Bees?

This week I managed to stop sneezing long enough to drive out to Spiddal, a small town near Galway pretty ideally suited to setting up field sites—I’ve never seen so many miles of undisturbed rock. The goal was to find the several square meters out of those miles where we set up the experimental plots (more details on that in a future post, which will likely include videos of dancing cats to distract any of you who find it mind-numbingly boring). It was freezing cold. It was windy. Climbing and jumping over boulders and ledges is something that hasn’t gotten any less nerve-wracking since my eleventh birthday at marine biology camp in the San Juan Islands, when I took a fairly dramatic fall down a boulder onto a patch of barnacles, giving me a nasty scar over a good part of my left arm. (Sorry, Mom, I know you read these posts—I’m more careful now, I promise.) But for every day in the field there are weeks of image analysis, statistical work, staring at the screen when the statistics aren’t telling you what they want them to, redoing the statistical work by hand, writing your own code to redo the statistical work, and refilling your coffee mug—so I try to keep a general attitude of “you will enjoy this field day if it’s the last thing you do.”

I was going to edit out the less-picturesque shot of the rocks, but I think it adds a certain realism. Also, my tech skills are lackluster, and I couldn't figure out how.

My fluorescent safety vest was definitely the most important part of the day.

All in all, it probably broke down to about 20% hauling equipment, 40% scrambling back and forth across the rocks trying to find the experiment sites (one problem with studying barnacles is that any given rock covered in barnacles looks exactly like any other given rock covered in barnacles), 10% struggling not to slip down the rocks (with varying degrees of success), and 30% frantically trying to take photos before the electronics died. The latter two incited a fair amount of frustration, but a good degree of laughing too.

And science can, honestly, be pretty funny, or maybe we just fill in the moments of frustration with humor. There are some sentences in papers that have stood out to me as inadvertently hilarious. From my Evolutionary Biology textbook: “Data was unavailable to test for one lineage of bees.” What happened to the bees? More concerning, what happened to the researcher responsible for the bees? And from arguably the most influential paper on barnacles ever written, by Joseph Connell in 1961: “On Stone 14a, the survival of Chthamalus without Balanus was much better until January when a starfish, Asterias rubens L., entered the cage and ate the barnacles.” The passive voice, the scientific stoicism with which it’s written completely belies the moment of stumbling through tidepools to your field site, arms full of gear, after months of preparatory work, and discovering that someone has eaten your experiment. Rude.

Science, though, is funny and full of stories and very, very human. As we were scrambling back over the rocks towards the car, my PI pointed out a stretch of rock almost completely clean of barnacles, and said that the sea snails had really been munching on them. (This particular sea snail is of the predatory, carnivorous variety—scared yet?—and is alternately known as the dog whelk, the dogwhelk, Nucella lapillus, or the Atlantic dogwinkle. Are you getting a sense of why memorizing classification systems is so difficult?)

But it reminded me of why I fell in love with science in the first place. To the untrained eye, the naked rock is tabula rasa, a blank page. But eyes that have spent countless hours in dimly lit lecture halls, peeled apart those same animals on a lab bench, mapped out an evolutionary tree by hand—those eyes fill in the blanks and see a whole story, prelude to beginning to the middle, and they wonder about the end.

Galway: 3, Jules: 0

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of packing lists, to do lists, and backup plans, and less of a fan of putting things in the universe’s hands. Now that I’m over the initial shock of the arrival, though, and more or less going about a normal working life, the past week has been an exercise in ‘you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to avoid every possible failure and indignity.’ A new city will surprise you, play tricks on you, and sweep you off your feet in every possible sense of the phrase.

Completely predictable embarrassment number one: the first real wind- and rainstorm hit this weekend, and blew me off my bike. No cars, pedestrians, or cows were harmed in this incident, and I incurred only a minor scrape. It’s actually comforting to know that some things don’t change between continents, and my being aerodynamic is apparently one of those things. Throwback to my freshman year, when I was blown off my crutches and down the steps of the Ruggles T station.

Embarrassment number two: I take a lot of pride in the fact that I’ve never lost a push-up contest, so when I had the chance to win €100 if I could hang from a bar for 85 seconds, I rolled up my sleeves and hopped on, and got an unpleasant surprise when I realized that this bar happened to spin. Luckily my roommate caught all of the flailing on video: if you look closely, you can see an air of overconfidence and impending doom. Shoutout to the outfit that the guy running the game was wearing. Where do I get a hat like that?

The final and most unexpected triumph of Galway over my carefully planned adventure came in the form of an older woman who struck up a conversation with me on the bus. The Irish are both very chatty and very blunt, which is actually refreshing, although it takes some adjustment. When she asked what I was doing here and I mentioned barnacles, she actually had the same reaction that a master’s student in my lab encountered multiple times: telling me about barnacle soup. This legendary soup is actually made from limpets, which are significantly bigger than barnacles and the bane of my research—they bulldoze barnacles that have already settled on rocks, take up bare rock space that the barnacles (my barnacles? Can I say that?) could’ve occupied, and lead to my doing a lot more math than I’d like to. I don’t know how an attempt at barnacle soup would turn out, but I think it’s one of those things that just because you theoretically could attempt it, really doesn’t mean you should. But it’s considered impolite to correct strangers’ taxonomic knowledge on public transit, so when she asked whether I’d tried the soup, I just said I hadn’t. The conversation ended when she got off the bus, but not before I’d been informed that I won’t be qualified to write about barnacles until I’ve stewed and eaten them. You win some, you lose some.

Brace yourself: I'm about to criticize Dunkin.

I have a distinct tendency to get sick after final exams. The timing has ranged from a raging headache coming on during a molecular biology final, which led to some answers about molecular cloning that probably would’ve been a medical ethics violation, to spiking a fever in the Dallas airport while waiting for a connecting flight, but it’s been a constant throughout my college years: adrenaline-fueled week followed by an adrenaline crash, resulting in a totally sidelined semi-human. So completely predictably, I got home on Friday from my first week of co-op, lay down on my bed, and within a few hours was feverish and coughing my lungs out.

A reminder: when you’re talking to someone who learned English in a different country than you, think hard before you use slang or figures of speech that might seem obvious to you. Objectively speaking, the phrase “my roommate picked up a bug in a hostel and gave it to me”? Not all that clear. Actually a little alarming. Another phrase that’s caused confusion in a house with a Minnesotan roommate, a Dutch, and a Chilean: the rotary half a mile from our house, which can come up in daily conversation because it gives a great morning dose of “oh God, this is how I die” on the bike ride to the university. In some places in the U.S. it’s a roundabout; in some places it’s a traffic circle; in our house, it’s “the thing with all the cars” and then some vague hand gestures. Another puzzling, albeit less dangerous, part of the morning commute? A sign at a gas station advertising Seattle’s Best Coffee, which I drank all through high school on the West Coast and missed desperately when I came to Boston (read: I’m on a one-person boycott mission of Dunkin. There is no Dunkin where I come from—which, incidentally, is another phrase, like ‘traffic circle,’ that lifelong East Coasters don’t seem to fully grasp).  

Hopefully once I’m a fully functioning person again, these updates will get more interesting. For now I’ll tell you that one of Ireland’s most popular drinks is carbonated lemon-orange juice, which is everything I didn’t know I needed when I was sick, and that cough drops here are more than just artificial honey flavor in lozenge form, so you really can’t pop them like Halls. It took a few hours of being woozy out of my mind on cough medicine, and an admonition from my European roommate, before I realized what was going on. Next week I should be more alive-awake-alert-enthusiastic and ready to start taking on Ireland for real; right now, I’m gonna take another nap.

It's (not) like riding a bicycle.

Dia duit o Gaillimh. Hi from Galway! (I seriously hope Google Translate didn’t fail me here, because my Gaelic skills aren’t quite up to this yet.)

I’m normally an ace with languages, and I’ve started to pick up on some common words and the sentence structure, but the pronunciation is totally beyond me. English is the main language here, but signs are often in both English and Gaelic, and some university buildings have Gaelic names. Working in the lab has added an interesting, if not especially useful, assortment of phrases to my vocabulary: chemical waste disposal protocol, Freshers Orientation Week, evacuation in case of fire. I’m going to stash those ones under ‘things to pull out to fill a lull in conversation.’

Since my last post detailing all the ways in which things had gone off the rails, plenty more things have gone wrong and right. That piece of diving equipment was delivered on time, and I made my flight without incident. I landed in Dublin Friday morning, jet-lagged out of my mind, and was immediately met by Minor Disaster #2: a nonfunctioning phone. Fortunately, the guy at the airport store that sold SIM cards seemed to recognize how panicked and exhausted I was, and was kind enough to help me get through my technophobia and get cell service. After what felt like forever sitting on the floor of the Dublin airport, I boarded a bus for the three-hour ride to Galway, stayed awake long enough to snap a photo of the road and make my first cheesy Instagram post…and then fell asleep so hard that I woke up with bruises from where my hip was pressed against the armrest.

One photo for the road before passing out.

It’s been eight days, and I’m starting (starting!) to get into the swing of things. It happened a lot more quickly than I expected, I think in large part because I made establishing normalcy here a priority. After I fell into my bed and didn’t move for approximately 14 hours, we set out to do some legitimate errands—buying credit for the gas and electric meters, grocery shopping (I bought not only potatoes, but two kinds of carrots), renting bikes for the semester. I scoped out a couple of potential running routes and we more or less found our way around the university campus. (Challenging: there are no straight roads in Ireland. The campus is no exception).

 

It looks like Hogwarts, though. 

I’ll end on a practical note, with the most important thing I’ve learned so far. I got used to biking on the left side of the road pretty quickly. Biking in the city is pretty much the same everywhere: a constant exercise in terror, but efficient and weirdly fun. But there’s another left-right reversal here that I was unaware of. On American bikes, the left hand brake controls the front wheel, and the right hand brake the back wheel. It’s the opposite here. As anyone who’s ever ridden a bike or has a rudimentary understanding of physics knows, if you brake with just the back wheel, the entire bike stops; if you break with the front wheel, the back of the bike goes from moving forward to moving upward, and very efficiently catapults the rider over the handlebars. Just food for thought.