Bryson Voirin

Bryson Voirin, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, writes from Panama, where he is studying sleep in wild frigate birds.

Tuesday, April 12

On Isla Iguana the sun rises over the Pacific Ocean and sets, somewhat counterintuitively, over the mainland. Pausing briefly to soak in the mysterious and picturesque sunset, we gear up for a long night of bird catching. Tonight we’re hoping to outfit our first frigate bird with the newly developed sleep logger, accelerometer and GPS unit. We’ll record two-paired electroencephalograms (EEGs), constant acceleration in three directions and a GPS position every five minutes. If all goes according to plan the loggers will record for five days. The data from the loggers should help us answer the question of whether sleeping on the wing is possible for frigate birds.

Bryson Voirin A close-up of a neurologger, developed by Alexei Vyssotski. The logger is completely exposed to the elements, so before each use we have to thoroughly waterproof it.

Before heading into the field we have to prepare the sleep logger for deployment. The loggers were recently developed by our colleague Alexei Vyssotski in Switzerland, and can record brainwaves and constant acceleration on almost any animal. But preparing them for use in the wild requires a bit of soldering and ingenuity. To minimize the amount of weight for the birds, my adviser, Niels Rattenborg, brought tiny zinc air batteries designed for hearing aids that should power the logger for five days. However, zinc air batteries require an air supply to function. When I put these loggers on the sloths, I used a lithium robotics battery that can be tightly wrapped and waterproofed. But for these new batteries, we have to allow them room to “breathe.” That wouldn’t be an issue in a laboratory, but frigate birds fly around catching fish in saltwater.

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Takeshi Inomata A spoon-shaped greenstone ornament (about two inches long) found in the excavation tunnel at Ceibal. The object was probably worn by an early community leader as a pectoral and then placed in a cache in a communal ritual.

Takeshi Inomata, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, writes about an expedition to Guatemala, where he and Daniela Triadan excavated the Maya site of Ceibal.

Sunday, April 10

Our archaeological field season at the Maya site of Ceibal ended successfully, but its last few weeks were an emotional roller coaster. The elation of important discoveries was quickly dampened by the news of a disaster in Japan, and we spent a few days worrying about the safety of our colleagues and collaborators. The magnitude of tragedy made us ponder archaeology’s relevance to the problems of the modern world.

Takeshi Inomata Stela 19 of Aguateca depicting the ruler of the city in elaborate ceremonial attire.

An obvious question that comes to mind is how past societies responded to natural and environmental disasters. Did the drastic social change around the ninth century A.D., often called the Classic Maya collapse, result from environmental problems or climatic changes? Are there lessons in what happened to the Maya? Our previous research at Aguateca showed that this Maya city was attacked by enemies and was rapidly abandoned around A.D. 810. Ceibal, in the same region, survived for another century and a half or so, erecting magnificent stelae while many other cities declined. Ceibal’s eventual fall was less dramatic than that of Aguateca, but our excavation of the Ceibal royal palace revealed evidence of burning and destruction.

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Alyson Santoro A whale shark circling the ship at our third station.  The shark has two remora attached to its head.

Alyson Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, writes from off the coast of Chile, where she is studying microbes in the nitrogen cycle.

Sunday, April 3

There are days at sea when I sit on deck, look out toward the horizon over the deepest blue, and think about what a unique experience it is to be on a scientific research cruise. Yesterday was not one of those days.

Yesterday was one of those days when the only scenery I take in is water coursing through my peristaltic pump, and think only about how many more hours of filtering I have left before I can crawl into bed.

Today, however, is a great day on the research vessel Melville. The sun is shining, the seas are calm, and we have nearly two whole days to catch our breath and get ready as we make our way to the next station, the most westward of the cruise. We are still sampling our experiments at scheduled time intervals, but this effort is small compared with the initial setup.

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Bryson Voirin Male frigate birds have a red patch under the neck that swells around their breeding time. Once a male has chosen a mate, the red fades and the skin returns to a slight purplish color.

Bryson Voirin, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, writes from Panama, where he is studying sleep in wild frigate birds.

Sunday, April 3

Bryson Voirin A close-up of the thorns.

The first thing you notice hiking around the island is how hostile the terrain is. Aside from the beautiful white sandy beaches that the tourists are splashing around on, the interior of Isla Iguana is a tangled mess of thorny bushes and vines growing so tightly knotted together that they form a magnificently defended fortress rivaling any medieval citadel. It’s no wonder the frigate birds choose to nest on this island — it is virtually impossible for any species to walk, crawl or even peer through this habitat without being seriously impaled by inch-long thorns. Even the land crabs and iguanas are kept at bay.

A few of the frigates nest on the island’s perimeter, which is ringed by somewhat treacherous rocks. However, as luck would have it, these easier-to-access birds are nesting in perhaps the most hostile of all plant species I have ever seen, a medium-size palm completely outfitted in razor-sharp thorns. One look at those plants and we unanimously decided to not even approach those birds. The rest of the frigate birds are nesting in the interior of the island, sitting on top of knee-high bushes and thorn thickets with which we are about to become physically acquainted.

Science Times Podcast: An interview with Bryson Voirin on his frigate bird sleep research.

Our research strategy to record sleep in flying frigate birds is to set up a working field laboratory directly adjacent to the bird colony, so that at night we can catch these large seabirds and outfit them with instruments as close to the colony as possible. The quicker we catch them and install the GPS and sleep loggers, the faster we can release them, which will minimize the stress on the animals. Our field tent will house all of the research equipment necessary to fit the sleep loggers on the birds, including an impressively heavy anesthesia machine. The rest of our camp is set up in the visitor’s center, an oddly familiar building set atop a small hill; it bears an uncanny resemblance to the visitor’s center in the film “Jurassic Park.” It’s a fair distance from the camp to the field, so having two sites is best.

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Scott LaPoint A missing cat poster near a forest preserve in Albany.

Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, writes from Albany, where he is comparing the behavior of fishers in urban and wild settings.

Monday, April 4

I hear a lot of people say that fishers — six-to-13-pound members of the weasel family — eat house cats, but I’m not yet 100 percent convinced. As a professional zoologist I have to be careful about accepting animal stories as facts without seeing the evidence myself. I hear stories of mountain lions in the hill towns and even a population of Bigfoots in the Adirondacks. Tell me you saw a deer today and I have no reason to doubt you, but if you make a claim that has never been verified, I want to see the data. Since cats fight each other all the time, and a black cat would look an awful lot like a fisher, witnesses’ accounts take us only so far.

Let’s review the evidence on this one.

Our research in Albany has shown that fishers certainly have the opportunity to eat cats. They are hunting the woods between subdivisions at night, which is prime cat time. I have followed their tracks through the snow crossing dozens of cat tracks, sometimes even smelling the cat latrines nearby.

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Alyson Santoro A 24-bottle rosette sampler.

Alyson Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, writes from off the coast of Chile, where she is studying microbes in the nitrogen cycle.

Wednesday, March 30

We survived 48 hours at our first station, and the research vessel Melville is steaming north toward our second station at 10ºS. The air is noticeably warmer, and continuous data from the ship’s underway sampling system shows us that the sea surface is getting warmer, saltier and even a little greener.

A substantial amount of our work at sea is devoted to getting seawater safely and accurately from different depths. To do this, we use a rosette sampler — a round steel frame holding large plastic cylinders, called bottles, each about four feet tall and open at both ends. The watertight caps on each end of the bottle are connected by a long spring, and before sending the rosette over the side of the ship, the caps are attached to a computerized trigger release system that will release the spring and snap the bottle caps closed, collecting a 10- or 30-liter sample depending on the rosette.

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Jeffrey Marlow Sinuous rock layers typify the base surge deposits of southern New Mexico.

Jeffrey Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, writes from New Mexico, where he is measuring sand particle sizes, layer thicknesses and angles to address questions about volcanoes and rock patterns on Mars.

Saturday, March 26

The base surge deposits of Kilbourne Hole and Hunt’s Hole are part of a much larger story, a story that starts on the desolate plains of Mars in 2003. As the Mars Exploration Rover (M.E.R.) Opportunity started surveying its outpost, it found several tantalizing features that pointed to a water-rich history. There was the crossbedding, the salt minerals that seemed to precipitate from an evaporating lake, and the famed “blueberries” — accretionary spherules formed by the movement of water through local rock.

But science is all about exhausting every opportunity to prove a theory wrong, and only then accepting it with caveats of probability and likelihood. Many of the devil’s advocates pointed to base surge deposits — citing the crossbedding and lapilli spheres — as viable alternatives, suggesting that the sedimentary environment on Mars was volcanic. Lauren Edgar, the doctoral student leading our expedition, also works on the M.E.R. missions, and she recalls: “There was a lot of debate about the origin of the sediment — was it deposited in damp to wet, subaqueous conditions, or was it part of a volcanic base surge deposit like the ones we’re observing at Kilbourne Hole and Hunt’s Hole?”

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Jeffrey Marlow Looking into Kilbourne Hole.

Jeffrey Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, writes from New Mexico, where he is measuring sand particle sizes, layer thicknesses and angles to address questions about volcanoes and rock patterns on Mars.

Friday, March 25

We awoke today to the excited yelping of a pack of coyotes, the end to a surprisingly eventful evening that involved many mysterious creatures going bump in the night. I slept under the stars with a rock hammer close at hand: here in the heart of “No Country for Old Men” territory, you can’t be too careful.

After surveying part of Hunt’s Hole yesterday, our next stop was Kilbourne Hole, the larger and more dramatic of the two. The crater floor is covered by dusty scrubland, and the steep rim shows sections of red-tinged sediment at the bottom, black lava rocks in the middle, and the sinuous base surge deposit on top. Looking up the crater wall, you can read the region’s history like a flip book. The bottom segment is made up of disintegrating mountainsides, lake deposits and windblown sediment — a mix of materials that was occasionally eroded by the meandering Rio Grande. Around 75,000 years ago, volcanic activity in the region flared up, and a stream of viscous basaltic lava from nearby eruptions flowed across the mesa, covering everything in its tracks with a dark black rock coating. Soon thereafter, the maar eruptions punctured the basalt at Kilbourne and Hunt’s Holes, pulverizing everything in their paths and generating a slurry of ash, water and rock that blanketed the landscape.

Initial investigators wondered if Kilbourne Hole was caused by a meteorite impact, but it has since gained fame as such a characteristic maar crater that Apollo astronauts honed their geological intuition here in preparation for field sessions on the Moon.

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Jeffrey Marlow Lauren Edgar sketches rock patterns at Hunt’s Hole, N.M.

Jeffrey Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, writes from New Mexico, where he is measuring sand particle sizes, layer thicknesses and angles to address questions about volcanoes and rock patterns on Mars.

Thursday, March 24

I’m on my hands and knees, staring at a rock wall inches from my face as the tan New Mexico sand coats my arms. I’m trying to answer one simple question: are the rock’s grains medium-size (0.25 to 0.5 millimeters) or coarse (0.5 to 1 millimeter)? The answer will help us figure out how this piece of rock was formed — a key piece to the puzzle of figuring out what exactly happened here one catastrophic day several tens of thousands of years ago. Lauren Edgar, the California Institute of Technology geology doctoral student leading our expedition, needed an answer. Medium or coarse?

Geology is the most instinctive of sciences, a common-sense desire to explain our planet at the most literal, physical level. It’s a science that has been enhanced, but not fundamentally changed, with the technological revolution of the last couple of centuries. Physicists have multibillion-dollar particle accelerators, biologists have robotic armies of gene sequencers, and astronomers peer into the vast expanses of the universe with space-age telescopes. But when it comes down to it, geologists have to get out into the world and look at it.

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Alyson Santoro Nick Rollins and Willie Haskell secure an incubator to the deck of the research vessel Melville.

Alyson Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, writes from off the coast of Chile, where she is studying microbes in the nitrogen cycle.

Friday, March 24

Now that we’re under way, the ship is rolling in a decent-size swell. With lots of help from the Melville crew, every box, bottle and pump — even the laptop I’m writing from — got secured to the ship before leaving port with a combination of chains, bungee cords, ratchet straps and twine. The rocking of the ship, even in small swells, is enough to send an expensive, unsecured instrument from a counter or lab bench to its death. So far, the only casualties from the waves have been a beaker, the lid to one of our incubators, and my stomach.

Studying microbes and chemistry in the ocean is a bit like forensic science. We need to figure out what microbes are doing, and often reconstruct what microbes were doing in the recent past. Most of the time, no one is around to see what is happening. Microbes being microscopic, even if someone were around, there wouldn’t be much to see. In our case, we want to figure out which microbes are around that can convert nitrogen among its different forms and find out how much nitrogen they are converting.

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