Day 4: The Oldest Organisms in the World and a Species in a Bucket

Day 4 was about two famous organisms: the pupfish and the bristlecone. The former is famous because of its scarcity and the latter because of its longevity. I had not heard of either one.[1] Both were incredible.

The pupfish were the highlight of the trip for me. The Owens Valley pupfish were one of the first organisms to be listed as endangered species. They were thought to be extinct when the species was described from a preserved sample in a glass jar. Then a small population was discovered in an Owens Valley spring and they made it on the first ever endangered species list. Early efforts at conservation were difficult and culminated in an event that Edwin Philip Pister describes in his famous and powerful essay: Species in a Bucket.[2]


The story goes like this. Through an unfortunate string of events the pupfish were limited to a single pool and word got back to the managing entity that the pool had almost dried up. This led to an emergency transfer to another pond:

I netted the surviving fish into the buckets, wincing as each dead one forcefully demonstrated the fragility of life. I then relocated the cages and returned to the buckets, trusting that the battery-powered aerators had not failed during my brief absence. Although the passage of time has obscured my exact words and thoughts as I lugged two heavy buckets and their precious cargo (each weighing more than thirty pounds) over the treacherous marsh terrain, I remember mumbling something like: "Please don't let me stumble. If I drop these buckets we won't have another chance!" I distinctly remember being scared to death. I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species. If I had tripped over a piece of barbed wire or stepped into a rodent burrow, the Owens pupfish would now be extinct!

But for me, the guy in charge of the project was as interesting as the project itself. He reflected several characteristics that I value professionally. I would describe him as ‘a man of action.’ He brought a wide ranging portfolio of resources to bear on his problem and has leveraged diverse social structures and technologies to help build this teetering population. He had wrestled up multiple funding sources, was supporting PhD’s work on the system but also secured free or labor from prisons and youth volunteer brigades. The work was fundamentally results driven, using a mix of ultra-high tech and ultra-low tech and everything in between. He was not afraid of technology but he was not a technology snob. The project is on the cutting edge of DNA analysis (they are doing remarkable environmental DNA) analysis[3] but he our guide told us the most effective tool he has discovered is ‘the rice knife’[4] . The project is a rare combination of insight and hard labor. And that is what impressed me. So many restoration professionals become either academic technology/math snobs or ‘bring in the bulldozers and f- the science’ pragmatists. The pupfish project was an excellent example of getting something big done by a marriage of action and reflection.


After lunch we started our ascent into the White Mountains. People started buzzing about the afternoon plan – hiking in the bristlecones. I had no idea why this was cool, but apparently, the bristlecones are the oldest organism in the world. They regularly get to be 3,000 years old and have been found as old as 5,000 years old[5], leading one student to exclaim ‘these trees are older than Jesus.’ It seems counter-intuitive that longevity would be an effective strategy for making a living in extremely harsh conditions...but there they are.


There is even a song.



Then we continued on to the Crooked Creek Station White Mountain Research Center, elevation 10,200 feet, where we would spend the final three nights. ...and lamp.

This post was written while listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel Pandora Station

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[1] It was at this point of the trip when some of the other students started playing a game of ‘trick the engineer,’ where they would describe biological processes to me and I would have to guess if they were actual or imagined.
[2] He starts his essay by describing a journal he kept for most of his professional career. The entry for the day he wrote about was remarkable: "Transplanted Cyprinodon at Fish Slough; purchased alkaline D-cells, $2.00," There is something profound here about how a life well lived in retrospect is the accumulation of many small acts…a few of which turn out to be decidedly not small…but I have not entirely penetrated it.
[3] There was also a really fantastic bit of hydraulic engineering which resulted in this very clever, multipurpose structure.

[4] Acres of cat tails were cut by hand by large crews of volunteers. Another great example of low tech problem solving is that every time invasive fish endanger the pupfish populations, our guide grabs his snorkel and spear gun and takes care of business.
[5] There is a story that I heard several times during this stop about the oldest tree ever found. Apparently a grad student was coring trees to measure their ages. He got his instrument stuck and had to cut down one tree as part of his study, so he cut this tree down to retrieve the instrument. That night, in his hotel, he started to count the rings, and as the number climbed higher and higher, his heart sunk. He had cut down the oldest tree ever found.

Day 3 SNARL and an Introverted Sierra Interlude

Day 3 started with a visit to the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory. This was not only the coolest acronym that I had encountered in a long time (SNARL[1]) but it was one of the most incredible research facilities I have ever visited. I have no idea how I made it through an entire PhD in river mechanics without knowing about this lab. SNARL is at the foot of the East Sierra, down gradient from Convict Lake.[2] The facility is built on 4 distributaries from the lake and has the hydraulic infrastructure to control the flow conditions in each stream. Additionally, the site has 10 meandering concrete flumes. My head was spinning with the research possibilities.[3] There was one researcher there working with the ‘green world’ hypothesis[4].

SNARL from space.

Before we left, the TA’s reenacted the news caster rumble scene from Anchor Man, for no discernable reason other than our general enjoyment. By those criteria, it was an unqualified success.


Then we proceeded into the Sierra for a lecture on Sierra plant communities and a hike. The lecture was presumably on the plant communities of the east Sierra, but focused on Fire Ecology and eventually zeroed in on the issue of environmental baselines. This is the highly contentious and totally puzzling issue that confronts conservation and restoration researchers of “what is natural.” How far back do you go? We often talk about pre-European state, but are learning more and more that indigenous peoples (and even paeleo-peoples[5]) had substantial ecological impacts.[6] I am pretty familiar with this debate, but found two parts of this one new:

1. Chasing the Baseline: This is the idea that each generation remembers the ‘natural’ state of their childhood and wants to restore it to that, which for each generation, is more and more degraded. So ‘the bar’ keeps falling.

2. Eco-Nazis – Now I have heard this term before as a general pejorative against environmental consciousness in a sort of low brow ad hominem ‘lets associate someone with the worst social movement of all time’ sort of way (think, feminazi, grammar Nazi or soup nazi – essentially a shorthand of http://xkcd.com/261/ Goodwin’s Law). But when we were talking about invasive species that have become locally popular (e.g. mule deer in Pt Reys or Percoforms in Western Rivers) there is a more targeted use of the word, “someone who fights for the purity of native races.”

After the lecture, we were free to hike for the afternoon. Most make the hike up to Ruby Lake. I had been sick for two weeks and was feeling like a shorter hike and a little solitude. I have always felt that the demarcation between introvert and extrovert was a little difficult to negotiate, and have never been able to decide which I am. I really enjoy people. I find them incredibly interesting. I am one of those people who generally enjoys listening to the person sitting next to me on an airplane. Most random individuals have a story worth telling and, therefore, worth hearing. But this was especially true of the people on this trip. It seems like every casual conversation went somewhere unexpected. One person had spent six months traveling around South America, another had just returned from studying cheetahs, another had spent several months isolated in a Costa Rican national park, another had been in the Air Force, another was a Red Sox fan. The people on this trip may have been the most consistently interesting collection of people I have been around. But, I am generally recharged by being alone, which is the definition of an introvert.[7] I think that makes me an introvert who really likes people but that seems absurd.


Anyway, all that is to say, that I took an early left and found a lake and a view (picture above) that I got all to myself. I spent a fantastic three hours reading, napping and praying.[8] One other fun note: I was in the ‘Burning Van’ on day 3, which means I got to select a costume. I selected these flowing ‘pants’ that were really more like a skirt. I selected them because they had lizards on them (below) and were mildly ridiculous (which seemed to be the general point, and I was committed to embracing the van themes). But what I did not foresee was how exceptionally practical they would be for the day’s activities. They were light and loose enough to not restrict while hiking, but they were open enough to stay cool, while they kept the sun off. Lizard skirt-pants FTW.


On the way out we stopped for pie at a spot called Pie in the Sky.[9] They offered a pear-cheddar variety. Now, berry pies and crustaceans are my favorite foods on earth. So I decided that, though I was deeply intrigued, I wasn’t going to risk my opportunity to have a berry pie to be adventurous with a pear-cheddar…until one of the other students offered to split two pieces of pie with me (so we would each end up with one total piece but it would be half experimental and half ). It was a sort of culinary bet hedging, It was brilliant[10], and delicious.

[11]

I don’t have a good place to write about demographics, but it was one of the really interesting things about the trip. So I will put it here. The demographics of the incoming Ecology cohort could not have been more different in every way from any engineering cohort I have been part of. Only one or two of the 28 students was from a country other than the US. Only four or five students[12] had ethic background that was not Caucasian. And only seven of us were men. Being used to a field dominated by dudes from all over the world, this was new. In some ways it was more diverse and in other ways less.[13] The reason I stuck this in here is that we talked about it at dinner on day 3. We all had to write something in our application about how we would add diversity to the community. I shared my response to that question which went something like: “The diversity question is uncomfortable for white men who are totally committed to the value of diversity, but have very little of it to offer.” [14]

I went to bed at 9, which turned out to be pretty typical[15]. This was probably the most regrettable part of the trip for me. Due to my extended sickness, some thyroid adventure, and being the oldest trip participant, I simply could not keep up. But, in my opinion, the key to aging well is to embrace each life stage for what it actually is.[16] Being a 35 year old student whose body is failing in very mild ways is fun enough.

This post was written while listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel station on Pandora[17]

Baxter?

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[1] I evaluate Acronyms on three metrics: 1) cleverness (is it fun), 2) ease (is it easy to say – after all, the objective of an acronym is to make communication more efficient) and 3) Naturalness (does it seem like the name was messed with in order to get a better acronym). SNARL works beautifully on all these criteria. I guess there is a potential 4th criterion: propriety. A woman in my office was planning a release of a new piece of software that she really wanted to name the Prescriptive Modeling System…but got shut down.
[2] Site of a classic, old school, wild west shoot out.
[3] And the potential for robust replicates.
[4] The green world hypothesis (from a paper affectionately known as the HSS or ‘the Etude’) asserts that because the world is green, herbivores must not be resource limited (meaning that predation or disease are the primary limiters). This led to a discussion between a couple of the students in which one of them suggested that the fundamental ecological question that you have to ask about any organism is ‘why doesn’t my organism take over the world?’
[5] There is substantial support for the hypothesis that the extinction of the Holocene mega-fauna (mastodons et al.) was the result of human hunting. On a separate note, I decide during this trip that ‘the Charismatic Mega-Fauna’ would be one of the best band names of all time.
[6] There is evidence that the indigenous inhabitants of the east sierra employed prescribed burns to make the forests easier to hunt in. This means that the historically high fire frequencies that we have always assumed were natural may, themselves, be anthropogenic.
[7] We also have had trouble pegging my wife on this scale. I generally really enjoy people but would almost always choose to spend time alone. Amanda is constantly planning events with large groups of people, but generally enjoys solitude.
[8] And yes, the praying did transition into napping…but it also transitioned the other way.
[9] I have written before that, while this phrase is often used to mock Christian eschatology it fails in two ways. (1) It demonstrates a total misunderstanding of the actual Christian hope of a renewed world and cosmos and (2) I really, really, really like pie. Pie in the sky sounds fantastic. And, this was simply empirical support for that contention. Consider it and excellent ante-type to a type that does not actually exist, but would not be troubling if it did.
[10] Have I mentioned that these people were extremely intelligent. There were times that this was highly advantageous.
[11] For the record, a pear-cheddar pie is a pear pie with a quarter inch of cheddar melted on the top. It is exactly as good as it sounds.
[12] By my very rough estimation.
[13] I also suspect we were less politically diverse than engineering communities I have been part of. And adding me did nothing substantial to broaden this.
[14] One of the women pointed out there is a little irony (in the Alanis Morssette, as it has come to be known, definition of this word) here that by being a dude I actually did augment program diversity.
[15] Here I am using ‘typical’ in a ‘Lagrangian’ sense in that it was typical when you observed me on a temporal scale not in the ‘Eulerian’ sense of, it was typical of all at a given time.
[16] I think the surest way to make yourself miserable is to get stuck in a life stage and not be able to let it go as it lets go of you.
[17] So, we talked music in the Burning Van on day 3 and I took notes. The musical citations for the remaining posts (including this one) will be mostly Pandora explorations from the recommendations of my friends from Van 6 on day 3.