Sampling with the macroinvertebrate team

I'm pretty sure it's not everybody who gets to go hang out in Yosemite for a couple of days for work. Believe me, I do feel lucky. I have to say, though, the smoke in the air in the Wawona and Yosemite Valley areas where I went last week was pretty nasty. Four days after returning I am finally starting to feel normal again. Of course, the smoke has been awful down here in the Central Valley, too, so I can't really blame Yosemite.

And my interactions with the students and leaders of the YLP and REU programs definitely transcended the woodsmoke. It was so exciting and fun to meet those I met, and I can't wait to go back and talk with some more people.

Thursday, my husband Glenn (a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Systems at UC Merced) and I drove up to Wawona together in an SNRI truck. He had some field work to do in Yosemite Valley, and he was scheduled to talk for the YLP and REU students on Friday. We had a nice drive listening to Abbey Road and eating Cheez-Its. (We have 4 kids, so our snacks are usually kid snacks.)

We finally got to the Wawona Field Station, and for all the times I have written about this facility this was the first time I have been there in person. Kind of a shame I have not made it up there before! It is a charming little white clapboard house with green trim and a beautiful big porch. Inside, the living areas have been converted to office space. There's also some lab/staging area and a kitchen.

I met up with Benoit Dayrat from the UC Merced School of Natural Sciences and the two students on his REU team - Alejandro from the University of Puerto Rico and Cymphonee from UC Riverside. They were just about to go out sampling near Happy Isle in Yosemite Valley. I invited myself to go along, and they were really nice about cramming me in their little natural gas powered car and letting me ask lots of questions.

Of course I made myself carsick taking notes as we drove along the winding highway. (If this happens to you on the winding mountain roads, try closing your eyes for a few minutes and focusing on your breathing. I once heard that carsickness is related to an overload of sensory input and the inability to process it all. A little meditation-style technique seems to help.)

I think we were all glad to get out of the car near Happy Isle. It was very weird to see the valley through so much smoke. It seemed to take the dimension out of everything and made the whole panorama look like a painted backdrop in a movie from the 1940s or so - the exact opposite of the clarity you expect if you've seen the best images of the park. We felt terrible on behalf of those who had traveled across the world to spend a few days in Yosemite and ended up with this hazy experience.

Alejandro, Cymphonee and Benoit all donned their hip waders and we tromped a short distance to a still spot in the river. The team (can I call them ABC?) proceeded to manually clean off a couple of armfuls of dead wood that had been submerged in the river, making sure everything they took off landed in a plastic bin of river water. Then they sorted through this bin using sieves and forceps to look for aquatic macroinvertebrates. I was mostly taking pictures and notes, because to my chagrin, there were no fresh batteries available for my digital audio recorder. I had a great time learning about stonefly larvae, water pennies, flatworms, and other invertebrate species. Later we went to another location and sampled from underneath rocks and from submerged mosses.

It was amazing for me to see this very small scale perspective on Yosemite, and especially the Merced River. I have always visited the park with Glenn, who is a hydrologist. Because he studies the big picture of the watershed and the chemistry of the river, I have always seen the park through his eyes, so to speak, as a very large scale water system . It was a fascinating and refreshing change to get acquainted with these tiny creatures who depend on that water.

Benoit told me there are a few motivations for his broad survey of aquatic macroinvertebrates in the park. First, there is simply very little known right now about what is there. A baseline survey is needed so that we can track how biodiversity among this group of species may change in the future. Changes may give us information about water quality or climate change.

I found it a little amusing - ironic, maybe - that a greater diversity of bugs in the water actually means it's healthy, high-quality water. Nature knows where the good stuff is!

I'll post more tomorrow about my time in the park last week!