days: 11 & 12

it's been a crazy busy couple of days.

DAY 11:
we did beaver surveys again! i was SO exhausted. by the end, we were (pretty much literally) crawling the last mile of the trail back. of course, that was after traveling through knee deep snow in bogs, forest, up and down hills, across lakes...etc. tough stuff. but fun, in retrospect. we found two really interesting beaver sites! the first we affectionately deemed: king firetooth. why? because he had the biggest lodge and the entire forest around his lake was burned tree. the second had a really visible cache--the ice was broken and you could see the wet footprints from the beaver. this particular beaver had also placed an entire sapling tree at the very tip of his lodge--almost like a flag sticking out of the point. super duper cool! haley'bug, to answer your question about how to tell if a lodge is active (in the winter): the cache/branches are in front of it and a somewhat heavy rock will fall through the ice between the cache and lodge--soft ice=active feeding); it smells horrendous through the ice chimney (condensation from their breathing forms a tube of ice out the top...hence, ice chimney); and, the trees nearby have been freshly gnawed by the beaver. as for why the beaver's are dying: since they have been on the downswing for the past decade, the itasca scientists theorize that it may be because of resource depletion, predation, disease, and harshness of winter. it's odd, though. while i believe the beaver population is going down, as evidenced by the majority of our lodges surveyed being inactive, i find it odd that the scientists have not mentioned examining any beaver bodies for disease, etc. i suppose it may be because i haven't asked that question specifically...i should do that. anyway, we did that all day yesterday, then we made spaghetti dinner! it was delicious. then we all chilled for a while, not really doing anything because we were so tired...and then we slept.

DAY: 12
woke up at 5:45 am to ski out to schoolcraft island (.25 miles) and retrieve zooplankton water samples. first we measured the snow depth (22.84 cm) and then hand augered a hole through 40 cm of ice. we then used a YSI Probe to measure water temperature, conductivity, % dissolved oxygen, mg/L of dissolved oxygen, and pH. then we used the kemmerer to sample water at depths of 3 m and 6 m. put those in bottles...then trekked back to the lab. we filtered later in the afternoon...but, here's the process: we filtered the water samples (125 mL at a time) and put each 125 mL filtered zooplankton in a 70% ethanol solution. after that, we went back to our cabins and ate a small breakfast (i wasn't too hungry--i just ate a couple pieces of toast with strawberry jelly). THEN we went to class at 9 am, where i felt like death, and learned about hibernation (nothing new...other than learning that: 1) red squirrels don't hibernate, and 2) according to our winter ecology book, many scientists have been injured trying to find the temperature of hibernating bears (awwwwwwwwwkward). OH! we also found the thermal conductivity of our socks (dad, my grey socks--i did not include the silk under'layer)--while dry and wet. my dry socks have the thermal conductivity of a piece of wood and my wet socks have the thermal conductivity of liquid petroleum gas. after we got back around noon, i made myself some stir fry (broccoli, water chestnuts, carrots, yellow pepper, and 1/2 cup of white rice), drank a delicious cup of 2% milk, and watched the latest episode of better off ted (LOVE that show!). around this time it was 12:50 pm...so then i decided to take a nap before we went back to the lab at 3:30 pm to do the filtering of our samples. then around 4:15 pm, we trekked back out to schoolcraft island to get our evening zooplankton samples (same process). the sun was scheduled to go down at 4:56 pm...we had our samples done with by 4:45 (awwwwwweeeessssoooommmmeeeee sauce). then we filtered, went back to our cabins, showered, i ate leftover/cold macaroni and cheese, and now i'm writing this blog entry! a group of people went to see a 4:30 pm showing of Avatar 3D in bemidji...when they get back, they'll all probably have "fun" while i'm watching a movie and typing up our results for the day. not a bad thing, necessarily: i can also start reading crime and punishment for great con next semester, haha. i've been SO procrastinating on that book. anyway! nothing exciting planned for tomorrow--other than we decided that tomorrow afternoon we're going to go to the west arm and headwaters drill our holes ahead of time. reason being: early in the morning, it is not fun to auger a hole AND by the time we go back sunday morning to get samples, there will be an 8 cm layer of ice. that is a lot easier to smash through than 40 cm of ice. as for the light penetration influencing our results: we already know zooplankton patterns correlate with day/night. we're not too worried about the difference in light--we asked the professor and he said it would be a very small difference in our results, and something not really worth noting. alright! off to type up results, read crime and punishment, watch my own movie, and write some letters :) love to all!