Last days at SERC

The last month at SERC was chock full! Meetings with the senior scientists, outings with the scientists and lab technicians, lessons on nutrient cycles, and more canoeing. It was a blast! 

 I volunteered for the fall Open House. My assignment -- accompany the boat tours around the Rhode River and answer passenger Q while Dennis did the tour. Really? Fabulous!

 Cruising down the river.

Back on land, these are the wet labs. 

 I spent a day in one of them, the Room of DOOM -- dissolved oxygen oyster mortality. It's looking at disease vectors and impacts on the Bay's oyster communities.

 Baskets of oysters. 
 

 New docks! These were repaired during my summer visit. We collected off these one day....

This image really should be rotated, but I'm shrimp tethering! They're studying food webs.

We caught this little croaker. I had no idea they were so named for a reason! Yes, he went back in to the river to eat more shrimp.

Back on land, these are the ruins of the old estate.

 And the tobacco barn, from the old farm days. This hopefully will be one of the programs that we get in place in 2013.

Yes, butterflies. They were all over every time I went walking.

 Back out to the marsh. I only fell in to my knees this time.

 In this part, they're doing some experiments with electron uptake at different levels of the soil.

 From standing on one marsh grass to having phragmites (these are very invasive) much taller than I all around me.

 On the 100-tree survey. What a phenomenal morning -- the professor was in! We talked about tree diversity, canopy structure, growth strategies, disease, species identification.... We started here. 

 These bands help demonstrate tree growth by measuring the width of the cutout. It can grow (or shrink). The yellow ribbons mark the 100 trees in this survey.

 This tree has a slit straight through it!

 This one has a fungus.

This branch is covered in aphids.

Then, off to the tower! The instrument tower, that is. 120-feet straight up, above the tree canopy. Right, I don't like heights. Yes, I get vertigo when I can see through the stairs.

But the view! Stunning. They are using this tower to study UV effects on the forest. These instruments are actually part of an experiment with NASA. It was slow going, but thanks to the fabulous scientist/professor with me, it was a really remarkable experience.

 Back on land, I got to watch the inventory of benthic plates just arrived from Florida. Through a microscope I got an even more detailed view, and saw a flatworm eating a barnacle. How cool is that!

 This is in the protistan ecology lab. Vials and vials of things taken from water surveys.

 Some of the bigger samples.

 But this vial is from the current survey, being inventoried and catalogued.

 Canoes! Jane told me they needed another adult for this middle school tour. Who was I to complain?

 Into life vests, then carry the canoe down to the floating dock.

 In the boat.

 Waiting for the kids to get settled. We spent much of the time talking them off the sandbars since the creek was so low.

And progress on the new lab building!! How fun to watch it go up over the summer. Can't wait to see it when it's done!

What an incredible experience! I miss being out there every day, both the incredible place that is SERC and the amazing people who work there. I was lucky to go back last week and do a brown bag about my time; it felt like I hadn't left! And, my host supervisor gave the remarks for rotations at graduation, so now all my classmates and all the senior leadership know how great my experience was and the exciting collaborations that we're hoping to make happen in the coming years. No pressure, right?