos. This was definitely a strange, new Argentina that I had not expected but which is full of possibilities for those of us interested in animal behavior!

The Tucos of Los Pozuelos

Last May, John and Eileen and Rachel, my labmate, went to the Los Pozuelos field site for the first time. They had been told by Pablo Cuello, a grad student in the university at Mendoza, Argentina, who had assisted us the year before and knew what a social tuco was, that the tucos he was seeing at this high altitude location looked suspiciously social. Not only were there lots of them in one area, one or more adults could be seen coming out of the same hole. It didn't take John and Eileen long, once they got there, to see that the tucos were social, and one of the primary reasons for this second trip was to confirm by radio telemetry that the areas individuals were using really did overlap.

Tissue sample was collected last May and we are still waiting for the genetic results from the lab in Mendoza but originally, this species was identified as Ctenomys opimus, which, from observations in other places, was characterized as a solitary animal. We are anxious to find out where this animal places in the known species of Ctenomys and if it truly is opimus or some subspecies or perhaps, something altogether different. Any of those possibilities are exciting... however, one thing is certain, the tucos that live in this area are social but do not exhibit the same social patterns we see in C. sociabilis in Patagonian Argentina.

In C. sociaibilis, we find females living in distinct colonies along with one adult male. Here, after MANY hours of radio telemetry (just ask Anna, the grad student who came out to join us!), we found that multiple males and multiple females overlap in the areas they use but not completely. The data are still being picked apart and analyzed but it looks like there are distinct groups but the groups don't necessarily inhabit the same space all the time. In addition, we did 3 nights of radio telemetry. There were 22 animals with radio collars and every hour on the hour all through the night and day, fixes were being made so we knew exactly where each individual was for that moment. This was no small feat... and I had to ask myself more than once, what the heck an almost 50 year old woman was doing out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night stumbling around in the dark with an antenna in her hand looking for a rodent!

However, we did collect a lot of information and are trying to better understand the unique society this mystery tuco participates in. The other big question we are asking is what the mating and breeding cycle is. Last May, they found fairly large pups. In January, we saw a number of pregnant females but also some decent sized pups. The picture in this post is one of them. Do these tucos breed multiple times through the year? Or are females on different reproductive cycles? With multiple males living in the same group, is there competition for mating or is there one male dominating? Who disperses? Who stays? Although I found this place to be a rather intense field site, I have to admit that these tucos intrigue me. There are so many things to discover, and discovering the stories of animals is what excites me most in biology. More to tell in the next post!

Field Site #2

So, I'm happily back at home and thought that I would take the next couple of weeks to post pics and memories of the second field site we went to in the north central part of Argentina. I wrote earlier that we were headed to Jujuy (which, yes, is fun to say) but actually we were a 4 hour drive north in a place called Los Pozuelos. The nearest town was about an hour drive, due to the rough dirt roads.

The field site here was so much different than what I have experienced in Patagonia. The tucos live next to a river in a gravelly soil with low growing vegetation. There are no trees and no shade. We were there in the wet season, and often, the clouds gathered every afternoon. Sometimes there was rain but always there was lightning and thunder. The high altitude (~13,000 ft) was a challenge but coca leaves and aspirin helped with the headaches, and in time, even the sluggish feeling left. The glare of the afternoon sun was overwhelming and the only relief was to sit in the truck.

The days were spent watching tucos, catching tucos, collaring tucos with radios and tracking them with telemetry. Often we were out for 12+ hours. It was rather intense, especially after having just completed a field season elsewhere. Still, a ton of data was collected and a lot was learned. Next posting, I'll write about these mysterious tucos, which we know are social but don't know what species they are.