Day 10: July 14, 2012

We had a lovely wake up call this morning from a young fella staying in another cabin. At 6 am, bright and early...

"I AM NOT WALKING WITH NO SLEEP, SO SHUT UP!!!"

Hahahahahahahaha, we all chuckled about that. And went right back to sleep until 8 am. 

We hiked to Benson after breakfast and had to go off trail again! Mosquitoes were everywhere, so I put my mosquito shirt on! Those bugs were terribly baffled.

Walking in, we found a tree trunk that had clearly been chewed up by a beaver!! Haven't seen any beavers at all though. I hope that we do at some point- that would be very cool. 

Benson was a fairly small lake, which was nice. There was also a lot of Nymphaea odorata (water lilly) in it, which was awesome since it's my favorite aquatic macrophyte!! I love the flowers, and the cool curly stems underwater. 

 

 

We got our sampling done pretty quickly because of Benson's size. It also wasn't too windy, which meant that Sarah and Charlotte had an easier time doing all of their tests! One of the things that they do that I haven't talked about yet is measure lake clarity. They do this using a secchi disk.

Here, you can see Sarah dropping the secchi disk into the water over the edge of the inflatable boat.

Charlotte's turn to use the secchi disk!!

If you've never seen a secchi disk, it's a weighted down plastic circle divided into quarters that are alternating black and white. You lower it into the water and record the depth where you can't see it anymore. Then, you lower it down a bit more, pull the measuring tape back up, and record the depth where it comes back into view! The further you can lower it and still see it, the higher the lake's clarity is.

They're also in charge of recording moose activity around the perimeter of the lake. They look for spots where there are trails leading to the lake; sometimes there's also evidence of moose feeding on the plants at the water's edge. They take pictures of these areas, with something in the picture to provide scale, and they take waypoints (points with the GPS) of the corners of these grazing beds.

Here's a moose bed at Benson Lake, with a floating jug in the photo for scale.

In this moose grazing bed, Angela and I acted as the scale. We make pretty good moose, I'd say.

Moose might be one of the mechanisms of plant movement at Isle Royale- it's possible that moose trample over plants in their search for food, and relocate fragments of their leaves, stems, or roots. It's good to know what the moose are up to, in case it ends up relevant to Angela's study!!

Our volunteers are so good at their job!! Thanks, Charlotte and Sarah!

This is a picture of the other plant we're collecting for Angela's genetic testing- Utricularia vulgaris.

Leeeeeeeeeeeech

Finished up and hiked back to Daisy. We were all exhausted, but we thought it would be nice to canoe back to Mott Island, so that we could sleep in a bit tomorrow! Seemed like it would be a nice leisurely paddle at first, but about halfway there the clouds started rolling in behind us and we could hear thunder. Apparently, we're destined to have difficult canoe trips. We really paddled hard, and beat the storm there!

I filtered half of our samples from Benson after unpacking. We get two bottles of water at each point where we take water column or sediment samples. One of these bottles gets filtered, and the other doesn't. The filtered bottle will be used to test ammonium levels (NH4+), and the unfiltered bottle will be used in a total phosphorus test. We kept the samples cold by keeping them in a cooler with ice cold water from Lake Superior! Once on Mott Island though, we froze them.

Got to drink soda tonight!! That was a great surprise. I don't necessarily drink tons of soda when I'm home, but an ice cold pop really hit the spot after a long day. We also had really delicious pasta with pesto for dinner- kudos to Angela for being a fantastic camping cook! She's had some really great ideas for meals so far, and every single night we rave about how wonderful the food is.

Poor Sarah and Charlotte are so sunburnt!! I'm sure that it gets really hot sitting in their boat all day, soaking up the sun. Angela and I are getting slight tans too... Wetsuit tans are wonderful- color only on your face, neck, and hands. Woooooooo!!

Can't wait for that wetsuit tan!!