Freshwater Exploration: are Invasive Crayfish Predating Benthic Invertebrates

This week Dispatches from the field welcomes Arron Watson,  who conducted his masters by research in Entomology at the University of Reading. His summer project was to investigate how signal crayfish, an invasive species, has an impact on benthic invertebrate predation. He sampled 20 sites across the UK, 10 without signal crayfish, 10 with. He conducted this field work over a month in May and is telling us about his experiences here!

May 1^st 2018: the first day of field work for my summer thesis, a key part of my MRes in entomology at the University of Reading. I had already spent roughly six months planning my field work, and decided that I wanted to start my freshwater exploration in Scotland. My supervisor from Buglife, Scotland is based in Stirling and he had offered to show me some advanced insect identification techniques. Next, I would drive over 1000 miles around the rest of the U.K. in my 1997 Nissan Micra (aka “the beast”), stopping over in a mix of locations including a hotel and the houses of friends I had met in my previous life as a back packer.

“The beast”

I left Reading at 6 am and headed north up the backbone of the country towards Scotland. I have lived in Reading for about 3 and half years now, so I have gotten used to the urban way of life. In Reading, I see buses much more often than I do trees or sheep. But driving along on a beautiful day with a wad of CDs was fantastic, and the closer I got to Scotland, the greener the landscape appeared and the more free I felt.

I met Craig (my supervisor) in Stirling. He suggested getting some rest after my 7 hour drive, then setting out first thing tomorrow for a set of four rivers to start my sampling. If you’ve never had the chance to “kick sample” before, it’s a lot of fun. It’s one of those things that takes you back to being younger: standing in the middle of a flowing river, dipping your net in, and waiting for living things to end up in there. When you remove the net from the river and you see lots of things wiggling about, you think, excellent!

After collecting the samples, the next step is to sort them. This is where the skill comes in: not only do you have to remove the things you don’t need (such as fish), you also need to identify things based on differences in morphology – without books, depending only on your memory. But Craig also told me just how many different stone flies and mayflies there are, and explained that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart just by eye, so I should be strict if I thought I collected everything.

Luckily for me, I already had experience identifying terrestrial invertebrates, which was a huge advantage, so after a day’s training, I was a professional picker. Now my task was to collect samples from the rest of my sites, spread across the UK. I would spend the next 3 weeks having limited contact with anyone other than my hosts at each accommodation.

Kick sampling methods used by the environment agency.

My next set of sites were on the Clyde river in Scotland. I was informed to take a letter with me to show any catchment officials or anglers I had permission to be there. I arrived at my first site and started to get a feel of what it was like to be in the middle (not literally) of Scotland. Water running fast, no one in sight, greenery everywhere: bliss! As I got to the edge of the riverbank to look at my first GPS location, I took a minute to stare at the flow of the river and thought, “Oh! Actually that looks like it’s flowing quite fast.” I looked around and realised I really was alone. This is where you start to build field work skills, I realized: no one to rely on, no one to ask, “do you think I will get swept down the stream?” – just your skills and intuition to rely on. After a moment of worry, I told myself, “OK, if I go down that river, I have my buoyancy aid and an inflatable bag which has my phone in it, so I suppose I would be noticed flying down the river like a game of ‘pooh sticks’” (look it up!). I used the pole of my kick sampling net (approximately 1m) to gauge the depth of the river, chose an area where the flow broke slightly, and stepped in. Within a short space of time I had picked my samples, and off I went to Edinburgh to see an old friend. We had a few beers and the following day I headed down to East Yorkshire.

“Alone!, bliss”

I started to feel like things were going really well. My samples were being kept cool in ethanol, the car was running well, and there were no issues so far. It wasn’t until I arrived in Norwich a week later that I would experience my first major problem – which really couldn’t have been controlled or pre-empted.

I had driven to Kings Lynn, heading for a river at the bottom of some farmer’s fields – which was nothing unusual. I found the location and got ready as usual: throwing my waders on, connecting the buoyancy aid connected to my belt, and grabbing my net. As I started to walk down the road, out of nowhere a farmer’s truck drove past me with a carriage of cows. It didn’t faze me at the time: I just headed down the side path, eventually reaching the field with the cows and calves. I walked up to the fence, intending to climb the gate and walk across the field…when all of a sudden, the cows started marching over to me. I had a strange feeling they weren’t there to welcome me.

By the time I got to the fence, a large gang of protective female cows were gazing at me. I tried to spook them, but they wouldn’t budge: they simply grunted at me, looking quite angry. I thought, “No chance am I getting trampled by cows during field work! I will just go around, because there’s another field next door.” I started to walk around to the side, watching the cows follow me out of the corner of my eye. I jumped the fence and started to make my way through some bushes (and brambles), regretting this choice but at the same time pretty sure it was better than cows trampling my head.

But suddenly…squelch! My height dropped by about 2 feet: I had sunk. It turned out that the way I wasn’t meant to go was some sort of swamp or bog…either way, I was stuck. This had happened to me once before, on Cleethorpes mudflats as a young lad. That time, I had gone out in brand new trainers my mum specifically asked me not to ruin. I looked at the cows and thought, “Ha! Cows 2- me 0.”

At this point getting out was my main focus. I knew that when in mud like this, you need to expand your surface area in order not to sink. Unfortunately for me, this meant laying on my front and crawling out. I moved across the marshy land like a seal that had lost its way, until I finally made it out. At times like this, you either have to cry or laugh. I chose to laugh…until I left and realized that the cows were waiting for me like a trained animal retrieving a stick!

“2-0 to the cows”

I will leave you with the image I saw at this point, and I’m sure you can guess what happened next…squelch!

Field work offers rewards and excitement no other work can sometimes……Let’s not forget the cows!

 

Arron is trained in field ecology, and has worked on a number of different research areas such as entomology, freshwater ecology, bat ecology, and the use of drones. He conducted an ecology and wildlife conservation degree at the University of Reading, went on to complete my masters by research in Entomology there also. He is currently working as a research assistant at the University of Reading and founder of a UAV consultancy called EcoDroneUK. 

It’s not just a ditch

This week, Dispatches from the Field is excited to welcome Dr. Melanie Kingsbury as a guest poster.  Melanie has done fieldwork on lakes in Canada and the UK…but today she tells us about her experience working in an urban development.  For more about Melanie, check out her bio at the end of this post.

Over the past 16 years I have had the opportunity to undertake field work in several interesting places. Some of them were local, such as Big Rideau Lake, and some of them were much harder to access – such as the boreal lakes of northwestern Ontario, where access involved driving down logging roads and hiking down trails with equipment. More recently, my research has taken me to lochs located on the archipelagos of Shetland and Orkney, which was an amazing experience. But the most unique experience I have had doing fieldwork was working in the ‘wilds’ of a large urban expansion project in the mid 2000s. We were tasked with monitoring the streams and urban ponds in the area being developed, which was originally farmland.

One of the streams we monitored, right beside houses under construction.

Some highlights of working in an urbanizing environment include:

* Walking around new, upscale neighbourhoods to gain access to the urban ponds and streams, looking sorely out of place in chest waders carrying various pieces of sampling gear. We got even stranger looks when our gear included carrying a canoe…or sitting in the middle of a pond in one (I am surprised that the police were never called with such suspicious behaviour);

* Waiting for dump trucks, heavy machinery and cars to go by so we could cross roads and active construction sites to get to sampling locations, all the while decked out in said gear;

* Discovering urban ponds full of goldfish or watching house painters rinsing paint brushes in them.  (When we spoke to the painters, they responded, “They are just storm water ponds,”…implying an extension of the street drainage;

Rain gauge on top of the municipal building.

* Coming face to face with giant hogweed for the first time, scattered around a grove (they had not taken over yet) at one of our sampling sites. It looked like the setting for a twisted fairy tale with these 2 m high plants with large leaves towering over us;

*Walking through a municipal building in field clothes to get to the roof to download the rain gauge located there;

* Discovering one day that our stream site containing a data logger had been completely re-graded and the stream rerouted. By the time we found out, it was in the middle of summer and we were presented with a bare rolling landscape (no grass had been planted yet), with stakes to mark the new path of the stream. We never did recover the logger. My guess is that it is still recording (soil temperature at least) to this day, somewhere underneath the dog park that exists there now;

* Experiencing the luxury of driving a short distance to the nearest store or restaurant for lunch or a snack refill!

This urban field experience allowed me to experience firsthand how easily people can dismiss what is in their own back yards and surroundings.  But those places are filled with habitats supporting a diverse range of plants, birds and animals, if you just look.  And I don’t mean just in the wonderful designated park areas that are home to many species of urban wildlife; rather, I’m talking about the ditches and culverts along roadsides, and the shrubby areas at the edges of vacant lots. This fieldwork also revealed to me how the creatures living in these places are affected living side by side with humans. I saw how beneficial urban ponds were – how they collect run-off from roads and in turn become mini ecosystems that effectively lower bacteria n the water and water temperature, allowing the pond to become habitat for many species. I have also experienced how plants like cattails can remove contaminants from the water so that they are not released into the greater environment and witnessed the destruction that can occur if silt barriers are improperly installed around constructions sites.  These barriers limit the escape of dirt and silt; if they aren’t installed properly, it can result in water courses being choked out by the resulting silt.

It is easy to disregard or even be blind to places that could be wildlife habitat in an urban environment. What you might think is just a culvert could be a biodiverse diverted stream. By retaining water in the urban environment, this stream can aid in reducing the potential for flooding while forming a connection between habitats. Keeping these places intact and part of the urban landscape is essential for both the human and non-human residents of our cities.

One of the urban ponds on the edge of newly built houses.

Melanie is a PhD graduate of the Department of Biological and Environmental Science at the University of Stirling (UK), where she researched the climatic and environmental changes occurring on the Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney) from the end of the last glaciation through the early Holocene (16,000 – 3,000 years ago) using diatoms, pollen and geochemistry. Her MSc work explored the relationship between diatom species communities and water-depth gradients in lakes across northwestern Ontario. She has always had a love of water and is interested in limnology/aquatic ecology and paleolimnology and how they can be used together to answer questions at many spatial and temporal scales.

It only took one run

This week, Dispatches from the Field is excited to welcome Scott Lynch, a Master’s Candidate at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, to share how his love for field biology (with sharks!) started.

There are few experiences more unnerving than being told you have to run off a boat, up a ramp, and through a parking lot while carrying a 3-foot shark in your arms. I peered through the hot August Virginian sun, eyeing the obstacles along the boat, not quite believing that this was actually happening.

Just a few days beforehand I had been a newly hired undergraduate intern, working for a month optimizing my supervisor’s western blot protocol. Although I had said I wanted to work in the field when I was hired, I understood the importance of paying my dues. I worked hard at the tasks my supervisor gave me, until one day he asked to see me in his office. When I walked in he had one simple question for me: “How do you feel about Virginia?”

Within a few short days I was landing in Norfolk, Virginia, headed to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science Eastern Shore Lab in Wachapreague. As a new undergraduate researcher I had no idea what to expect. What I found was a sleepy little town of 400 people, characterized by its charter fishing fleet, one large restaurant, and the research lab. As I approached the research lab I found it to be a small complex of buildings, including offices, staff housing, an under-construction dry lab, and a newly opened, state-of-the-art, wet lab. The newly opened building was a concrete hulk nestled on the edge of the salt marsh, the home of the animals studied there. It was accompanied by a set of docks and bobbing boats.

As I got out of the car I was immediately met by a rush of activity. A fresh set of oysters had been brought in for study. The boat was being unloaded and the huge clumps of mud containing oysters along with whatever else happened to get caught up in the shovel were being cleaned and separated. I immediately jumped in and learned just how frenzied and tiring life at a field station can be.

The next morning I was up bright and early for my first encounter with sharks. The salt marsh around the lab is a common place to find juvenile sandbar sharks that time of year. I went out with the senior fish scientists at the lab and learned a great deal, very quickly about fishing and shark handling.

I also learned a great deal about the brutality of bugs on the Virginian Eastern Shore. They have these bugs that look like houseflies with green heads, earning them the creative nickname of “greenheads”. However, unlike houseflies, when they land on you, their bite draws blood – even straight through jeans sometimes. This leaves you with a hard choice: wear jeans, melt to death in the 100 degree (when you include the brutal humidity) weather, and still get bitten occasionally, or wear shorts, keep cooler, but get home with blood running down your legs?

Later that afternoon when we got back to the lab, it came time for that run with a shark in my arms to deposit it into the large outdoor holding tank. I have been asked time and again why we would transport the sharks in such a way and the simplest explanation is to minimize time in between breaths for the sharks. These animals are obligatory ram ventilators, meaning that they need to swim forward to be able to breath. In other words, they can breathe in the tank on the boat and in the holding tank, but still wouldn’t be able to breath in a tub small enough to also be able to carry or wheel around. Therefore, covering their eyes and gills with a wet cloth to protect them and simply running them between locations means that they have the smallest possible window between breaths.

I eyed the path I had to take to get off the boat: up the floating dock, around the corner, through the water tables (being careful not to trip on the pipes running along the ground), and up some stairs. Once at the top, I could carefully slide the shark into the water. Easy, right?

I wrapped the shark’s head in a soaked towel, held its jaw shut with my hands, and went for it. Now I’m a big guy (6’3”, around 300 lbs) so running is not my strong suit, but there is no motivator quite like having a shark in your arms and being responsible for its safety. Especially when a big part of that safety includes getting it back in the water as quickly as possible. I jumped off the boat, ran up the ramp, through the water tables, up the stairs, and with great relief deposited the shark into the water. As the shark slipped out of my hands and took off, I was immediately hooked.

From that point on, working 17 hour days dealing with the heat, the bugs, and the danger of handling live sharks was nothing but exhilarating to me. I worked through meals, woke up in the middle of the night to check on my sharks, and was happy for every minute of the work. I had absolutely caught the shark bug, and the field work bug too.

From those summers working with juvenile sandbars in remote Virginia I have stories of near shark bites, drowning scares out on the mud flats, and so many stories of evil salt marsh bugs. While I love telling all of these stories, and gladly will if you give me a minute of your time, nothing since has ever affected me as much as that first day at the field station, and that first time running a shark.

 

Scott Lynch is a Master’s Candidate at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he studies white shark movement and also works full time as the Technical Services Coordinator for Campus Services. He holds his BS in Marine Biology from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he conducted work on the effects of satellite telemetry tags on juvenile sandbar sharks. Twitter: @savindafishies

Let’s talk field biology again

When Amanda, Sarah, and I started Dispatches from the Field almost three years ago, we wanted to inspire people to notice and love the nature around them.  Because doing field biology allows you to get to know a place intimately, we thought the best way to achieve our goal was by giving people a behind-the-scenes look at the world of fieldwork: the triumphs and the frustrations of working in nature, and the incredible places and breathtaking sights that field biologists get to experience.

Over the past three years, we’ve posted more than 150 stories about fieldwork in locations as diverse as the Canadian arctic, the wilds of Patagonia, and a deserted island in the middle of the Atlantic.  Our posts have drawn both on our own experiences and on those of our many guest posters, and they’ve been read and shared by thousands of people all around the world.  I think we’ve made great strides towards achieving our goal.

But sometimes, just writing about something isn’t enough, and there’s no better way to share the highs and lows of fieldwork than to give people the opportunity to experience the field for themselves!

A few weeks ago, Amanda wrote a post about an upcoming event that she and I were hosting as coordinators of Let’s Talk Science at Queen’s University: the Let’s Talk Field Biology Open House.  When she wrote that post, we were in the final, frantic stages of planning the event.  We were excited, but also a bit apprehensive: it can be difficult to get people to drive half an hour outside the city to attend an event, even if it is free.

When I woke up the morning of April 22^nd, the grey skies and cold wind did not inspire my confidence.  But when I sat up in bed and reached for my phone, I saw I a text from Amanda: “Happy event day!!”

That set the tone for the day.  The weather wasn’t ideal, we had no idea whether or not people would come, but we were going ahead anyway!  We packed our cars with piles of field gear and food, gathered our many volunteers, and headed up to the Elbow Lake Environmental Education Centre.

It took a couple of hours of frenzied preparation to set up for the many activities we had planned, including grad-student led modules on trapping birds, identifying plants, recording frog calls, and studying lake sediments.  We also filled the Elbow Lake Pavilion with a host of activities, ranging from making a smartphone microscope to painting with maggots (yes, you can do that!).

Learning to record frog calls

But finally, we were ready to go.  And just as we put the finishing touches on our activities, the Pavilion door opened: our first visitors had arrived!

Over the course of the day, the clouds blew away, the sun came out to warm us, and we ended up welcoming almost 100 visitors.  Some stayed for only an hour, and some stayed for the entire day.  We showed people how to catch birds using a mist net, how to record frogs using a directional microphone and hip waders, and how to learn about past climates using sediment cores from the bottom of a lake.  Visitors learned to age trees by counting rings (the science of dendrochronology), built their own popsicle stick birdfeeders, and used maggots as paintbrushes to create explosions of colour on paper.

Maggot art created by a group of Beavers & Scouts that visited the open house

As dusk fell, we gathered around a roaring campfire to roast marshmallows and tell stories about some of our favourite funny, scary, or inspiring fieldwork experiences.  And we finished the evening standing quietly on a bridge in the dark, listening to a cacophonous duet between two barred owls.

It was a magical day: despite our anxiety beforehand, it couldn’t have unfolded better.  We hope we’re not mistaken in believing that all the visitors who attended had a great time; however, we certainly know that the almost 20 volunteers who helped us plan and execute the event enjoyed it!

“It was a really neat experience to not only tell our stories out loud but to share them around the campfire. I think it is one thing to read about a story, but to actually hear it first-hand from the one who went through it – now that is putting a face to fieldwork!” – Sarah Wallace, field biologist and co-founder of Dispatches from the Field

“My favourite experience of the Open House was when we went in search of owls at dusk. The moment where the pure silence and peacefulness of that night was broken by an eruption of hoots and screeches is an unforgettable memory.” – John Serafini, field biologist and volunteer

“Having some children (and adults) really learn something new was inspiring to see. Watching people have that ‘aha’ moment while listening to our talks or going through the workshops really inspired me.” – Alastair Kierulf, Let’s Talk Science Volunteer

“I especially enjoyed both telling and listening to other people tell stories about the other amazing things that happen in the field, that might not necessarily be related to the focus of their research.  It really honed in on the unique experiences that make fieldwork what it is.  It didn’t matter if the stories were funny or frightening…people in attendance were all so interested in what we had to say, and for me that was a special moment!” – Amanda Tracey, Let’s Talk Science Coordinator and co-founder of Dispatches from the Field

Amanda showing off a gray rat snake skin, and telling her story “from damp and dark to light and warm”

 

By the time we stumbled out into the empty, dark parking lot at the end of the day, we were exhausted in the way that only fresh air and hard work can cause – but also tiredly thrilled to know that we had been able to share the enchantment of fieldwork with so many people, both adults and children.

Maybe some of those children will go on to be field biologists.  (In fact, at least one of our visitors said that was her career plan!)  But we think the experience was important for everyone.  It’s easy for us, as field biologists, to care about the amazing diversity of flora and fauna we get to see up close and personal.  But how can you expect people to care about what they never experience?

A keen high school student holding a bird for the first time…future field biologist? I think so!

Conservation efforts won’t work if only a few have access to what we’re trying to conserve.  If we want people to care about, respect, and preserve the natural world, they need to feel it belongs to them too.  And that, ultimately, was our goal for Let’s Talk Field Biology.  We hope we succeeded.

 

If you came out to the Let’s Talk Field Biology Open House, we’d love to hear from you!  Send us an e-mail or comment on our blog to let us know what your favourite part of the day was!