The Northern Lakes, Part 2

I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but I somehow had the incredible luck to get to go along on the trip to collect samples at the northern lakes again!  Once again it was a gorgeous drive!  The landscape is getting much greener and wildflowers are starting to bloom. 

Making myself less of a target for terns. They like to divebomb.

A traditional turf wall

Lunch at Husavik Harbor

Lupine is kind of a double edged sword - it was introduced to Iceland to help prevent the erosion caused by overgrazing, but it has grown so well that it is out-competing native plants.  It is very beautiful, though.

 A sandy sea-side lake.  We stopped at some bird cliffs in this area and saw about 20 puffins!

Fertilization Plots

So we know that adding midges to plots in areas where there normally are none changes the plant community from a heathland to a grassland and increases overall productivity - but what exactly is it about the midges that causes this change?  The most obvious answer is that the midges add nutrients that are limiting in the soil, which in this case would most likely be nitrogen.  To test this, we've set up plots in a variety of communities and are adding a nitrogen fertilizer to observe the effects.  If we see the same results as we got when adding midges, then nitrogen in the midges is probably what is causing the community changes.

Yesterday we drove out to all the plots to apply a round of fertilizer and to take baseline measurements of all of the sites.  This involved cataloging the plants encompassed within the plots as well as those in the site, measuring the amount of light that reaches the ground through the plant canopy (which correlates to plant biomass), and taking soil samples.  This means I had a crash course in Icelandic plants and am now an expert in identifying them! 

Tea Leaf Willow (Salix lanata)

Heather (Calluna vulgaris)

Bear berry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Moss campion (Silene acaulis)

Yes, I know the scientific names as well.

The coolest plot by far is in the lava field:

And we saw some impressive midge columns!  Actually I got engulfed in a midge column, possibly because we had just learned that you can attracted midges by humming at a certain frequency.  I'm not sure if someone actually hit that frequency or if there were just a lot of midges in the plants we were rustling up while fertilizing.

Personally, I think a certain frequency that repels midges would be much more useful.

Hofdi

In the not-to-distant past, Iceland was covered in birch forests.  A combination of deforestation, erosion, and badly placed volcanic eruptions have destroyed nearly all of that forest, leaving the heathland I've been seeing since I arrived.  However, there's a park just a quarter mile down the road from Kalfastrond called Hofdi where trees have been planted to recreate that forest.  I hadn't seen a "real" tree since I left Wisconsin, so suddenly being in a forest was quite a shock!  It also had great views of the surrounding area.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Icelandic Delicacies

When I first decided to come to Iceland, the first thing I did was look up the cuisine online.  And I was horrified.  Their diet seemed to consist of fermented things and every single part of a sheep.  But luckily most Icelanders are also not too fond of traditional Icelandic food, which was designed for surviving long winters, not for taste.  We eat a lot of skyr - which is a yogurt-like concoction - bread, pasta, lamb and fish.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are scarce and expensive since you can't farm them in Iceland.  It all has to be either imported or grown in greenhouses.  But tonight, we ate like the Icelanders of old:

That's a sheep's head.  We cheated a bit in our preparation of the sheep's head.  Traditionally, it is only boiled, but to make it a little more palatable, we grilled it with rosemary and thyme after boiling.  What you see here is one sheep's head cut in half.  The brain has been removed.  You don't actually eat most of the head.  Only the jaw muscles, tongue, ear, and eye.

I ate a bit of the jaw and the tongue.  The eye and the ear were just too freaky for me.  Heck, the tongue was pushing it!  It was a very strange texture.  Very unsettling.  Not to mention the part where your food looks back at you.  But otherwise it just tasted like lamb, especially the jaw muscle.  We did have supplemental chicken available for dinner - we only cooked one head for 8 people, figuring nobody would want to eat a half by themselves.  We were right.

So I can check that off the list!  The other delicacy I have to try while I'm here is fermented shark fin.  Apparently it has such a bad aftertaste that you have to chase it down with a vodka called the Black Death.  Uh oh. 

Bug counting

Another drizzly, cloudy, cold day.

We spent the day inside counting our samples from yesterday's field work.  The infall cups for flying insects are easy - it's mostly just the two kinds of midges, big and small, and a few kinds of flies.  Pitfall cups for walking things are more difficult, since you've got to identify spiders, mites, beetles, "true" insects, scale bugs, and a few stray midges and flies that fell in, as well as pinpointing the type of spider, mite, beetle, etc.  The first cup takes a very long time and involves a lot of calling a grad student over to make sure you've got a crab spider and not a wolf spider, or if that tiny thing is a leafhopper or an aphid.  But after awhile you get the hang of it.  I'm getting more and more desensitized to spiders, although the dead ones don't scare me as much, even if they do look nasty under a microscope.  The idea of this experiment is to measure the biodiversity of a location and see if it correlates in any way to the midge count.

Bug tray

In other news, I figured now was the time to get an Icelandic sweater!  I got it at the handmade, local craft goods store in town.  It's a gorgeous hand-knit piece, and it is very warm!  Perfect for dreary days like today.

This is what I woke up to this morning.

Yesterday it was a gorgeous sunny day and I could get away with wearing a t-shirt.  Today, it's switching between snow and freezing rain and I wore multiple jackets and my long underwear.  Today was also the day we had to check the Myvatn transects - poles with cups of liquid at the top to catch midges, sticky cards for flying insects, and a cup of liquid buried in the ground to catch walking arthropods, placed at various distances from the lake and in different landscapes.  I'm sorry to report that, except for a sunny break at lunch time, it only got colder, wetter and windier throughout the day, and it took us until dinner time to get them all done.  After a hot shower I'm feeling much warmer!  I'm going to go ahead and rank leaving my clothes on the radiator during my shower one of my top ten best ideas ever.

But this did give us the opportunity to drive all the way around the lake and see some dramatic scenery!

Fresh snow on the mountains

Distant rain showers

An awesome lava field - you could still see ripples on it

 

Tonight we're probably going to go back to the research station and start counting up our samples.  I'm ok with this as long as I'm not required to change out of my sweatpants.

The Fisherman's Holiday and other assorted events

This weekend there hasn't been all that much science to do - just cleaning things and preparing for the new arrivals - but there has been some exciting stuff going on.  For starters, we have three new people here to focus more on the aquatic side of the midges.  I'll probably be switching back and forth between the aquatic and terrestrial group.  I requested to be anywhere involving microbes!
On Friday night we went for a walk along the pseudocraters by the research station and saw some neat birds.  There were tons of swans in that bay, but sadly they were too far away and there was not enough light for me to get a decent picture of them.

Phalaropes

Arctic tern

Snipe on top of our house

 Saturday is a very special day in Iceland, as Saturday is half price candy day!  This is something they avoid telling the tourists. We might have made a special trip in town solely for half price candy.  On the way we ran into the annual marathon, which goes all the way around Myvatn.

My candy haul

This is what police cars look like in Iceland.

The Fisherman's Holiday (or Sailor's, or Seaman's) is actually Sunday, but Saturday night is when all the fisherman go out and celebrate not having to work the next day.  We drove up to Husavik on the coast to join the celebrations.  I didn't bring my camera to the party we attended for its own safety so sadly I don't have any pictures. I think we were the only non-Icelanders there.  The party was held in a hotel and had a fantastic cover band that played a lot of great songs in English, including Journey, Queen, Lady Gaga, and Adele.  In between sets there may have been a successful chant started by some party-crashing Americans to play the winning Eurovision song, which was followed by some party-crashing Americans singing and dancing their hearts out to "Euphoria."  We spent the night at a friend in Husavik and drove back this morning.  At lunch I discovered an Icelandic delicacy waiting for me:

This is sheep dung smoked lamb called hangikjoet.  It has a very intense smoky flavor at first but the farther I got into my sandwich, the more it grew on me.  Tonight we plan to take advantage of one of the last days of nice weather and grill a leg of lamb.  I also saw some sheep heads in the freezer... uh oh.