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.