Hibernating

Still in hybernation.
After getting out and in of New York between snow storms to visit Germany for Christmas I went into hibernation for the winter. Between being hit by multiple massive snow storms (causing a lot of work tunneling out of the house...), starting new projects in the lab and the semester kicking off with lots of class work not too much has happened.
With subzero temperatures a lot of my energy was wasted in putting on layers and layers of clothes every time I tried to go somewhere,... maybe I can blame all the extra sleep I've needed on that.
But, in the last few weeks we've started to see the sun more and more and hope of spring getting here eventually is growing as the expectation that we will have to play our first rugby games of the season on snowy pitches.

Excuse me – do you have sawfish saws?

Yes, what have I been doing with the sawfish saws and why am I stealing bits of sturgeon from museums? One of the projects I’m working on had me contacting all sorts of museums across the country saying: Excuse me sir, do you have sawfishsaws? May I have part of your sawfishsaw? I’m looking to isolate DNA from sawfishsaws.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t using the term sawfishsaw quite that frequently (the scientific word is rostrum) – but I was getting bits and pieces of sawfishsaws mailed to me. The Smithsonian Museum in DC and a museum in Philly told me that they had quite a few sawfishsaws and that it would be best if I could come by to sample them myself. Go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian (or any museum for that matter)? Yes please!
And so I packed my hacksaw to go saw sawfishsaws (yes this is the new version of she sells seashells at the seashore). As I was packing my bag I thought to myself, Shannon, it’s a good thing you’re not flying anywhere. There’s no way you’d get through security carrying a saw, a bottle of ethanol, vials, a lighter, razorblades and a serrated knife. A couple of people were a bit confused when I told them I was off to get pieces of sawfishsaws (I can’t help it, I like that word) from museums. They envisioned me walking in the front door checking out the museum exhibitions and taking parts of the saws on display. Okay, I might have given them a little bit of incentive to believe that :-)
The ichthyology (Fish) department in the Smithsonian Museum is usually in part of the building that is currently being renovated so I ended up in the attic with big freight boxes (the wooden kind, that kinda make me think if I opened the wrong one some archaic dinosaur would march out) and rows and rows of box-type drawer thingies. You unclip a huge board in the front which then reveals shelves of specimen with little tags on them (some of them a hundred years old or so!) about where they came from and what they are.

I was sawing off part of a rostrum that was probably about a foot long and joking around with the curator about how the fact that the tag said that this fish had been speared implied getting pretty close to it. We discussed whether or not that was a good idea. I quickly made up my mind when the next saw we pulled out was only a bit shorter than I am tall!
In Philly I did get to see the cellar which is where I found the big sturgeon (so no, on that picture I’m not stealing part of a sturgeon on exhibition!). I spent most of my time a few floors up in a room that not only housed (shelved) the dried specimen but also entire fishes crammed into jars (kinda spooky), or larger ones stacked in tanks. The shelves where the ones where they have big “steering” wheels that you can use to move them closer and farther apart so you can get at the shelves in between. As the curator climbed up one of the shelves the entire shelves starting rolling slowly, slowly, slowly closing the gap.
I quickly reached out my hand to stop the movement, but couldn’t help but wonder how many curators go missing every year in shelf rolling incidents…

I like Christmas for lots of reasons...

while I enjoy hot chocolate, gingerbread and Christmas Carols, the main reason I like Christmas is because it's Christmas.

Christmas Bells 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till, ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The Carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said;
‘For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!’
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
‘God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!’

the issue of (un)locked doors...

The “AllHands” email in our department is constant source of entertainment. Lately there’s been a whole series of emails, forwarded emails, crossed-emails and email parts going around regarding unlocked doors at night.
It started with a forwarded email from the Chemistry department reminding everyone there to make sure they properly locked the lab doors. Apparently they caught a couple of students trying to repeat an experiment they had seen on Youtube.
The email was forwarded to our department with an added comment that we need to remember to lock OUR buildings at night – which started a whole controversy of who found what building unlocked at what time, who should be making sure they are locked, who is unlocking them and so forth. Oh, stuff got blown so out of proportion, people were offended, people were accused, names were named and general name-calling ensued.
Real drama, about real life issues – seriously, who needs reality TV? Oh, my favorite part was one of the email which mentioned certain “ingredients” available that people could “use” for “experiment”. If we’re really that obsessed with terrorists –they’ve kinda already won.

Gone Fishin'

okay... actually this is me taking a sample from a museum specimen and the sturgeon I usually "deal" with a subadults and smaller... but still. This is me in a Philadelphia museum cellar with a very large fish!

Oh, the thinks you can think!

Frequently, when I meet people and they ask me what I do and I reply that I'm a budding Marine Biologist their first reply is (especially if they're female): "I totally wanted to do that when I was a kid -" I generally finish their sentence with "because you wanted to work with the dolphins?" and generally am right in that assumption.
Speaking of dolphins, I came across an interesting website today advertising a symposium to take place in Hawaii next summer. From what I can tell these people are perfectly serious and this an actual even to take place (once you've taken a look at the website you'll understand why I'm assuring you of this!).
It's a symposium on teleportation and apparently dolphins do this all the time so that if you swim with them you can experience it as well. There will be several experts there to guide you through these experiences.
Check it out: http://www.joanocean.com/SYMP011/index.html

Bless You update

The other day I walked into my office. I had barely set foot in the room when my office mate spun around and said: “Shay-non, I have question for you”, I expectantly held my breath, since as we’ve already established these questions could take us anywhere, “today in class I sneeze and somebody say bless – is this okay?”
We followed up our previous sneezing/blessing/thanking conversation by running through this case study. Apparently he sneezed in class and was quite surprised that somebody said bless you. After our previous lengthy discussion of that convention I was a bit surprised at his surprise until I realized that he thought that this breaks the other convention of not talking during class (though how strictly that one needs to be laid out is debatable). We agreed upon the fact, that with somebody sneezing, class had already been more or less disrupted so that a friendly “blessing” is not adding insult upon insult.
Then we got back into the whole issue of saying “Thank you” after somebody saying “bless you”. This one had been quite confusing for him in our previous exploration of the subject because I couldn’t give him an exact protocol on when to say thanks and when not, though I assured him that it wasn’t offensive not to say anything.
At one point, during the Thanking-non-Thanking part of our conversation I realized that he probably didn’t know what bless you really meant. “Do you know what ‘bless you’ means?”, “yes, when somebody sneeze –“, “No, the word blessing, do you know what a blessing is?”.
Turns out he didn’t. So I tried to explain it to him as simple but accurately as possible: “A blessing is a good thing you get from somebody that you didn’t earn for yourself and maybe don’t even deserve. When blesses you, they are giving you something good. And if somebody is giving you something good you didn’t deserve or wishing a good thing upon you – we should thank them, shouldn’t we?”
Shouldn’t we?

Happy Thanksgiving

There’s a tall, good looking guy looking for me

I walked into my office the other day and was greeted by a “Shay-non. You here. There was a man looking for you”.
Ha. Thought I. Who? Said I.
“Uh, I don’t know. Tall. Tall man.”
Ha. Thought I. Well, what did he look like? Was it Pete? Tall guy, glasses, red hair? Said I (Pete being tall and having red hair he’s quite distinct – even people who don’t know who he is, generally know who he is.)
“No, no red hair. Tall man, Tall good looking man.”
Ha. Thought I. Thanks. Said I.
I checked with all the usual suspects (in this case, any male I could possibly think of who might have been looking for me), none of them came by.
Well, good news is, there’s a tall, good-looking guy out there looking for me… he also matches the description of “my boyfriend” in a friends dream a while back (she only saw him from the back – she didn’t want to be nosy, and figured I would let her know I was seeing somebody when I was ready, but from what she could tell he was tall and good-looking) –
Now if only I could figure out who he is…

Yes, the forklift and why I’m hauling so much cement

I ran into a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while on campus the other day and as we were having a quick catch up she said, you know, we’ve been wondering about the forklift that is popping up in your facebook status. Are you referring to driving around an actual forklift or is this some sort of analogy/inside joke that I don’t know about?
Well, I’ll my jokes about driving around in my forklift and hauling cement are centered around the fact that lately I’ve been spending a lot of time driving around a forklift and hauling a lot of cement. And yes, I probably would have been just as good at this before I decided it was time to become part of the highly educated elite of the marine science community but then again yes, my new found passion for lugging around cement sacks more than half my own body weight is, in a way it is very relevant to my making it into that distinguished group.
For the sturgeon project I’m currently working on, acoustic tracking plays a central role. We catch the fish and pop a tag into them and toss them back into the water. The way we track them, is that we deploy receivers in NY Bight and when they swim past them the receiver picks up the tag signal we know which fish is swimming were.
Now, getting those receivers placed onto the bottom of the ocean is a bit more difficult that it sounds and imvolves huge cement blocks that hold them. And somebody, somebody you see has to make those cement blocks, and it happens to be me!
We’ve got to huge metal molds with a hole in the bottom. To get set up, I line them with a cut open garbage bag (yeah, as I continue this description you’ll soon notice how highly sophisticated the whole process is!), then take a PVC tube with a reed bar inserted in one end and wedge it into that hole. The PVC tube is the center piece of our little work of art – this is what will later hold the receiver. Then I start prepping a couple of red plastic cups with reed bars that will later make various anchor points for ropes and straps.
Once I’ve got everything set up, I start setting up to mix cement. Each mooring is filled with seven 80 pound cement sacks. I lug them to the boathouse door where I’ve already set up the cement mixer (at least I’m not mixing all this by hand!) and start mixing cement to sacks at a time. I fill the finished cement into a wheelbarrow to shovel into the molds. Mixing cement involves a lot of deadlifting cement bags. I’m too short to lift them cement bags into the mixer, so I use a cinder block as a stepping stone. Once I’ve filled the molds I make sure we’ve got a nice flat surface which I engrave and then let the whole thing dry for a day.
I’m usually covered in cement but the time I finish so I head home for a long hot shower. Getting cement off is not an easy task. All the cement dust settles in my hair, and it usually doesn’t come out properly – actually I’m fairly sure that it turns to cement which is making my hair do even weirder things than usual.
The next day I go to get the moorings out of the molds. This is the tricky part and also the part that involves the forklift. I maneuver it around in the boathouse until I can slip a strap looped through a reed bar in the mooring over the forks. Theoretically, I should be able to lift I straight out, pull out the strap, but it through another loop, flip over the mooring and store it outside next to the parking lot.
In practice, that rarely happens. Instead I have developed a new method, in which I take the entire mold out into the parking lot, flip the whole thing over (at this point the mooring will usually still insist on staying in the mold instead of giving into gravity) and then continue lifting and dropping it onto the curb until it drops out.
I have learned not to use that method during “rush hour” when everyone is leaving school because people give me really, really odd looks… my friends are convinced that I’m having withdrawal from rugby now that the season is over and are suggesting alternate forms of anger management.

COLD and WET

Ah, yes. Summer is over. Just like that – from one day to the next. One day sunshine and beautiful weather – the next day sunshine and beautiful weather and I stayed out past sundown, and on the ride home became nearly convinces that my fingers where going to freezer right off.
Things went downhill from there. Two days later, not only had the temperature dropped a good 20 degrees or more, the floodgates of heaven had opened and we had our first major fall storm. I was kinda miserable. I guess I was prepared for the cold, and prepared for the wet but the combination of the two is just not a happy thing for somebody who gets places on their bike.
But the weather to a change for the better and I am currently enjoying a beautiful Indian Summer falling into Autumn. The foliage is breath-taking, I’m doing my best to stay out of the rain when it does come and to get out on long bike rides and walks when the sun is out.
I got a pocket, got a pocket full of sunshine,…

Well, bless you!

My office mate is from Taiwan. My office mate asks me the most random questions at the most random times – even when I am using the international signal for “I am extremely focused on my work” (i.e. wearing headphones while frantically typing into my laptop with several open books/stacks of papers on the table).

The two of us have the desks at the window and there’s a huge bookshelf between us. Yes it’s possible to have a conversation “through” it, but due to my office mate’s limited English (it’s getting better though!) he usually does this thing where he pushes his chair backwards, and says: “Shay-non, I have question”. This question can be anything ranging from some announcement our department has made (not so random you think,… but wait!) to “Shay-non, I hear German and English very similar language” (I made the mistake digging back into my knowledge of the development and history of various European languages which has encouraged him to use me as an Encyclopedia) to “Shay-non, I hear in German (he never says Germany) students don’t pay for lense” (it took me a while to figure out he has an odd obsession with the fact that Germans make the best lenses for glasses), he also tried to rope me into discussions about the German welfare system, the fact that I play rugby not football etc.

One day, he asked me a question that apparently has been sitting on this chest for a long time and had come up again at a recent event, where he sneezed in the library and somebody said “bless you”. It turns out that he has noticed this before and was a bit confused of how it actually “works”. I spent about 20 minutes explaining the convention and answering his many questions. Like do you only say it to people you know, if there are other people in the room who says bless you, etc. Just goes to show you how complicated small every day things like that can be for an outsider.

Ironically, this happened on a day when I was having really, really bad allergies. I had spent the first half of the morning working from our kitchen table with a roll of toilette paper at hand and had only come into school because I needed to get at the internal network. Even as I was explaining the whole “issue” I was thinking to myself… this is not going to go well!

Sure enough, not even two minutes after our conversation, my nose started itching and I sniffled a bit. I heard and excited: “Shay-non! I say BLESS now?” which resulted in another 10 minutes of explaining how you only use it for people who sneeze. Then my allergies kicked in again for real. The kind where I sneeze so much and in so rapid succession that I’m sore the next day.

And every time I sneezed there’d be a super excited: “BLESS! BLESS! Shay-non, I say it right now?”

Needless to say I left early that day…

God is Green - and so am I

I was the kid who got into heated arguments with their biology teacher whenever the subject turned to Evolution. I was the kid who graduated from high school to travel to the ends of the world to share their faith. In an alternate universe I would be married with two kids living in an African hut preaching to the natives. But I’m not – you see, I also was the kid who excelled in every science class, graduated at the top of their class, studied Molecular Biology and Ecology and was one of the first of my high school class to pursue a PhD in a natural science.
Moving to the States for graduate studies, I discovered that here, being a Christian Conservationist or an Evangelical Ecologist is considered as much of an oxymoron as Military Intelligence and Microsoft Works. When it comes to subjects such as Global Warming, the need for conservation and going green, my fellow scientists put Christians in a box labeled “ignorant, unwilling to face facts & blinded by faith” and my fellow Christians seem to think people advocating these things are automatically either left-wing liberals and/or atheists bent on destroying the church.
I beg to differ. I dare say, God is green – and so am I.
Because I have never felt like I was bridging a gap desperately trying to keep a foot in each camp. Being a Biologist and a Christian never was mutually exclusive to me and neither does my passion for my faith diminish the passion I have t o conserve and responsibly manage the earth and the resources we have been entrusted with. On the contrary, the more I discover about the world we live in, the more I understand about the beauty of nature, the more I stand in awe and call it creation (debating the whos and whats and wheres of evolution put aside). And at the same time, the more I marvel at creation, the more I am driven to study it, understand it and attempt to grasp the fullness of the complexity of how everything fits together. And the more I am exposed to scientific facts of how the world around is changing and hurting - the more I passionate I become about the necessity to take action before it is too late and we have destroyed our planet.
Because the world was not given to us to mess it up. For me, conservation goes back to the Garden of Eden, when God gives mankind dominion over his creation. While dominion does mean “to rule” or “to put under the authority” of, it does not mean “to exploit”. Rather, it implies stewardship, a responsibility to make the most out of what we where entrusted with. It does not mean we need to preserve everything as it is and dare not touch anything lest we mess something up. But it does mean that we need to understand how the world works and come up with a scientifically founded management plan which would enable us to use natural resources in a sustainable responsible way.
Because our own backyard is a good place to start if we want to change the world. If we as Christians want to be taken seriously as a force toward changing the world for the better, we need to become a part of both actively participating in conservation and resource management, as well as speaking up and being an advocate for God’s creation. This could start with small things, such as throwing away paper plates for a ceramic set. Only heating the building when there is somebody in it. Properly isolating windows, making the building more energy efficient. Turning the lights off, adding power switches, asking “what would Jesus drive”– a lot of small things that should also translate into our personal lives, too. It could also mean that this year’s youth outreach doesn’t go to South American for a children’s program but strives to clean up the local forest. Using church buildings a venue for educational programs. Planting trees on church property. Supporting efforts in third world countries that are bringing water, resources and jobs to people in a sustainable way. Yes, it also means being open to work together with scientists, listening to them and using their knowledge and understanding to provide a foundation for our efforts.
There is an entire list of ways to become active. But for earth’s sake, as the church we need to get up off of the pews and do something.

so...

yes, I'm still around.
I'm currently piddling around with a lot of different stuff: Hounding museums for access to their sawfish-saws, reading, hauling cement, figuring out statistical analysis programs for population genetics, prepping and giving lectures, driving a forklift around, as well as this that and the other thing.
I'm determined to start writing up some of my late adventures - at some point or the other :-)
I'm posting an "Op-Ed" I wrote for a class a while back... Several people asked me if I would post it here so they could actually read (and not just hear) about it!
So - for some insight into the inner workings (and thinkings) of my brain....

just so you know...

I've added a few pictures from my time in the Gulf to previous posts.

in retrospect...

We arrived in Pascagoula, Mississippi early Wednesday morning. By 10am we had successfully unloaded the boat - everybody was hyper and happy as their family and friends arrived to pick them up. Those who still had to work unloading and storing all the equipment were being very quick and efficient about it, eager to get home.

Several of us had flights out later that afternoon and so rather than hang out on an empty ship on of the girls who works for NOAA took us all to the bar, where we decompressed drinking beer and playing shuffleboard to the tunes of country/rock being played from a jukebox.

I suddenly felt sufficiently exposed to the South.

The flight home was rather uneventful. After collecting my luggage I stepped out of the airport onto a clearly marked crosswalk with a green light for pedestrians. A yellow taxi honked its horn at me.

So good to be home!

The final haul...

A few hours before the end of our last shift we went out on the back deck to bait for one last time then an hour later we headed towards the bow of the ship for a final haul. For the past few days most people were starting to get antsy and very anxious to get off the boat and finally see their families again - you could tell how the mood on the ship was changing. Still positive - but ready to finish and finish well.
By our final haul (and long before) my shift was working like a well-oiled machine. And it's a good thing we were. After we had pulled in the first 10 hooks with sharpnose on the line all I could say was "you've got to be kidding me". But hook 50 we had caught 40 sharks - mostly sharpnose but apparently some of the larger sharks had caught on (pardon the pun) that there was a bunch of free food lying on the ocean floor in the form of smaller sharks which had gotten hooked. Quite a few hooks had a sharknose head plus a blacktip or tigershark attached to it.

We hauled in 69 sharks, which put us six sharks shy of the all time record.
Not bad for a last try.

back in the day when we played with Legos....

When I played Legos with my brothers we frequently built "space stations". The reason why we (or at least I) did this because then we could make cool but odd looking "cars"/flying saucers, platforms because in outer space, normal rules just don't apply.

You can imagine my surprise, when I saw my first oil platform up close and discovered that our Lego-designs weren't so outlandish after all.

Especially while we were off the coast of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi there constantly were oil rigs on the distant horizon or close enough for us to see helicopters landing and taking off.

I'm used to the ocean being a dark place by night the only sources of light being the moon and the stars (and there are SO MANY when there isn't so much light pollution) and whatever lights the ship has on. Here, in the Gulf I was constantly surrounded by illuminated platforms, rigs and crew boats. In some places there were so many of them I felt like they were closing and trying to take over.

On the other hand, looking at the amount of off-shore drilling going on in the Gulf and all the leases Florida has already given out even though currently nothing is actually being built... maybe that is exactly what is going on!

Eeeek! Eels…

People seem to equate Shannon with Fearless. This is not necessarily true – I do have my fair share of things that make my knees shake and my heart pound. I am not, however, squeamish and generally up to poke and prod and hold things – be it slimy, slimy fish, slimy, slimy fish gonads, stinky, stinky whale guts, and so forth.
At this point would like to admit, that these huge eels that we occasionally pull out kinda freak me out. Some of them are almost 2m long, their wiggle and squirm, and as we pull them up to either bring them on board or just cut the line, they stare into your eyes and give you the “I’m going to bite your head off in just a sec”-expression. They don’t actually make a sound by I always envision (enaudio?) them making a hissing, dragon-style I’m-about-to-breath-fire-type sound.
Yes, eels are freaky!

[once I get a better internet connection you'll be able to view the Shannon-holding-eel-picture]

it's me - plus the a kingsnake eel

Cut the line!

I few of you have asked what happens if the line breaks. Well, if the line snaps for whatever reason we usually maneuver around to the other high flyer and start from there. We have had this happen before, but it’s not too big of a problem because we have a second chance.
We did though at one point snap the line, then try to haul it in from the other side to discover that the line must have gotten snagged by something on the seafloor because the same things happened again. This IS a problem. Apart from the fact that we spent the next hour or two making new gangions (the short lines with the hook that we then attach to the actually longline) and sorting out tag numbers to have another complete set to clip onto the hooks, “ghost lines” and “ghost nets, i.e. any fishing gear that has been lost or cut loose by fishermen can be a big problem and cause high mortality of dolphins, turtles and other creatures.
Last night we were happily hauling in our line when all of the sudden gales started up, then the rain. We continued reeling in the line as fast as we could, but at the point where hard hats blew across the deck and one of the hook barrels tried to make a quick getaway we got the call from the bridge to cut the line. Which we did, then packed everything down in a hurry and hurried inside.
By the time things had calmed down enough to haul the rest of the line in, our shift had ended and we were cuddled up in the crew lounge watching a movie while the night shift did all the work….

Sword Fish!

Sometimes we really don’t catch anything. We just pull in hook after hook “bait damaged”, “no bait” and some more hooks “no bait”, “no bait”. The other day we were on the front deck reeling in the line, enjoying the sunshine, lulled by the constant zzzzzzzzzz of the winch. When suddenly “Fish On! What the…??”
We all peered overboard and discovered that we had captured a huge swordfish! I managed to whip out my camera and even get some decent shots:

[you'll have to come back for pictures of the awesome swordfish - our internet connection is too slow]

here it is!!