Science is tiring. The boxes behind me contain 16 2-liter flasks full of filtered stream water plus a bacterial inoculant. I'm going to track the concentrations of various forms of nitrogen and carbon of the course of two weeks to determine how much of it is usable by bacteria. At the end of the two weeks I'll have hundreds of small vials of frozen water that will keep me busy for quite a while. And of course, it doesn't end there. I have a few other things I'm going to try to do with the water left over, because with science, there's always something else you can do.
Filtered samples for ammonium analysis
After filtering water for hours I took 40ml from each site to analyze for ammonium, a form of nitrogen that bacteria, algae and plants prefer. I also saved another 60ml to send back to minnesota to analyze for nitrate and total nitrogen. Using these numbers I'll be able to estimate the relative importance of different forms of nitrogen for the stream food web.
Filtering water samples
At the bottom of this picture you can see the top of a flask, with a rubber stopper and a brown plastic funnel on top of that. The flask has a nozzle on the side that I use to vacuum water through a filter in the brown nozzle. The filter blocks anything larger than 0.7µm, smaller than a typical bacterium, and about the same size as the wavelength of red light. Small!
Field work!
Yesterday I went to seven sites, spent 4 hours collecting 32 liters of water. This was at the South Fork Eel near Ten Mile Creek. We missed the turnoff on the path and ended up a ways up Ten Mile. Finding our way back to the Eel took 45 minutes and felt like an Indiana Jones adventure, but without the mysticism.
Mendocino Ocean View
This was a nice bay at the headlands in Mendocino. I thought Mendo was going to be big, but it's kind of the Bayfield, WI of the north coast. In this photo you can see pretty flowers in the foreground, and giant kelp in the bay. It was beautiful and windy, and I got cell phone reception.
Tide Pool
Every so often we take a day off to buy groceries and interact with the rest of the world. Sunday we went to Fort Bragg, explored the tide pools, watched seals work on their tans and point at interesting flora and fauna.
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