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.