A surprise exit

It’s a good thing we packed all of our gear yesterday!

We were scheduled to return to Chile on Tuesday on an Air Force plane. However, Chile’s Air Force is busy fighting a very large, dangerous fire in Chile right now. We weren’t sure they’d be able to stop to come get us from Antarctica. 

Today, a plane from the Peruvian Air Force landed, and they agreed to take us back to Chile… right now! We had 45 minutes warning to finish packing our suitcases, move our cargo to the hangar, and clean up. It was frantic, but we did it!

So instead of eating lunch, we flew as cargo in a Hercules LC-130 with Peru’s Air Force back to Chile.

Now we are in Punta Arenas. We have enjoyed a refreshing shower and have clean clothes on. And we were all very hungry by 8 pm when we could finally eat dinner!

Tomorrow we will have a busy day tracking down our cargo and preparing it for shipping back to the US. But first, a good night’s sleep is in order!

Packing up

Our work is coming to a close! We have completed our field work, and collected all of our samples. We have been working hard in the lab for the past few days to finish our invertebrate extractions. 

The lights under the table are for our Tullgren funnels that we use to extract the arthropods from the plant and soil samples. Zoie is working on drying her plant cores for more analyses back at home.

Now that our lab work is also done, we have packed our cargo. We are scheduled to fly back to Punta Arenas, Chile on Tuesday. That’s just a couple days away! So, all of our gear is in boxes, and our samples are safely packed up. We are officially done working, because everything is in boxes!

Most of the scientists who are working at Escudero are scheduled to leave in the next couple of days. So, most of us are busily finishing up our work and packing. We did take time, though, for a group photo in front of the station!

Now that our work is done, we are just waiting for our flight back to Chile when the next leg of our work begins: shipping cargo! I will keep you posted. 

Soil organisms are cuter than penguins!

Today we spent some time inspecting moss species at one of our main research sites. This is a great way to see some of the soil organisms that we study!

For our experiments, we extract the organisms from the soil and plants in the lab, and look at them through a microscope. But to do this, they are preserved in ethanol or formaldehyde. They aren’t alive when we work with them in the lab. 

To see them alive in their natural habitat, you have to look closely! It may look like nothing is living in the moss or soil… but if you move a rock, you can see all sorts of organisms living there! (You might have to make the video full-screen in order to see the small critters!)

The first things you see in the video are some white Collembola, which are commonly called springtails. These springtails spend their life below the surface, which is why they are white. Why bother making pigment if nobody can see you through the soil anyway? 

Then, you will see some mites. These move on the surface and below, so they are brown to blend in with the soil. There are two kinds of mites in the video. One is moving around a lot on top of the soil and moss. The other one is burrowed down a bit and you have to look closely to see it move. 

Here is another video featuring a mite on top of the moss, and a LOT of springtails crawling around among the moss. 

So, as you can see, these organisms are very adorable. They use the moss as their habitat to live and graze for food. They are small, but if you know where to look, you can find a lot of them!

Move like a penguin

When most people think of Antarctica, they think of penguins. They are certainly the most popular Antarctic animal. So, of course I have to write a post about penguins!

Penguins are very good swimmers. Their bodies are built to allow them to be very agile underwater. They have a streamlined shape that reduces drag, and their oily feathers make the water flow smoothly around them. Their wings aren't good for flying, but they make very good flippers to propel themselves forward in the water. Their feet tuck in by their tail to steer like a rudder. That's how they can escape their predators! This is a very short video, but see that white spot zooming around underwater? That's a penguin swimming just beneath the surface of the water!

Penguins breathe air, though, so they can't keep swimming to hunt for their food if they can't come up for air. But if a penguin has to come to a stop in order to breathe, they might be found by a predator! They need to breathe while they're swimming. So, penguins will also do what's called "porpoising". Penguins will swim quickly underwater, and then jump out of the water and dive back down. They look like porpoises when they do that. And, like porpoises, they do this to breathe air without having to stop or lose their speed.

You can find some very good facts about how penguins swim from this website. But I am a soil ecologist, so I don't see them underwater. I see them on land!

Penguins come on land to nest. While their body shape makes them good swimmers, they are much less graceful on land! To stay balanced on their two feet, they have to hold their wings out and back. In this video, the chinstrap penguin in the lower front shows you how they waddle over flat ground, and then hop with two feet to jump onto rocks. Their body shape is streamlined for swimming, but on land it makes them look a bit fat and unbalanced. They do tend to trip and fall down a lot, especially if they're trying to move too fast!

However, moving on land is much easier for a penguin when there is snow on the ground! Penguins will slide across snow and ice on their bellies. They use their feet and wings to push themselves along like paddles. It's like swimming on land! You can see the tracks through snow where other penguins have crossed the snow, so it's a popular mode of travel. (And if your sound is on, you can hear the musical stylings of a penguin colony.)

I see a lot of penguins while I'm doing my field work in Antarctica. This is how I see them: waddling and hopping around on rocks, sliding on snow and ice, and (if I'm near a beach) porpoising above the water. They are very cute, but I still think soil organisms are much cuter!

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.