Day 1: Onesies, Thematic Vans, and Lake Tahoe

It is no secret that the great liability of the modern[1] academy is that it requires specialization, usually to the point of irrelevance. To someone whose intellectual role model is Blasé Pascal, this seems like an intellectual death by a thousand boredoms. But I am convinced that if Pascal was alive now, that he would almost certainly be an Ecologist. Ecology is the last great refuge for the generalist.[2] For me, it is a little bit like coming home.

UC Davis has the top Ecology program in the country.[3] But their great strength is also a potential weakness. At UCD, Ecology is not a department, it is a ‘Group,’ a loose coalition of 200 students and 125 faculty come from 24 different departments across campus. The obvious interdisciplinary advantages of this approach are vulnerable to being negated by the forces of fragmentation. To mitigate this impending fragmentation, each new class of incoming graduate students go on a seven day field trip together. The objective of the trip is presumably to introduce students from all over the country to California’s ecology and UC’s amazing field stations. But there seems to be a more powerful scientific benefit…friendship. By forging enduring friendships between students who will scatter to labs across campus, the group ensures continued collaboration between diverse specialties. It is brilliant. And it was a blast.


My Odyssey[4] started with a 6:30 pickup. My wife (who was about to undertake 7 days of unassisted parenting for the sake of my education[5]) looked at me askance as two TA’s dressed in onesies and bomber hats emerged from a decorated van to get my stuff. “You are going to have fun,” she said, not entirely approvingly. When we rendezvoused with the other vans, it became clear that (a) my van was not remotely an aberration and (b) I was, in fact, going to have a lot of fun. The onesies and bomber hats were the official TA uniform[6] and each van was elaborately decorated with its own theme:

Van 1: Country Music/Redneck Culture
-Played country music[7],
-Offered tattoos to the students in their van each day
-Ate slim jims and jerky
-Decorated with empty PBR cans

Van 2[8]: Carnies
-Ate popcorn and peanuts[9]
-Played Carnie trivia
-TA’s dressed as new Carnie ‘freak’ each day

Van 3: Life Aquatic
–The van was decorated as a submarine
-Had a mascot (inflated dolphin)
-If you were in the Life Aquatic van for the day you had to wear an “Intern” shirt
–Played the Life Aquatic movie.
-Theme song “I’m on a boat”.[10]

Van 4: The News 4 Anchorvan
–Played the Will Farrell movie Anchor Man,[11]
-TA’s dressed as the characters
-If you were in the Anchor van for a day you had to wear a tie[12]
-Someone had to hold a lamp, because, well “I love lamp.”

Van 5: The Safari Van
– great Jungle themed sound track
– ‘animal ears’ for students
– TA’s wore pith helmets and very short shorts.

Van 6: The Burning Van
– The TA’s had just returned from “Burning Man” and kind of just kept the party going.
-If you were in the Burning Van you had a huge selection of outlandish costumes to choose from.
-And they had great music.

Tahoe

The cultural curiosities were the big story of the first day, but there was some interesting content as well. We went to the two UC field stations in Tahoe. I had been to one of them before, but it had undergone such a thorough renovation in the last couple years that I did not notice it. Tahoe has three main research issues.

1. Loss of Clarity: In recent history, lake clarity has gone from 100’ to 60’

2. Invasive Species: Lake Trout, Asian clam et al.

3. Climate Change: Tahoe ecology is dependent on winter stratification and summer mixing. This is a classic ‘threshold event’ where small incremental changes in climate could have dramatic, non-linear effects on physical and biological systems.


The most interesting Tahoe trivia of the day: There is enough water in Lake Tahoe to cover California in a foot of water.

I had heard the Tahoe shpeal (um, not sure how to spell that one) before, but it took on a new angle with my new ecologist companions. Many of them seemed to agree that clarity research was overrepresented with respect to its ecological impacts. They kept trying to understand why clarity mattered ecologically[13] and could not seem to get a straight answer other than, it concerns the wealthy land owners and tourist industry and, therefore attracts a lot of research dollars.

This exchange encapsulates precisely what I am hoping to get out of this program. Mostly, I am not studying ecology to acquire a bunch of new facts. I am full. Every new fact supplants an old one. What I find most helpful about entering into a new discipline is learning new ways to think about things. It is like getting a new pair of eyes that see things that were just not there before. I am looking forward to seeing like an ecologist…though you will have to wait until later in the week to find out if I ever learn to dress like one.

This post was written while listening to The Mars Volta Channel on Pandora

Note: Credit for many of these pictures goes to my friend Matt, who knows more about birds than anyone I have met and became my tutor for all things avian.
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[1] Here I am using the word ‘modern’ as a temporal not an ideological signifier.
[2] To the point that some (most notably ‘the Canadian school) have argued that the semantic range of the word is so broad that it fails to signify anything meaningful. By the way, how cool is it to be in a discipline where the cranky contingent is called ‘the Canadian school.’ Ah, Ecology, a discipline so full of wonder and paradox that Canadians are benevolent curmudgeons.
[3] In 2009, it made the #1 spot on the US News and World Report for programs in Ecology and Evolution. In 2010 it was tied for 3rd…but the two schools before it have no Ecology program to speak of and make the list on the strength of their evolutionary biology programs.
[4] This is what the trip was called and (from what I can tell) has been called for the 13 years it has been offered, though, from what I can tell, not a single Homer reference was made during the entire trip…though the trip was not without classical references. There were nearly 5,000 Anchor Man references.
[5] Reason 239,345 why my wife is amazing.
[6] But just the first costume installment. The TA’s each brought a new costume for each day, and a few would undergo more costume changes per day than my 3 year old.
[7] As much as riders could take…which I think amounted to ~3 tracks.
[8] My home van
[9] We were encouraged to shuck peanut shells on the floor of the van once it was confirmed that no one in the group had peanut allergies.
[10] This song gets funnier with more plays. One of the other students got to the heart of it: “It is funny because being on a boat isn’t really that great.” But it plays well as a deconstruction of contemporary hip hop hat has so much talent but nothing to say. I have written about this in my main blog, but I never feel older than when I talk about how rap used to be great.
[11] Apart from Stranger than Fiction, Anchor Man is probably Ferrell’s greatest work, and it is certainly one of the most ridiculously quotable movies in recent history. Bill Simmons once wrote an entire NFL preview by attributing an Anchor Man quote to each team.
[12] Because, “I’m a professional.”
[13] And, certainly it must, since clarity influences light penetration and the thickness of the photosynthetic zone.