Devin LeopoldInside a kipuka with large ohia trees.
David J. Flaspohler, an avian ecologist and conservation biologist at Michigan Technological University, writes from Hawaii, where he is studying the influence of human activities on birds and the natural ecosystems that support them.
Thursday, May 17
After six months back at the Michigan Technological University in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I am once again hiking across the sun-baked landscape of undulating lava on the Big Island of Hawaii, approaching one of the forest islands known to native Hawaiians as a kipuka. I hear a familiar and predictable sequence of bird songs. First, there’s the up-and-down whistle and staccato ending of the apapane as they fly above me from ohia flower to ohia flower in search of nectar. Next, there’s the nasal whine and rapid “sound effects” of the fruit-eating omao, which sounds like someone in the forest tuning an old-fashioned radio.
Now, as I near the kipuka, I hear the discordant, chattery whistles of an i’iwi, a sickle-billed bird the color of a ripe persimmon — a frequent poster child for imperiled Hawaiian birds. Entering the cool shade of the kipuka from the lava field, I am once again surrounded by the chorus of these and other birds, including the Japanese white-eye, a nonnative species imported from Asia in 1929 to control insect pests.
This is a large kipuka, so it may be home to the Hawaii elepaio, an endemic flycatcher with an explosive, cheerful song. Its nearest ancestors also came from Asia millions of years ago, without human help. When I hear the simple bouncy song of another endemic bird, the Hawaii amakihi, sounding a little like a black-and-white warbler from back home in Michigan, the chorus is complete. Now, finally deep inside the kipuka, I close my eyes and let this soundscape ring around me.
Chicago Zoological Society/Sarasota Dolphin Research ProgramAya and her second calf, F233, cruising around Sarasota Bay. (Photo taken under National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Research Permit No. 15543.)
Tara Thean, a biology major at Princeton University, writes from Sarasota Bay, Fla., where she is studying signature whistle development in wild bottlenose dolphins.
Saturday, May 12
Tara TheanA typical lunch during a field day: sandwiches, apples and cereal bars. Sometimes we throw in some crisps to mix things up.
Instead of spending the morning loading equipment onto boats and conceptualizing our follow strategy for the day, we spent it cleaning our motel rooms and preparing to leave. We enjoyed winding down at the farewell barbecue last night. The weather was perfect for a cookout: warm and slightly breezy. I particularly enjoyed eating my first hot meal in five days: two burgers and a hot dog. Our packed lunches on the boat had to be portable, sturdy and compact, which means our lunchboxes were filled with sandwiches and cereal bars. By dinnertime, I was always so exhausted that I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than cereal and milk.
After we had settled down with food, our program director, Randall Wells, gave us a final debriefing about the week’s work. I was happy to hear that we had sampled and examined 16 dolphins in this round of fieldwork — in a typical field week, we find 10 to 15. Of these 16, four were high-priority animals that we had previously not had a chance to look at: FB274, FB233, FB276 and Boomer. I also found out that one of the dolphins we had thought was female was actually male — thankfully, he had been given the versatile name Pat.
Chicago Zoological Society/Sarasota Dolphin Research ProgramA 28-year-old female named Lightning and her calf, Boomer, wearing DTAGs that record vocalizations. (Photo taken under National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Research Permit No. 15543.)
Tara Thean, a biology major at Princeton University, writes from Sarasota Bay in Florida, where she is studying signature whistle development in wild bottlenose dolphins.
Friday, May 11
The Sarasota Bay dolphins saved the best for last, and our final focal follow of the week turned out to be our smoothest. We attached the DTAG tracking devices to the dolphins around 2 p.m. and followed them from a safe distance to collect behavioral data while the DTAGs recorded their whistles. These dolphins were particularly cooperative, swimming synchronously and at a moderate pace, making them easy to track. Their tags came off around 4:30 p.m., which was exactly when we had programmed the electronics to release them. It felt great that we didn’t lose any dolphins or DTAGs today.
Tara TheanA member of the tracking team watches the dolphins closely from the bow of Nai’a, the tracking boat.
On the tracking boat, each of the eight crew members has a role during a focal follow. Our skipper is Katie McHugh, a Chicago Zoological Society postdoctoral scientist. She navigates, drives the boat and gives the team instructions. The rest of us record behavioral data; time the recordings; measure the bearing of the dolphins from our vessel, Nai’a; mark way points; or keep an eye on the focal animals to make sure we don’t lose track of them. We also leave someone in charge of a DSLR camera to take photographs of the dolphins whenever they surface to breathe, which occurs about twice a minute. This provides us with a visual record of which dolphins were present, what they were doing, and how many companions they were traveling with. Read more…
Chicago Zoological Society/Sarasota Dolphin Research ProgramA 3-year-old female named Nellie. (Photo taken under National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Research Permit No. 15543.)
Tara Thean, a biology major at Princeton University, writes from Sarasota Bay, Fla., where she is studying signature whistle development in wild bottlenose dolphins.
Thursday, May 10
I took a break from focal follows on the Nai’a boat today to hop over to Flip, the veterinary examination boat on which veterinarians perform dolphin health assessments. I had a great time asking the vets on board about their duties as we searched for animals in the morning.
The vets spend their field days obtaining a variety of samples and measurements of the dolphins. Because they’ve been doing health assessments since 1987, they now have a comprehensive suite of Sarasota Bay dolphin health information that serves as benchmark data for comparisons with other dolphin populations around the world. This is particularly handy in the wake of environmental disasters; scientists used data from the Sarasota dolphins to understand how other coastal dolphin communities might have been affected by oil and contaminants from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Lisa J. LuceroChip taking a GPS reading in Pool 1.
Lisa J. Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is studying ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize under the auspices of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, National Institute of Culture and History.
Thursday, May 9
There are 25 pools at Cara Blanca, and we have only just begun plumbing their depths. In 2010, divers explored eight pools and, in addition to gauging their size and depth, extracted 10-foot-long sediment cores using four-inch-diameter PVC pipe from two pools: Pool 2 (16 feet deep) and Pool 6 (60-feet deep). The history of changing climate and landscape is slowly emerging from the cores via pollen and soil analyses. Radiocarbon dating shows that the Pool 6 core covers a period before and after the Classic period (around A.D. 550-850), the time when the Maya population was at its peak and kings were at their most powerful.
Then kings disappear from history in the southern Maya lowlands. I have told this story before. But now results from several field seasons increasingly demonstrate that something was going on between A.D. 800 and 900. That something is drought. Several multiyear droughts occurred, and all of the water jars date to this 100-year period. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Incredibly, Maya farmers persevered.
Lisa J. Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is studying ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize under the auspices of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, National Institute of Culture and History.
Tuesday, May 8, and Wednesday, May 9
Five-gallon buckets are so very useful. Little did I think we would use them to explore ancient Maya offerings underwater. While dive gear consists of high technology like trimix gases and the underwater camera, archaeology gear consists of low technology, like the bucket and shovel. During excavations, archaeologists usually fill the buckets with dirt, which is then sifted through half-inch or quarter-inch mesh screens for artifacts. But here, Chip would be using the buckets underwater — at a depth of nearly 200 feet.
The plan was to begin excavations downslope from the ceremonial building on the southwest edge of Pool 1, where we think anything the Maya threw in would roll down. But first we had to find empty pigtail buckets at the local gas station. John Carr at the Banana Bank Lodge offered us the use of a broken shovel. Now we were ready to go.
Chicago Zoological Society/Sarasota Dolphin Research ProgramTara Thean, Frants Jensen and Goldie Phillips use handheld trackers to search for dolphins with DTAGs attached to their bodies. The trackers emit a beeping noise when they detect a DTAG.
Tara Thean, a biology major at Princeton University, writes from Sarasota Bay in Florida, where she is studying signature whistle development in wild bottlenose dolphins.
Wednesday, May 9
Patience is key when it comes to tracking dolphins in the wild. If we lose sight of them or if our tracking devices — the DTAGs — fall off prematurely, like they did on Monday, it takes hours and hours into the evening until we find them again. It’s important that we find the DTAGs. They took 13 years to develop and cost thousands of dollars each. But losing sight of the dolphins is also difficult to deal with and that’s what happened to us today.
Around 2 p.m., our focal animals — two male dolphins named F276 and F142 — decided to venture out of Sarasota Bay into the Gulf of Mexico portion of their range. Sarasota Bay is an estuary, so its waters are partly enclosed and therefore relatively calm even at high tide, which makes tracking easier for us than if we were in the open ocean. But we felt an immediate difference when the dolphins left the bay and entered the Gulf of Mexico portion of their range. Though the Nai’a, our tracking boat, is sturdy, it was not designed for rough waters. It jerked violently up and down with the choppy waters of the gulf, and we soon lost sight of both F276 and F142.
Lisa J. Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is studying ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize under the auspices of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, National Institute of Culture and History.
Monday, May 7
We did not leave for the field until 9:30 a.m. Because our exploration diver Chip Petersen is using trimix (oxygen, nitrogen and helium) gases, double-checking the gas tanks before and after the hour-plus trip to Pool 1 is critical. Using this gas mix will allow him to safely and effectively explore depths beyond traditional scuba diving, and that is where we expect to find Maya offerings.
At Pool 1, as the divers began getting their gear in order, Ernesto, Cleofo, Juan Antonio and Stanley constructed a ladder that the divers need to enter the pool, since the surface is eight feet below ground level.
Chicago Zoological Society/Sarasota Dolphin Research ProgramA bottlenose dolphin pair surfacing for air in Sarasota Bay, Fla., wearing DTAGs that record their vocalizations. (Photo taken under National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Research Permit No. 15543.)
Tara Thean, a biology major at Princeton University, writes from Sarasota Bay in Florida, where she is studying signature whistle development in wild bottlenose dolphins.
Monday, May 7
I saw my first dolphins at 8 a.m. on an overcast Monday morning in Sarasota Bay, Fla., just seven minutes after leaving the boat ramp near Mote Marine Laboratory. The dolphins, muscular creatures about two and a half meters long, were a mother-calf pair named Boxer and Box 1. They powered smoothly through the water with their sleek blue-gray bodies, staying close together as we watched from 50 meters away.
Few animals have had their life stories so closely documented as the dolphins in Sarasota Bay. There are people out here who could tell you about a particular dolphin’s date of birth, list the sex of each of its calves and describe its behavioral ups and downs simply by looking at the nicks and notches on its fin. From time to time, a team of veterinarians and scientists from around the world work with the Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program to conduct health assessments and photo-identification surveys of the Sarasota dolphin community, gathering biological, behavioral, ecological and health data for use by field biologists, conservationists and veterinarians.
I am fortunate to be part of one such team this spring. I will write a senior thesis that focuses on bottlenose dolphins under the supervision of Laela Sayigh, a research specialist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Laela has kindly allowed me to take part in this trip to help with data collection and to get some hands-on experience with the animals I will be thinking and writing about for the rest of my undergraduate career.
Lisa J. Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is studying ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize.
Saturday, May 5
On Wednesday, my plane touched down near Belize City. What a difference a day makes. Before, I was leaving my university office in the midst of end-of-semester craziness in flatland Illinois. Now, I’m in a hot and humid jungle. There was little time for relaxing in my 23rd trip to Belize. I have the same amount of paperwork and prep to do for a weeklong project as I do for a six-month project. But I would not give it up for anything.
I am lucky to work with a great bunch of people, who include excavation assistants from the Valley of Peace village, the Carrs at Banana Bank Lodge and the archaeologists at the National Institute of Culture and History at the Belize Institute of Archaeology.
Last May, my goal was to explore the 200-foot-deep cenote at Cara Blanca in central Belize to explore for ancient Maya offerings. A cenote is a sinkhole fed by the water table. But several things prevented exploration: The post-hurricane landscape did not help matters, nor did the dry-season conflagration. Cara Blanca was ground zero for both; the jungle was first flattened and then burned to a crisp. I am anxious to see what has changed after a year.
This blog is the modern version of a field journal, a place for reports on the daily progress of scientific expeditions — adventures, misadventures, discoveries. As with the expeditions themselves, you never know what you will find.
Are there scientists you would like to see write about their field work? Are you a researcher interested in writing about your own field work? Send an e-mail to scientistatwork@nytimes.com. If you are nominating yourself, please include a description of your field work and samples of your writing and photographs.
Kevin Anchukaitis of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University conducted a tree-ring study to analyze drought patterns in Guatemala.
Natalie Boelman of Columbia University studied the effects of climate change on the interactions among plants, insects and migratory songbirds in Alaska.
Jennifer Calkins, who teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., studied the ecology, behavior and evolution of the elegant quail in Mexico.
S. Amanda Caudill, a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island, assessed mammal diversity on coffee farms in Costa Rica.
Anthony Di Fiore of New York University used GPS technology and camera traps to study the behavior of male spider monkeys in Ecuador.
Jack Dumbacher of the California Academy of Sciences studied island birds and their diseases in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.
Ron Eglash of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute used culturally situated design tools to teach math to students in Ghana.
Chris Filardi of the American Museum of Natural History studied evolution and conservation in the Solomon Islands.
Clyde E. Goulden of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Laura Fox and Daniel S. Song of the University of Pennsylvania studied the impact of climate change on the vegetation and people of northern Mongolia.
George E. Harlow of the American Museum of Natural History studied the origin of jade in Guatemala's Motagua Valley.
Mark Hay of Georgia Tech investigated coral-seaweed competition in the coral reefs of Fiji.
Kay E. Holekamp of Michigan State University studied the behavior of spotted hyenas in Kenya.
Bonnie F. Jacobs of Southern Methodist University studied fossils of ancient plant life in Ethiopia.
Lekelia D. Jenkins, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, studied the cross-cultural adoption of marine conservation technologies in Ecuador.
Roland Kays of the New York State Museum compared the behavior of fishers in urban and wild settings in the Albany, N.Y., area.
Alia Khan, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studied ephemeral glacier-fed streams in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica.
Lisa J. Lucero of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize.
Margarita Marinova of the NASA Ames Research Center studied microbialite formation in Kelly Lake, British Columbia.
Jeffrey Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, studied the roles of micro-organisms in deep ocean vents off the coast of Oregon.
Michael J. Mascarenhas of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute conducted a survey on water and sanitation issues in Rwanda.
Rich Mooi of the California Academy of Sciences surveyed echinoderms off the coast of Luzon Island in the Philippines.
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell of the Stanford University School of Medicine studied elephant societies in Namibia.
Christopher J. Raxworthy, a herpetologist with the American Museum of Natural History, searched for new chameleon species in Madagscar.
Dustin Rubenstein of Columbia University studied the physiological adaptations of birds to climate change in Kenya.
Stuart Sandin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography compared the coral reefs of inhabited and uninhabited parts of the Line Islands.
Alyson Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, studied microbes in the nitrogen cycle off the coast of Chile.
Amanda Schmidt, a geologist at Oberlin College, studied the relative natural hazards of villages in Sichuan Province, China.
Noah Snyder-Mackler, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the evolution of social behavior in the gelada, a primate found in Ethiopia.
John S. Sparks of the American Museum of Natural History studied native freshwater fish in Madagascar.
Kate Stafford of the University of Washington participated in a visual census of bowhead whales in northern Alaska.
Researchers travel to Hawaii to study how forest fragmentation caused by a series of 19th-century volcanic eruptions has shaped native bird communities.
After finding more water jar pieces, researchers plan their return to Cara Blanca, Belize, to further study the Maya world and how its inhabitants survived multi-year droughts.
Devin LeopoldInside a kipuka with large ohia trees.
Slide Show: Cloud Forests, Birds and the Origins of Island Life
