Charismatic organisms of Antarctica

Everybody of course loves penguins and seals, who are the most famous Antarctic animals. But there are a lot of other animals that don't get as much attention. They are often small or live deep underwater, so they don't get nearly as much attention as the big, cute animals like penguins. But I think these small and unknown organisms are the most interesting to learn about!

This year we are working at Escudero with a lot of different scientists who study these small organisms. When we have time, we show each other our super cool animals under the microscope so that we all get to enjoy learning about them! I've met some cool critters in the lab.

I have been able to meet some fish larvae. This icefish larvae is my favorite, because of its large fins. Icefish only live in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. They are a unique species because they do not have hemoglobin in their blood, so their blood is colorless! They don't need the hemoglobin to help carry oxygen in their blood because the cold waters around Antarctica tend to have a lot of dissolved oxygen. 

Another cool organism I learned about is called a chiton. (Pronounced in English like kye-ton.) These are mollusks that live on rocks in the intertidal areas of oceans. They are covered in plates that protect them like armor. The plates are partially overlapped so that they can bend and flex as they move over uneven rocks. Chitons look like underwater roly-polies! 

The cool thing I learned about chitons is that their shells have a bunch of sensory organs under their shells to sense light and dark. Some of them have ocelli which act like eyes. So, chiton shells are covered with thousands of eyes! Like other mollusks, they have a radula, which is a tongue-like structure in their mouth covered with teeth to scrape algae off of rocks. Chitons' teeth on their radula are coated in magnetite, which means their teeth are made of magnetic iron! 

Chitons range in size, but the ones being collected here at Escudero are very small. Here are Cecelia's hands as she was putting the chiton in place on the microscope. The chiton is in between her fingers on her left hand.

We also shared some of our soil organisms with everyone. Everyone was excited to be able to see one of the most adorable soil organisms: a tardigrade! Here is the tardigrade that we found living in the soils of our transplant experiment:

Tardigrades live everywhere around the world. In soils, they live in the water that surrounds the grains of soil. They also live in moss and other plants. They are INCREDIBLY resilient. They can survive not only the extreme cold here in Antarctica, but also extreme heat, pressure, radiation, dehydration... even the vacuum of space! Many of the other scientists here had never seen a Tardigrade in person before, so they were excited to be able to see one in person.

Soil respiration

Yesterday we had some very nice weather! It was foggy and misty, but there was no rain and very little wind. Antarctica is a very windy continent, and that's especially true here on King George Island in January! Most days when we've been out working, we have worked through 20-40 mph gusts. Yesterday was much calmer, and we took advantage of the nice day to measure some CO₂ flux.

For our research, we are interested in measuring how plants influence the soil biological community. We look at the biological community in different ways. One way is by measuring how active they are. All of the organisms in the soil, from the tiny bacteria to the larger Collembola, all have to respire in order to live. This is how they break down their food to release energy that they need to function. Most organisms in the soil use oxygen and respire carbon dioxide, just like humans! We also breathe in oxygen and respire carbon dioxide. And, when we are more active, we breathe more. You breathe more heavily when you are getting exercise than you do when you are sitting still watching TV. So, the amount of carbon dioxide that you are producing corresponds to how active you are.

We use the same principle to measure the soil community. We measure how much CO₂ is being produced from the soil. If more CO₂ is coming from the soil, it tells us that there is a more active soil community. They are probably more abundant, and eating and metabolizing more!

We measure the amount of CO₂ being produced by the soil using an infrared gas analyzer, which is on the ground in front of Dr. Hannah. The gray chamber in Dr. Hannah's hand gets placed on top of a PVC ring, which directs the CO₂ coming from the soil up into the chamber. The gas is then pumped through the black hoses from the chamber into the blue-and-gray machine. The machine contains the gas analyzer that measures the rate of CO₂ being produced. 

While Dr. Hannah and I used the gas analyzer, Zoie ran around placing the PVC rings for the next samples. (That's why she's off in the distance to the right.) So Zoie kept us moving forward to the next sample until we were done!

We measured how much respiration was being produced by the soils at each of our successional zones. We'll be able to compare whether soils beneath certain plants are more active in early, mid, or late succession stages. But, analyzing all of that data takes a LONG TIME, so I'll have to tell you the answer later!

Samples galore!

We have had a productive day of sampling! We visited a new site on Nelson Island, which is nearby to the peninsula where the research station is located.

At Nelson Island, we started sampling one of our "transects" through the successional zones stretching away from the glacier. We sample three areas: one near the glacier (where soil is newly exposed, which we call "early succession"), one area where ecological succession has reached its fully developed climax community in "late succession", and one site in between. We call this one "mid succession". We are using the different distances from the glacier to represent how much time has passed for ecological succession. The more developed site with a lot of vegetation has been exposed longer, which allows succession to reach its fully developed ecosystem. (You can read more about our transects with this post from last year about the one we did here on King George Island.)

We started with the late succession site that has a highly developed plant community. We had to work fast because we only had six hours to get our work done! One of the main things we do at each site is to describe the plant community. 

Zoie and Hannah worked on this by laying down a 10-meter line and measuring the community at every meter. We put a square on the ground and count everything inside the square. We end up counting the community in 50 squares (five different 10-meter transects), and we use this to calculate which plants are the most dominant.

Then we get to the important part! We take samples from each of the dominant plant species. We collect some of the plant and the soil beneath it. Here I am taking one of the samples at our late succession site:

We take samples from the four most dominant plants, and also bare soil with no plants growing on it. That lets us see how plants change the soil by comparing it to soil with no plants growing on it. And, we do that at our late succession, mid succession, and early succession sites. We end up carrying a lot of soil in our backpacks!

You can see the difference between our late-succession site (above) and our mid-succession site (below) with less vegetation. This site has been exposed for a while, and there are several different plant species living there, but there's not as much vegetation as in late succession.

We ran out of time before we could get to our early succession site. We have to spend a LOT of time hiking through the moraines to find the best sites to work at. We had six hours but only finished the mid and late succession sites! We will hopefully go back soon to finish with the early succession site.

Nobody works alone

The weather here at Escudero hasn't been very good, so we've had to mostly stay indoors for the past couple of days. We've had a lot of wind (up to 40 mph) and some rain. That means no field work! It's important that nobody works outside when it's unsafe. Even when the weather is good, we are not allowed to go out to do field work alone. We have to always work with at least one other person. Nobody works alone!

The same is true of the animals that live in Antarctica. Animals can't exist without interacting with other animals. While some animals are solitary, they still have to interact with other species to eat and reproduce. Some of them are particularly dependent on other species. They also never work alone! 

Everybody knows about penguins living in Antarctica. But penguins are actually marine birds and only live part of their life on land. The snowy sheathbill is the only true land bird on the Antarctic continent. 

Sheathbills are scavengers who will eat just about anything. They are often found around penguins because they steal a lot of their food from penguins. They will steal the food that penguin parents regurgitate to give to their chicks, eat the remains of dead penguins, even penguin guano! Without penguins, the sheathbill in this photo would not be able to survive.

Wilson's storm petrels often eat invertebrates in the water, but sometimes they take advantage of the work of other animals. In this video, a leopard seal is eating a penguin. The storm petrels are hovering around, diving in to steal little bits of leftovers that fall off when the leopard seal is tossing the penguin around. The storm petrels rely on bigger predators to catch the food that they can't hunt themselves!

Not all interactions between species are friendly, though. Skuas are another type of bird common in Antarctica. They are predators who will eat eggs and chicks of other birds. Therefore, other species of birds don't usually like it when a skua shows up! Antarctic terns are a smaller species of bird who will work hard to defend their nests from predators. They "dive bomb" any potential threat to try to scare it away. When this skua showed up at one of our field sites, the terns were very unhappy!

These are just a few examples of species that interact with each other in Antarctica. The same is true for humans: we rely on other species to survive!

Successful gardening!

The main research goal for our project is to understand how plants and soil interact with each other during ecological succession. After a glacier melts, the new soil gets colonized by new plants. Those plants can change the soil and the invertebrates who live there. Those changes to the soil pave the way for even more plants to move in, which can also change the soil. This goes back-and-forth until you reach a mature Antarctic plant and soil community, like this one:

We want to understand more about how this process happens. How do plants change the soil at each of these stages of succession?

Last year, Dr. Hannah and I set up a "transplant experiment". (You can read the post from last year here.) This is a great way to understand how plants change soil. We started with bare soil that had not yet been colonized by plants... and then moved the plants in to make that colonization happen! Last year, we created our little "gardens" of Antarctic plants. 

Dr. Hannah "planting" some algae in one our transplant plots last year.

We planted two species of moss, grass, and an algae so that we can measure the impact of these different kinds of plants on the soil. We didn't know whether they would survive through the year. Winter can be very hard for new plants to survive, and the meltwater that comes with summer can wash a lot of plants away!

Now that we are back at Escudero, the first thing we did was go check our transplant plots. And... THEY SURVIVED! We were very happy to see that they are still in tact.

The ecosystem is still "waking up" for the summer, and some areas have been drier than normal. So the plants aren't very green, but they are alive and will be able to continue growing over the coming years.

We collected samples from each of the transplant "gardens". We collected one piece of each plant species, and the soil underneath of it. We collected these from each of our six replicate plots. This way, we can see how the plants have changed the soil after one year of colonization. I don't have any pictures of us sampling, though... it was VERY windy and cold! We worked as fast as we could, and we didn't take the time to snap photos in the heavy wind.

Now that we have the samples in the lab, we are analyzing the invertebrate and microbial community living in each one. We are also making measurements of the plant health and growth over the past year. When we are back in the U.S., we will measure the chemistry of the soil, how many nutrients have been added, and the physiology of the plants that were growing on them.

Dr. Hannah and Zoie working with one of the moss samples.

We feel good that one of our main tasks for this field season is complete. We are now busy in the lab for the next few days processing all of these samples!

Back at Escudero

Well, so much has happened since my last post! Dr. Hannah and I were on the RV Betanzos for two weeks sampling around the top and east side of the Antarctic Peninsula. We didn't have any cell phone or internet connection until we returned to Escudero Base a couple days ago.

The Betanzos, our home for a couple of weeks!

Here is a map of the sites we visited during our time on the ship. All of the red dots and yellow pins are sites where we sampled soil and plants for our research. (Now, we are back at Escudero on King George Island, which is marked with the blue bubble at the top.)

The sites we visited on the Betanzos were very exciting for me, because it was my first time going to the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula! It was challenging, though, because the sites were selected for the penguinologists on the ship. We saw a LOT of penguins.

Adélie penguins marching on the beach, in front of the Betanzos.

We usually try to avoid areas with heavy penguin activity, because they have such a big impact on the soil. Soils and plants at penguin colonies are VERY different from the rest of the surrounding land. Penguins poop a LOT of nutrients and create a lot of compaction, and that's not the type of soil we want to investigate. Since our sampling sites were selected for the penguin research, we always had to walk as far as we could to get away from the rookeries. But, we didn't have a lot of time at each stop... usually only a few hours. So we had to walk as fast and far as we could to get our samples!

It was tough! But we found plants at all of the islands we visited. We collected plant (mostly moss) and soil samples from across all of those locations. We are extracting the invertebrates that live in those plants and soil, so that we can measure how plants influence the soil biological community. We have already been doing this at King George Island, but we don't know whether the relationships we measure are only true here (in the unique climate at this site) or if it's true across all of Antarctica. By looking at the plant and soil communities across all of these sites, we can make broader conclusions about how plants influence soil biology in general, not just at one place. More spatial replication creates stronger conclusions!

We found a wonderful oasis of moss on James Ross Island on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Now that we are back at Escudero, we will be working with the samples we collected on the Betanzos. We were able to do some of our invertebrate extractions on the ship, but it is hard when the boat moves so much! We got creative and modified our extractors to be more stable, and it worked well.

Our ship-stable version of the Tullgren funnels to extract arthropods. The cans are secured into a hard case that is taped to a table so that it wouldn't slide around!

We could still do the invertebrate extractions on the ship, but other things had to wait until we were in an actual lab. We will continue to process those samples here at Escudero, along with a lot of other field work at our sites from last year! We are at Escudero for three more weeks, and I will keep you posted about our progress.

A quick update from the Betanzos

We successfully made it to Antarctica! Our flight left Punta Arenas, and we landed on King George Island the night of January 2.

We briefly visited Base Escudero, where we stayed last year. From there, we took small boats out to our research vessel: the Betanzos. It was very late at night (about 1 am on Jan 3), so it was almost like dusk. The lights on the horizon at the upper left are from the Betanzos. Our home away from home!

After dropping some scientists off at Base O’Higgins, we have been moving along the northwest side of the Antarctic Peninsula. We stop at a new site each day, and the ship sails to the next at night. So far, we have collected samples at Isla Duroch where there are a lot of chinstrap penguins. 

Now we have moved on to Baya Esperanza (Hope Bay) on the tip of the Peninsula. There is an Argentinian base with a cell phone tower. That is why I have a little bit of internet… for right now! Tonight we will move on to the next site, away from cell reception. 

At each site on our “cruise”, we are looking for the succession gradients from a receding glacier where plants are beginning to grow. We are hopeful that Baya Esperanza will have the sites we need! However, we have been on a weather delay all day. It is not safe whether to take the Zodiacs (the small boats) from the Betanzos to the shore. 

So we are just waiting for conditions to improve… hopefully tonight!

A brief stop in Punta Arenas

We safely arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile. Normally we stay here for a couple of days to pack gear and get ready. But, bad weather is moving into the area where we will land in Antarctica, so we can’t wait for tomorrow. We have to leave tonight! That means we had two hours to do all of the things we would normally do over a couple of days!

We quickly went to our hotel… not to stay overnight but to get a fast shower and brush our teeth. (We have been in airports and airplanes for a day and a half. Yuck!) We received our cold-weather clothing from the Chilean Antarctic Institute, and repacked our luggage to be ready for use in Antarctica. We also got the safety gear we use from the U.S. Antarctic Program. It has been a busy couple of hours! We ate a quick dinner at the hotel, too, because it’s the last food we will see until tomorrow morning!

Now we are back at the airport waiting for our flight to Antarctica. There is our fight at the top of the Departures board!

We will fly for about two hours to King George Island (which in Spanish is Isla Rey Jorge). This is where the Chilean Base, Escudero, is. However we are not staying at Escudero. We will board a ship to visit the sites in the map I showed you a couple days ago. 

Hannah and Becky about to board the plane to Antarctica

We will have no internet on the ship, so there won’t be any more blog posts until mid-January when we’re back at Escudero. I will tell you all about our adventures when we are back in contact!

…And we’re off!

 

Dr. Becky and Dr. Hannah are on their way to Antarctica! We are currently flying from our homes in the U.S. to Punta Arenas, Chile. Here we are in the Santiago airport. We have made it to Chile! Now we are waiting for our flight to Punta Arenas.

Punta Arena is a small city on the southern tip of Chile. It is on the coast of the Straits of Magellan. It is one of the few places where ships and planes will leave South America to cross the Drake Passage for Antarctica.

We are currently in the Santiago airport (blue dot). We are about to fly to Punta Arenas (red tag). From there, we head across the ocean to the Antarctic Peninsula!

Usually we stay in Punta Arenas over night and travel to Antarctica the next day. That gives us time to gather our gear, hear all of the safety briefings, and have one last good meal before traveling further south. But, the weather forecast is not good for the next few days, so it sounds like our flight to Antarctica might be later tonight! We will have about 5 hours to accomplish all of those things. Plans change frequently in Antarctica, though, so we shall see how it goes!