Sea Tomatoes and Tuttu

July 3^rd, 2013. 12:09AM

Today started off pretty darn early.

Umimak had wake-up duty this morning (Chloe, Nasuu, Fred, and Marie-Louise). … And Chloe (US), having misread her watch, woke up at 1:15am instead of 7:15am! She came into our room and yelled a ‘Godmorgen’, to which Samantha replied, “I feel like I literally just closed my eyes,” and Lana mumbled, “She’s wrong.” It was a few minutes before Chloe re-entered, profusely apologized, and told us to go back to sleep, but none of us had really considered waking up anyways. Or moving. Or opening our eyes.

We were visited by the students from Dartmouth College much later in the morning, who gave a lecture on glacial lakes, parasites, and cyanobacteria, specifically sea tomatoes.  I was particularly interested in the glacial lakes. We’ve seen many lakes in the mountains, but I hadn’t yet considered why or how they had formed.  

Kettle lakes, for example, are created when a piece of ice left by a glacier carves a hole in the ground and then melts. These lakes are characterized by their smooth, kettle-like bottom.

Cirque lakes form when a glacier is surrounded by a ring of mountains. When the glacier flows out through an opening, it leaves behind an indentation that fills to form a lake. These lakes are easily identifiable because they are surrounded by a circle of mountains with an opening to one side.

Sea Tomato Lake is both a cirque and a kettle lake. 

Cryogenic lakes are the most complicated, and I’m still not sure I completely understand how they form, but I’ll give it a shot. Due to seasonal temperature change, cracks form in the layer of soil above the permafrost; over time these cracks grow, merge, and fill with water through precipitation and seepage, forming a lake. Cryogenic lakes are typically smaller than the other two types of lake, and are carved directly into the permafrost.

A couple of cryogenic lakes by the ice sheet

After doing some classic classroom learning, we hit the field. First up was what we ended up calling ‘Stickleback Lake’, because we spent our time there catching stickleback and examining them for parasites. Most (four out of five) of the fish had a huge parasite in them that our college students had lectured us on. What makes these parasites so outstanding is that they take up a whopping 80% of their host’s body mass! I found it amazing that the stickleback could still move and function with these enormous, worm-like creatures lodged inside of their bodies. Of course, infected stickleback are much slower than their non-infected friends, which make them better targets for birds- this works out perfectly for the parasites, who then complete their life cycles in said birds.

A stickleback fish and its parasite. Both were still moving at the time of this picture 

Although I did not take part in any parasite-wrangling, a few of the other students had a great time popping stickleback open to check for parasites. Someone even had the great idea of taking samples, so we now have little Tupperware containers of dead stickleback and parasites in our refridgerator. They double as emergency provisions.

Samantha with stickleback. She's the brightest witch of her age.

Next we went to Sea Tomato Lakes, to investigate the elusive sea asparagus. Jest aside, there were probably hundreds of apple-sized sea tomatoes in the lake, and hundreds more dried up on the shore. At first Sam (US) talked about tasting one of them, but when we learned that sea tomatoes are actually  extremely toxic colonies of cyanobacteria, he had second thoughts.

Josephine looking out over Sea Tomato lake

Sea tomatoes are pretty neat little organisms. They form when cyanobacteria cling to each other in string-like filaments, which together excrete a mucilaginous sheath. This sheath, capped by a firm outer “shell”, protects the colony from seasonal climate change and gives it a spherical shape. We talked about sea tomatoes more extensively with Jess, one of the Dartmouth students, since it was Nanoq’s turn to make an informational video on what we learned today.

Samantha (L) and Josephine (R) measuring sea tomatoes

Dissecting sea tomatoes

Oh, and I tripped in the mud and fell into a pile of sea tomatoes. Surprise surprise.

After all of our experiments and whatnot were done, some of the students took naps in the cars, and some were driven back to HQ to work on projects. Samantha, Ronin, Fred and I explored the lake a little more and messed around with the sea tomatoes. It’s strange to think that I’ll be parting with these new, close friends of mine in only a week …

We finally made it back to HQ, where Makka and I worked on our video. Then, dinner at the airport. Today’s special was tuttu stew! It was really delicious, although I have a feeling my sister will be horrified to learn that I ate reindeer- and liked it! Samantha and I shared desert, which was also excellent- and to cap off a wonderful dinner, I found her water bottle (which she had been searching for for days) in the truck.  I don’t know what that girl would do without me.

Back at HQ, the Americans planned for the 4^th of July … it’s going to be awesome. I will spare you the details for now.

Tonight we even had time for a movie! Someone had ‘Mama’, which was not scary at all. It was actually pretty hilarious! Fred frightened me more than the actual film did because he’d yell every time something ‘scary’ happened. All in all it was a great night to wrap up a great day.