What's been happening?

I almost forgot my password to this blog. Dang it has been awhile. Let's get right to it:

- First of all, my good friend K revealed himself to be 'openly hostile' by sending me a link to the game tower defense. I'm going to warn you that clicking on that link is like clicking on crack cocaine. I'm serious. I didn't look up from my computer screen for three days, and that was only because a catastrophic flood inundated the biological station, forcing the loss of internet, phones and septic systems (ew!).

- About that flooding: Lake Texoma, she is over her banks! I may not be teaching a class on Invasive species this summer after all, since the profs are supposed to arrive in 17 days and right now the road to the station is flooded over in 4 places, the phone and internet is out, the septic systems are backed up, and there's a pretty good chance one of the dorms is going to be flooded out momentarily. I'm conflicted about this. Overall it is a bad thing. The station needs the money from such a class, I need the money (and experience), and I've spent a ton of time and effort getting everything ready.
On the other hand, I am extremely busy and I would love to not leave my very pregnant wife for two weeks. I'm also not sure what exactly I'm going to do if the floodwaters are still high, as a big part of my plan revolved around surveying boaters...and all the boat ramps have been under water for the last month.

- Job stuff: Did anyone not get the memo about my new job? I'm officially leaving academia after about ~10 years of collegiate life. Regrets? Yeah, a few. On the whole I think I've had a good run at attending and working at colleges, but I wish this last had gone a lot better. The job I left was, without a doubt, one of the most depressing times I've had since I left high school. This, fortunately, was in sharp contrast to my wife's experience working at the same place (in a very different capacity), so there's been some weird feelings about leaving.
Basically, I felt as if I was living in a dark tunnel for the last 6 months and seriously debated seeking professional assistance while the wife was enjoying her job, her co-workers, and the great joy of not having to drive to work.
The new job is in state government. I really have no idea what to expect.

- Looking for a house stuff: So I'm living in my parent's basement. This is not good times. Don't get me wrong, the basement is wonderful. There's a lake out the back where I can go fishing, there's a cute dog that is extremely happy to see us, and there's a really, really big TV (talk about a culture shock after 8 months of no cable).
But we need to get our own place. The problem is there is literally nothing available to rent that is remotely affordable. There was a tornado and over a thousand people were displaced into the area we're moving. The rentor's in the area have apparently responded by raising the rent to astronomical levels. A 2 br, 1 ba, 800 square foot house costs $800 a month! The house is ugly, doesn't come with any appliances, and the kitchen is a piece of shit. $800 a month. And this is in a tiny little town in Kansas. We could buy the house with no money down, and pay less than 500 a month on the mortgage. Annoying.
We will probably end up buying something.

- Harry Potter: So as some of you know, I have not read the Harry Potter books, and I had only seen the first Harry Potter movie. I've been generally dismissive of the entire idea, believing it to be A) annoying and B) a cheap version of Lord of the Rings. However, anyone who continued listening past those initial reasons would have heard me also say that I suspected I would love the books and didn't want to get involved until they were all out.
Particularly tuned in readers may be recalling that the final book in the series hits bookstores this month.
I'm sure we can all see where this is going. On Sunday we watched all 4 of the movies available to rent, and today we saw the latest movie (Order of the Phoenix). I read the first book in 3 and a half hours on Monday, and the second over a slightly longer period on Tuesday. I've held off on buying another book today.
Let's sum this up: These movies are unprecedented. There has never been anything like a 5-part movie that remained cohesive. Unless you want to count TV shows (in which case Firefly looks beautiful), the movies alone are unique. I have no idea how this has happened, but I suspect it has to do with the writer having unprecedented control.
Secondly: The books are a little disappointing. The movie paints a rich tapestry that appears to be just barely explored. I anticipated this being like the Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien books contained an astounding amount of information, from which the movies could include maybe half (often much less). The first two Harry Potter movies contain 90% of what is in the books, to the point I was surprised when anything was even slightly different. My usual rule is Watch the movie before you read the book because books are almost always interesting even if the movie has given something away. In the case of Harry Potter, I'm not how the book became so popular without the movie. The book leaves a lot to the reader's imagination, which of course for me is now tainted by the movies. I can't imagine what I would have 'seen' if I had read the books without seeing the movies, but it wouldn't have been what the movies show. Basically, I'm astounded that this stuff became so important that they had to make movies about it.
In summation: The books are ok, but the movies are fantastic. And yes, I'll still be reading all the books.

Seriously? More rain?

This is just getting ridiculous. The Lake Texoma flood control pool is 24.41% full. That may not sound like a lot, but it has been raining for days. And I'm not talking about a light, gentle rain, I'm talking about a rain that sweeps children from their mother's arms and we end up with 4 missing people! This is the kind of rain that has little animals lining up two-by-two next to the boathouse.

And right now what's happening outside my window? If you guessed "The kind of rain that prevents you from seeing more than 10 feet in any direction", you win a piece of candy.

Weekend fun

I'll try to get pictures up later, but this was a pretty fun weekend. The in-laws were down, and we went out fossil hunting and blueberry picking.

The fossil hunting was more fun.

Let's see, what did we find? A couple of smallish trilobites, a couple of gastropods, some sharks teeth, and a couple of geodes. We also saw some lizards, and we caused a kill-deer to 'break it's wing' to distract us from a nest (which we avoided).

Mostly I just had fun climbing up a hill. The view was amazing. The southern part of the Arbuckles are just unbelievably gorgeous right now. They are green and beautiful.

The blueberry hunting was fun as well, I'm just not very good at it. Turns out really dark red and really dark blue blue-berries look pretty similar to me. Oh well. We also bought some squash pickles (tasty!).

And I couldn't sleep worth crap last night, so I can't think of anything else to write.

The Upside to living at a Biostation

The roller coaster has upswings.

Tonight was one of them.

In actuality, this whole week has been one of them. I interviewed for a job that would pay great, and get me out of the academic muck. But beyond that, tonight was a fish-fry.

The maintenance manager at the station is an Oklahoma good-ole' boy. Except that he's cool and amazing. He caught 25 catfish last week when he could have been working (screw that!) and tonight he fried us up a feast of venison, catfish, gar, hush puppies, tater tots, and drunken chicken. Plus he had some 'drunken onions' which were, I think, marinated in vinegar and maybe alcohol.

The onions were amazing. The chicken was amazing. The hush puppies were terrible, don't eat them. I'll eat them for you (this is my way of saying that they were so good I want them all to myself). The beer was good (2 kinds of home-brew). The company was astounding. All good people.

I almost want to cry it was so much fun.

Tot means dead in german, so tater-tot is 'potato dead'...which seems appropriate.

There were other German words I learned, but I can't remember them.

Did I mention I'm drunk? Off a combination of tequila, wheat beer and home-brew. I haven't felt this relaxed in quite a while.

The facilities manager down here is one of the most amazing people I've ever met. He's honest, loud, friendly, guitar-playing, cooking fiend, etc. Reminds me of my buddy B from grad school. I miss the grad school field station. I feel like going back, because that was some really good times, but this field station in Oklahoma is pretty good too.

Less card games, more tequila, but damn. This is why I like field stations.

There are upsides to this whole profession!!

Sitting in the library

The summer has exploded into activity. After months of hard work in isolation, suddenly I'm in charge of a pair of undergraduates, in charge of planning experiments, and still trying to get finished with my own stuff.

Here's some thoughts:

1. I have an undergrad working for me who is very full of herself. She's certain that A) she's the shit and B) her rich boyfriend will keep her from ever needing to work. She's interested in science because it will be "A reason to get out of bed in the morning."
If you're rich and you want a reason to get out of bed in the morning, work at a f***ing soup kitchen. Seriously, I can't imagine a scenario where that wouldn't be more fulfilling.

2. The prof I work with most closely (who routinely drives me insane), has been astonishingly nice lately. Frankly, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. He hasn't insulted anyone to their face for most of the past 2 weeks. Do I forgive and forget?
You may have heard the old saying: "Women forgive, but never forget. Men forget but never forgive."
That's a load of crap. Not only do I not forgive, I write things down so I don't forget.

3. Boston slipped to #5 in the NBA draft. That's great. I've throroughly enjoyed having a city to hate. Thanks Boston.

4. If you've never taken a green fluorescent light and dropped it into a lake at night, and then seined up whatever showed...well....you should. That is AWESOME. I may do this fifty times this summer.

5. I'm working on an NSF grant. This is almost guaranteed to fail on the first attempt, but everyone agrees that it is a good idea. So I'm writing it anyway. If I were to get an NSF grant that would go a long ways towards proving my value as a scientist. Of course, even if they did fund it on the first attempt (unbelievably unlikely), I wouldn't find out until probably October/November....if I'm lucky.
The subject of this grant? The Zeroeth Law of Stoichiometry (homeostasis).

6. I'm sitting in the library 'watching' the undergraduates who are here for the summer class session. The station is packed, and there is all kinds of craziness occurring. Officially it is a dry campus for this two week session, but I'll let you in on a little secret.
This coffee mug next to the computer here?
That's not coffee.

Busy busy

Well, it's 7 30 and I should really go back to work, but I'm going to take a moment to tell you all what's going on:

- Mouse update: 2 mice down, hopefully no more to go. We've alerted the calvary (the maintanence guys at the station) and we're now optomistic that the problem is under control. I hope so, ***king mice!

- Weather update: Oh my god. Seriously. I...the weather is just astonishingly beautiful here.

- email update: So some of my emails are getting picked up by spam filters. If you emailed me something and haven't heard a reply (assuming it has been a few days) let me know and I'll try re-sending. I have no idea what's happening.

- I gave a talk Update: Yeah, I gave a talk at OU today about Food Quality and Toxicity. The talk went pretty well, except that some prof asked me a confusing question. I had put up a graph of how varying nitrogen:phosphorus ratios in media causes changes in the growth of duckweed, and he said (out of the blue incidentally): "But do you know what causes that change?"
"Sure, nutrient limitation."
"No, I mean, what causes it."
I still really don't know what he meant. One of the graduate students I know there thought he meant that since I only showed the N:P ratio, it could be that the nutrients were so high that we were seeing toxic effects, or so low. But if that's what he was implying, he certainly didn't say so. I was very confused, and, of course, it threw off my timing for awhile. I think I did really well overall however. I really wish I was a more natural public speaker. I feel comfortable speaking in front of groups, but I really need to know what I'm going to say or else I get completely discombobulated.
This time I had a really good idea of what I wanted to say.

- Update on the Newspaper article about me: What? You mean I didn't mention that a reporter for the OU Daily wanted to do a story on me? Really? Well, after my talk I was interviewed by a brave reporter from the OU daily who I'm not sure really understood the distinction between postdoc and graduate student (until I explained it). Hopefully I won't come off sounding like an idiot in the article. There should be an on-line version of the story that I'll link to when it comes out.
I also got to interview her about what it is like working for a daily college newspaper. As I'm sure everyone has heard ad naseum I used to be the editor of our campus paper. That paper was just a bi-weekly, but with our staff of six we ended up having a ridiculously hard time finding enough material to fill the pages. I figured that student-editors/reporters at a big college like OU were essentially full-time employees at the paper receiving credits for that work. Turns out not so much. This poor reporter was getting paid to write at least a story a week, but she was still taking a full-time class load and working a real job. Sounded pretty rough.

- High school students: Tomorrow morning I'm going to be one of two researchers from the station entertaining/educating a group of high-school students from a nearby town. There are 55 students coming! Wow! Fortunately the whole event is only going to last 2.5 hours, so even if it goes badly, at least it will go quickly. And the person helping me out has done this several times before.

- Waking up in the night screaming update: So apparently I have lost my mind. No, literally. Last night (according to my wife) I jumped out of bed and began screaming (at the top of my lungs) and doing that 'brushing off bugs' motion with my hands at 4 in the morning. As I said, this is what my wife says. I was completely asleep. When I woke up I was standing at the foot of the bed, my wife was hollering at me, and I was sweating profusely and my heart was racing.
I have no idea what the hell happened.
My wife claims she will hit me in the head if I do this again. I don't think she's kidding.

- My uncle is coming up from Thursday-Mon/Tues. That means my updates will be probably nonexistant those days. That also means that on Friday I'll be in OKC for the Suns-Hornets game. I can't wait! Two of the best point guards in the league! We've even got front row seats on the balcony! Yay!

Some title

- I just ate dinner. Apparently the largest chicken in the western world died so that I could eat tonight. Seriously, I just ate a chicken breast that was easily 15 lbs. I am full!

- I went with beer and coke.

- Allow me to rant a little about Oklahoma. I like OK a lot, the air is so much cleaner than anything in Indiana, the temperatures are warm. We’ve got hawks, owls, bats, and bald eagles gracing our skies. I’ve got the best fishing spot in 300 miles on my doorstep.

But seriously, can we get people to pick up their damned trash?

On every road in the area (on the OK side) the ditches are littered with garbage. Everywhere! There are cans, bottles, scraps of paper, trash sacks, magazines, paper plates, and every other kind of random trash you might imagine some idiot throwing out the window. I can’t even believe it! The scale of the problem is enormous, and I’m sure that’s why nobody has done anything about it. You could get those convict crews out in the ditches for 15 hours a day and you might never finish a twenty mile stretch. I can’t even imagine where to begin.

And then there’s the scene down by the bridge we sampled at today:

Fantastic, I’m sure that’s where we should be dumping our old furniture.

- I met a guy today named Buck Ray. Yeah, I live in Oklahoma. I couldn’t make that up if I tried. In fact, we spent a good 15 minutes trying to come up with a better ‘western’ name and couldn’t. Tex Oklahoma? Jim Bob Joe? I got nothing. (That isn’t to diminish the guy. He seems articulate and educated, he’s got a MS. I just think that’s a crazy name.)

- Yeah, this is the beast I drove around today. I miss Daisy (the van I drove through Chicago and the north woods 20-odd times a summer for two years).

- While we were out sampling for benthic invertebrates we came across these ‘nests’ of caterpillars in the trees along the side of the road. Anyone know what these are called? Kind of freaky looking.

- Guess who’s happy that Texas is out of the tournament? This guy! Maybe when KU plays next week I’ll actually be able to watch a game!

- So, Kobe Bryant scored 115 points over the weekend. Meh.

A day in the life

(Notes: Don't forget to read Part 1 of my 3 part series on scientific misconduct.)

(Also, all the pictures below can be viewed much larger if you click on them.)

Many people have asked me, in the last few weeks, what I do down here on the Oklahoma-Texas border. Well, I’m going to tell you. Using pictures (so maybe people can read past the first paragraph!!).

I’m working on algae that cause fish kills. On Thursday, just down the road from us, some people started reporting dead fish on the lake behind their houses. So JE (the other postdoc), AE (his wife and the lab tech), and DH (the professor on this project) went down to investigate. Here are some pictures:

Notice that the water has a very murky appearance. This is probably due to the presence of a mixotrophic algal called Golden Algae. Mixotrophic just means that the algae acts like a plant and like a predator, using sunlight to produce energy, and eating bacteria and protists to get nutrients.

Usually, Golden Algae kill fish by causing hemorrhaging (bleeding) around the gills. This gizzard shad doesn’t seem to show any hemorrhaging, the gills look pretty normal. The fish had probably been dead for awhile, so this might not mean anything. The hemorrhaging isn’t as obvious if the fish has been dead awhile.

We checked several fish for bleeding around the gills, but none seemed to have it.

This white bass might have had some hemorrhaging, but it isn’t dead yet either.

You can see from this picture that the fish kill didn’t seem to be very species specific. We saw largemouth bass (shown here), green sunfish, bluegill, threadfin shad, gizzard shad, drum, bighead carp, and white bass. These are fish that feed on lots of different food sources and in different places in the lake.

This is a little hard to see, but this is a pool along the shore that had little fish (I can’t remember what they are called). As we stood here watching the fish in this little pool we realized they were dying as we watched. We decided to take some of the water from the lake back with us to see if it was still toxic. The number of Golden Algae in the water was really pretty low, so we wondered if the fish kill was being caused by low oxygen levels the previous night.

The next day we came back to measure oxygen again and to see if there were more dead fish. This is JE with an oxygen probe.

When fish kills happen, pelicans show up. There were some pelicans out this morning.

There were also lots of turkey vultures. These guys appeared to be eating stuff along the shore.

The day before we had brought water back into the lab. We then added fathead minnows to that water to see if it was still toxic. The bottom right tub is just plain water. The bottom left tub is ½ lake water and ½ regular water. And the top middle tub is all 100% lake water. As you can see, the lake water killed all the fish. That water definitely appeared to be toxic.

My wife and I decided to visit the part of the lake that has been having major fish kills three of the past four years. This is what we saw there:

This is a stretch of beach in Lebanon Pool. You can see here several dead gar and carp.

This gar was probably 5 feet long. The fish must have been amazingly beautiful when it was alive. Last year every single fish in Lebanon Pool was killed by the Golden Algae. Nobody could find a single fish in the entire pool in March of 2006. These are all fish that repopulated the area after last year’s wipeout.

We got pretty depressed looking at all the dead fish.

You can see that the pelicans were out in force. The Golden Algae toxins are broken down quickly by acid, so saliva or stomach acids in mammals, birds and most reptiles make them able to consume the dead and dying fish.

Pelicans are surprisingly beautiful birds.

This made us immensely sad. How did this turtle die, I wondered. The toxin needs a way to get into the body, and most turtles have an impermeable skin (soft-shelled turtles are an exception). Then we found this, still living turtle (this is a little disturbing):

This is difficult to see, but it is clear what’s happening. The Golden Algae toxin has gotten in through the turtle’s eyes. This turtle was alive, barely, but did not respond when we picked him up. He didn’t respond to sounds or visual cues. The poor animal was clearly on the verge of death. We didn’t think there was anything we could do to help him. JE later suggested that we might have been able to douse him in clean, pure, freshwater. I’m not sure that would have done any good.

This is what worries a lot of people. This is a striper, a cross between a white bass and a striped bass. The economic basis of recreational fishing in Lake Texoma is stripers. We didn’t see many of them dead along the shore, but they are definitely at risk when the Golden Algae is blooming.

We’re trying to learn more about how the Golden Algae kills fish, so we’re doing simple (and complex) experiments in the lab. Here we’re raising Golden Algae in flow-through containers known as chemostats:

We can then use that Golden Algae to conduct toxicity tests on fathead minnows.

On the right hand side of this picture you can just barely see a small fathead minnow baby.

We set up a lot of these babies in all different concentrations of Golden Algae.

Then we count to see how many Golden Algae cells it took to kill the fish.

There are lots of complications that I’m glossing over, but this is basically what’s driving my research. I hope you enjoyed my photoessay!

So many thoughts...

Reasons (true and false) that I haven't posted since Thursday:

1. I've run out of interesting things to say (False!)
2. Nothing much has been happening (False!)
3. The station was attacked by terrorists and I had to fight them off using nothing more than a Poison CD and a broken laptop (True...er...False!)
4. I got really really drunk on cheap beer, 70 degree weather and sunshine on Thursday (True!)
5. I spent all day Friday doing stuff (Kinda True!)

So what's been happening. Let's make another list!

1. My wife visited the doctor. She's pregnant. I know. I'm as shocked as anyone!

2. I'm learning how much I hate racists!

3. The TV show: Ok, let me give you a brief transcript of what I said...

"I work on gabbaba adaga agaha abifdai dDag DAPHNIA and how they inteatcate awiaath afdfda abjath GOLDEN ALGAE ana ana ana FISH."

So if you know me, you should be embarrassed. I did not do well. I'd like to think I could do the kind of thing that Steve Irwin did, but I'd need a lot of retakes.

A lot of retakes.

4. New experiments!! Finally!! I've been waiting for my daphnia to start kicking up the reproduction for a while now and they've finally responded.

5. We sold our house!! We managed to lose a ton of money doing it, but the house is totally sold. We celebrated by going out to eat four/five times this week and then I bought an exercise bike. My history with exercise bikes is not really pretty (I tend to ride them into the dust), but I spent a bit more on this one, so hopefully it will last longer than 6 months. My plan is to ride it while I play video games, which means it will get a lot of use.

6. I haven't figured out what to write here.

7. Check out this enormous sinkhole that opened up in a Guatemalan city. If you had shown me that picture and said "Is this real?" I would have laughed at you. I'm amazed this can even happen. Seriously, what in the hell are you supposed to do when this happens? Considering there appears to be a river of sewage running underneath there, I'm pretty sure you're not going to be able to just fill it in with dirt (I'm not even sure you could find enough dirt!!). I'm pretty sure that if this had happened in New York the entire U.S. would be paralyzed with fear and Congress would authorize the use of military force to "prevent future sinkholes."
If this sinkhole opened up in Boston nobody would notice for three weeks and then the bomb squad would be called out. Then they'd arrest the employees at the sewage treatment plant for "misplacement of sewage."
Seriously. I really don't like Boston anymore.

8. Becoming the GOP Presidential candidate requires jumping through a certain number of hoops. For example, you have to hate homosexuals, atheists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, Washington insiders, liberals, black people, Asians, Indians (dots), Native Americans, poor people, hippies, everyone who was big in the 60s, war protestors, tofu, vegetarians, taxes, Muslims, Hispanics, single moms, people who have 'funny names, anyone on welfare, drug addicts (except for Rush Limbaugh), movie stars, movie producers, Hollywood, 'big government', rappers, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. Whew! That's a list.
One of those hoops is making fun of people with disabilities. For example, George W. Bush famously laughed about a death row inmate who was mentally handicapped on T.V. Now emerges a clip of Rudy Guiliani making fun of a person with Parkinson's disease. Oh man, he is so going to be our next president!

9. I play way too much Age of Mythology.

10. Here's the weird thing about living in southern oklahoma. The restaurant's are terrible. We've actually gone to Pizza Hut. Multiple times. And loved it. We went to a Dairy Queen tonight and I almost cried. Why?
People are so friendly. I mean, you forget about how crappy the food is when the waitresses or people behind the counter are just so nice. And we don't even know these people yet! I love it down here.
And on Thursday it was 70 degrees and slightly breezy, so everyone just ended up sitting around a picnic table from 4 - 7 that night drinking and eating homemade salsa and chutney and talking shit until the sun went down. I love it down here!

11. The wind. There are probably only two places in the world where you can feel truly insignificant. The ocean and the prairie. Today you could walk outside, look into the wind, and know that you didn't matter at all. The wind was pushing lengthwise along the lake and the waves were enormous. I'm not sure I've been in a boat on freshwater that could stay afloat on the lake as it was today. We saw a tree that had cracked in half because the top blew off. Apparently somewhere to the west of us they've had dry weather, because for about 4 hours we got so much dust that you couldn't see 200 feet in front of you. Dust bowl part deux.
You can't help but feel alive when there's that much energy in the air. I love it down here!

12. Oklahoma City is pretty cool.

Wheel of food.

Ok, so this is kinda funny. We've been trying to find good restaurants down here since we've moved. We were accustomed to eating out and having great food we didn't make on a regular basis. So far this search has not be particularly successful.

Enter, the Wheel of Food.

I think to myself: maybe this will show us some interesting places to try.

Check out what I got (you'll have to click on it to read it):



That's right "Skip lunch." Welcome to Texoma, where the restaurant options are so great you might as well skip lunch.

Oh man.