I love field work

I just returned from a week of whirlwind sampling in Lake Superior. I was with three other graduate students and we were looking for a fish virus that has been devastating fish populations in the lower Great Lakes in recent years.

A sign at all the boat ramps in Wisconsin warning fishermen to be on the lookout for the virus. Many of the photos came from my current lab

It reminded me of how much I love field work. Our days (minus the incredibly long time it took us to drive the truck with our boat to the lake) looked something like this:

6:00am: get up and eat breakfast. My travel mates both had dietary restrictions (one couldn't eat meat and the other was gluten intolerant) so our typical free hotel breakfasts of two eggs, sausage or bacon, and toast became me and my vegetarian companion eating three pieces of toast and two eggs, while my gluten intolerant companion ate three servings of sausage or bacon and two eggs. Needless to say, the waitresses always looked at us strangely as we started to swap foods.

6:30am: arrive at the sample site; start putting the boat together. The boat was modular and so we had to literally assemble all the pieces every time we arrived at a site. Because we were electrofishing (shocking fish to stun them and then picking them up with nets), the boat looked very curious and we always got a lot of questions about it while we were setting it up.

One of the electroshocking booms on our boat

7:00am: Put the boat in the water and start looking for fish. We would get lots of questions while we were out on the boat as well, although no one seemed to understand that with the generator and the motor running, we couldn't hear what they were asking. I only shocked myself a couple of times and fortunately they weren't serious shocks.

The middle/bow of the boat (the whole vessel was 16 feet long)

11:30am: Return to shore and start disassembling the boat; go for a run and start the trek to our next sampling site.

5:00pm: Arrive at our second sampling site and start reassembling the boat

5:30pm: Put the boat in the water and hope we can find fish (Lake superior is not a productive lake; that is biology code for there are not very many fish or other living organisms).

9:30pm: Return to the dock and start disassembling the boat. This also included identifying all the species of fish we had caught and cataloging them, which is more difficult than it sounds when you are very wet, it is getting dark, and you have not eaten since 6:00 that morning.

10:00pm: Decide it would be a good idea to eat dinner. Then realize that in small rural towns in Michigan and Wisconsin, most places close before 10. Find a bar to grab something to eat, then get strange looks when someone doesn't eat the bun of their hamburger and another orders french fries because there is no other vegetarian dish.

12:00am: Find a decent hotel, ask for a triple, get told the only option would be a suite, decide it's too expensive and that one person will sleep on the floor. Go to sleep and repeat the process the next day.

Writing it all down makes it sound rather horrible, but it was totally my idea of fun. It made me think I should be getting a PhD in natural resources where I could do this sort of field work more frequently.

As an aside, one of my companions was an international student so we decided it was our duty as Americans to expose him to traditional midwest culture. Thus, on the way home we stopped at Cabela's in Dundee, MI:

I think his response was that it was "overwhelming". I agree completely.