The fieldwork experience …

“Experiment” and “experience” have the same root in the Latin word experiri, meaning “try”, which makes sense up to a point.  One lunchtime on my recent trip to China, I experienced fried chicken’s feet.  I say “experience” but, in truth, I was the unwitting subject of my son, Ed’s experiment.  The difference between an experiment and an experience lies in the active and passive partners.  The experiment, as traditionally understood, involves someone actively imposing their will on something else.  An experience is a more equal process.  Ed bought the fried chicken’s feet, but I was under no obligation to partake.

Fried chicken’s feet on sale at a Wuhan street food market.   The photograph at the top of the post shows Mellbreak reflected in Crummock Water.

This post is actually about fieldwork rather than chicken’s feet, but the same principles apply.  Just before I headed off to China, I spent a day in the field in the Lake District, blessed by some wonderful views to distant fells.  These days are all about experience.  We have an itinerary but, beyond that, we do not have an agenda and we certainly do not intervene beyond collecting some measurements and samples.  For this particular set of sites, we have a strong idea of what to expect but that just makes the exceptions that much more intriguing.   I wrote about one of these in “Golden-brown”; another occurred in the River Cocker just downstream from Crummock Water where a dense growth of a red alga smothered Fontinalis antipyretica.  I see this same alga growing on rocks in late autumn and winter in the River Ehen but here I found it in spring growing on other plants.  Checking back through my field notes, I see that this is not a totally unique record, but it is an outlier from my general experience and deserves further investigation.  The previous post (“Acid trip …”) is the result of the happy conjunction of two people comparing their observations of the same site at different times.   

Audouinella hermainii growing on Fontinalis antipyretica in the River Cocker, just downstream from Crummock Water, April 2023.  Scale bar: 20 micrometres (= 1/50^th of a millimetre).

I read recently that the word “experiment” was first used in the 17th century in a religious context.   Most prayer, at the time, followed fixed formulae but a movement towards less formalised prayer, where the worshipper saw the encounter with the Divine in a more open-ended way.  The experience of God, in other words, is too easily drowned out by the words of the supplicant.  Prayer, in this 17th century manifestation, became about listening.  And, before I meander too far off topic, fieldwork, too, can be about listening to the stories nature has to tell us rather than imposing our own interpretations on what we see before us.  Or, to come from another angle, seeing the exceptions to a general rule we have been taught introduces seeds of doubt around which alternative explanations may crystallise.  “There’s a crack in everything”, as Leonard Cohen wrote.  “That’s where the light gets in”.

I touched on this subject in “Form without function?”.  Geoffrey Fryer, the subject of that post, was a proponent of what a modern social scientist would refer to as “qualitative research”.  He wrote about this at length in his valedictory essay in the journal Freshwater Biology: Quantitative and qualitative: numbers and reality in the study of living organisms.  He was not arguing that qualitative and quantitative approaches were alternatives but was concerned that modern scientists rush too quickly into measurements without first spending time observing the organism or system they were studying.  It is about experiencing rather than dominating nature. 

Great Gable dominating the skyline behind Wastwater, April 2023.  

Of course, experiments are an essential part of the scientific method.  The problem with observation is that you can establish patterns, but it is much harder to determine causes.  For this, the ecologist has to bring unruly nature under strict control, evoking Yahweh’s mandate to Adam in Genesis 1:28: “…Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground”.  We can gain much from experiments but, at the same time, stripping out much of the complexity that is an inevitable part of most ecosystems can, on occasion, give misleading results.  Experiments need to work in tandem with experience if robust inferences and profound insights are to be achieved.  

And what of chicken’s feet?  I’m still not a convert without actively disliking them.  There is a lot of skin, cartilage and bone on a chicken’s foot.  But that raises a whole other set of issues.  My experience was conditioned by a lifetime in the West where we prioritise the taste of soft tender meat over the diverse textures that other parts of the bird may offer.  Our experiences are partly the result of our conditioning (more on this in “On fieldwork …”).   Having started the post by praising “experience”, I end worrying whether I can trust my experiences.  But going into nature equipped with this awareness does, at least, mean that I’m forever conscious of “falsifiability” which, if nothing else, lends a sense of anticipation to even the most mundane sampling trip.  

Reference

Fryer, G. (1987). Quantitative and qualitative: numbers and reality in the study of living organisms. Freshwater Biology 17: 177-189.

A street food market in Wuhan with, bottom, a wok containing “long bao” (soup dumplings).

Some other highlights from this week:

Wrote this whilst listening to: John Haycock.  Intriguing mixture of West African kora and electronica.

Currently reading:  Cuddy by Benjamin Myers.  Excellent novel about the influence of St Cuthbert in the north of England.

Cultural highlight:  Choral evensong at Durham Cathedral. 

Culinary highlight:  A Rachel Roddy recipe that involved cutting fresh asparagus stalks into very fine strips, then sautéing these slowly in butter, onions and wild garlic and serving with home-made tagilatelli.

Acid trip …

I had to walk several kilometres from the nearest car park to find this loch in Galloway, the last couple of kilometres following a small burn up the hill side, struggling through knee-length grass and soft boggy ground and scrambling over granite boulders.  A herd of highland cattle lifted their heads at one point to contemplate this rare invader before returning their attention to the grass.   Finally, the land flattened out and I found myself looking across small loch, no more than a few hectares in size, nestled underneath a granite escarpment.  Pushing through the heather that surrounds the loch, I stood on a small beach composed of fine white sand, the end-product of the erosion of the granite hills around me.  

I had made this journey to Round Loch of Glenhead to collect a sample of the algae; however, there were almost none of the cobble-sized stones that I usually use.  On the other hand, once the water was about 20 centimetres deep, stems of aquatic plants – an aquatic Lobelia and a quillwork – started to appear, arising vertically out of the water. The submerged portions were surrounded by a dark brown translucent cloud but, as soon as I scooped it out of the water, it collapsed into an amorphous slimy gunk.

The brown gunk surrounding stems of Lobelia in the littoral zone of Round Loch of Glenhead, Galloway, August 2011.  The photograph at the top shows the loch set against the Galloway hills.

Later, staring down my microscope at a sample of this gunk, I could see a rich mixture of algae.  There were long filaments of a green alga called Mougeotia – cells whose chloroplasts were flat plates which could rotate round the central axis of the cell in order to catch as much light as possible.  Tangled around this were much thinner filaments of a cyanobacterium Lyngbya as well as chains of Tabellaria quadriseptata.   Within this tangled web there were other algae: Merismopedia, an ordered array of blue-green cells within a mucilaginous matrix; elegant vase-shaped cells of Dinobryon and, creeping through this tangle, diatoms.  One was a species of Navicula but there were also larger boat-shaped cells – some almost a tenth of a millmetre long – from the genus Frustulia.  And, to complete this submerged melange, there were trapped particles of peat, washed in from the catchment, and responsible for the dark brown colour of the gunk.   Attached to the plant stems, I saw several cells of small asymmetrical diatoms belonging to the genus Eunotia, along with needle-shaped cells of another genus, Peronia.

Round Loch of Glenhead was one of a number of acidic lochs in Galloway studied by Rick Battarbee and colleagues from University College London during the 1980s.  Evidence gathered from sediment cores suggested that the ecology of these lochs started to change rapidly from the middle of the 19^th century onwards, gradually becoming dominated by species that preferred more acid conditions.  This, along with data from Scandinavia, and similar data from the eastern USA, was a crucial evidence in establishing a link between the activities of factories and power stations in industrial regions and the livelihoods of people living many hundreds of miles downwind.  As a result, legislation was passed requiring power stations and other major industrial plants to install equipment that removed noxious gases before they were released.   

This story has a happy ending, of sorts.  The monitoring work started by the UCL team continued after the legislation was passed, and showed a gradual increase in pH in these lochs, along with a gradual shift in the composition of the diatom assemblage back towards species that prefer near-neutral (if still slightly acid) conditions.  But the diatoms we see now are not exactly the same as those that they found in their cores from pre-industrial peridos.  Rick Battarbee mused that the fall in sulphur dioxide – the major exhaust gas from power stations – has been more dramatic than that of nitrous oxides – which mostly comes from vehicle emissions.  There is evidence that nitrogen is naturally scarce in many of our upland lochs and lakes so the modern lochs are, in effect, more nutrient-rich than in their pre-industrial days.  

The microscopic world around a quillwort stem from Round Loch of Glenhead, August 2011. Filaments of Mougeotia and Lyngbya are entangled with chains of the diatom Tabellaria quadriseptata, within which particles of peat are trapped.  Peronia fibula (top) and Eunotia bilunaris (bottom) are attached to the plant stem whilst Navicula leptostriata moves through the algal matrix. 

Roger Flower, Rick’s colleague in these original explorations of Galloway’s lochs commented to me that the brown gunk that I had noticed on my visit to Round Loch of Glenhead was not obvious when they had first visited in the early 1980s.  This led me to wonder whether the rich growths of Mougeotia around the Lobeliaand quillwort stems is a consequence of this and maybe the Navicula which is now common in the loch is able to use this matrix of filaments to move around.  The rise in Navicula was, in other words, facilitated by other changes in the algal community that an analysis that focussed on diatoms alone missed.

The earlier analyses had focussed on how changes in the chemical environment had forced changes in the diatoms.  But the change towards more motile diatoms also suggested something else: a change in habitat alongside the changes in chemistry.  That led to Roger and I comparing experiences.   We do not have data to support this theory of increasing quantities of gunk but, on the other hand, observational studies such as this are necessary to fill in the gaps in the story that emerge when the data are analysed.  There is always a point when the data-driven “explanation” peters out and some informed “storytelling” has to take over…

References

Battarbee, R. W., Simpson, G. L., Shilland, E. M., Flower, R. J., Kreiser, A., Yang, H., & Clarke, G. (2014). Recovery of UK lakes from acidification: An assessment using combined palaeoecological and contemporary diatom assemblage data. Ecological indicators 37: 365-380.

Flower, R. J., & Battarbee, R. W. (1983). Diatom evidence for recent acidification of two Scottish lochs. Nature 305: 130-133.

Jones, V. J., Stevenson, A. C., & Battarbee, R. W. (1989). Acidification of lakes in Galloway, south west Scotland: a diatom and pollen study of the post-glacial history of the Round Loch of Glenhead.  Journal of Ecology 77: 1-23.

Kelly M.G. (2012).  The semiotics of slime: visual representation of phytobenthos as an aid to understanding ecological status.  Freshwater Reviews 5: 105-119.

Some other highlights from this week:

Wrote this whilst listening to: Connie Converse, early exponent of the singer-songwriter genre who was active in New York in the 1950s and 60s but never really had success in her own lifetime.  A review of a biography in The Observer last weekend piqued my interest.

Currently reading:  Golden Age, novel about the Cultural Revolution in China by Xiaobo Wang.

Cultural highlight: Armando Iannucci’s 2009 film “In the Loop”.

Culinary highlight:  Ten course tasting menu at Gauthier, a vegan fine-dining restaurant in Soho.   Excellent food including a main course of 3D plant-based “meat” by Redefine was so authentic that, apparently, many vegans cannot touch it.  Washed down with a rather nice Sancerre and a glass of Banyuls.

A tourist in Wuhan …

China’s Covid lockdown was longer and harder than almost anywhere else, which was difficult for us as we had a son and, more recently, a grandson, living there.  China’s refusal to issue tourist visas meant that it was impossible to visit, and contact during this period was largely by Zoom and WhatsApp.   In mid-March, however, the Chinese government announced that it was opening the doors to tourists again and, a week later, we had flights booked and were presenting ourselves at the China Visa Centre in Edinburgh to complete the paperwork.  A month after that, we were checking in our bags for our trip to Wuhan, arriving early on the morning of Casper’s first birthday.

Wuhan is a city that everyone has now heard of but hardly anyone from the West has visited.  It is a huge city – over 11 million people – but not somewhere that features on most tourist itineraries.  I am guessing that we are amongst the first Western tourists to visit since the pandemic.  We have passed very few Western faces in the street, and have attracted plenty of curious stares and audible comments featuring the word wàirén(“foreigner”).

If Europeans are scarce in Wuhan, European architecture is quite prominent, particularly in the city centre. Wuhan represents the most upstream point on the Yangtze that was accessible by ocean-going ships and, as a result, was an important trading port.  There was a British Concession in Wuhan, dating from the period after the Second Opium War in which France and Britain defeated the Qing Dynasty in 1860, overran the Forbidden City in Beijing and forced legalisation of the opium trade on the Chinese.  Establishment of a trading post in Wuhan was one of the consequences of the very unequal treaty that was the result of this.   These quaint streets with their colonial architecture, therefore, represent one of the less glorious episodes of British history.  

The British Concession in Wuhan: clockwise from top left: a crowded street during the May Day holiday, the YMCA building; Customs House; Jianghan Road near the Yangtze River.   The photograph at the top of the post shows a view across the Yangtze River.

It was not just the British who arrived during this period.  A separate treaty was signed with Russia and, as a result, Russian tea merchants arrived in the 1860s and also settled in the city, setting up factories to produce brick tea.  The ”Russian Caravan” tea that I buy when my favourite Lapsang Souchong is not available is a living memory of this trade, which took tea back to Europe overland rather than via the fast sailing ships such as the Cutty Sark.  The tea merchants also built an Orthodox Church inside the British Concession, although this has now been deconsecrated.  None of the fittings or icons remain, with the building now housing the “Wuhan Sino-Russian Cultural Exchange Centre”.   

Saint Alexander Orthodox Cathedral, Wuhan, May 2023.

Our next destination was the Baotong Temple, a Zen Buddhist monastery built on a wooded hillside on the far side of the river.  Wuhan, like many Chinese cities, is frantic and crowded, with buildings jammed up against one another, and constant noise of traffic.  This is still a working temple and monastery, and weekend visitors shared the space with worshippers and monks. Temples are often islands of tranquillity amidst all the bustle of a Chinese city and we spent an hour wandering through the grounds and climbing the hillside, relishing the quiet as well as absorbing the atmosphere.  Looking back down, we could see the buildings of the temple set against a huge shopping mall, capturing some of the contradictions that I wrote about during my last visit to China (see “The limits of science …”).   We were to see the same paradoxical juxtaposition later in our trip when visited Jiang’an Temple in Shanghai.

Four views of the Baotong Temple, Wuhan, May 2023.

Our final stop on this brief tour was Tanhualin Street in the historic district of Wushengmen.  Much of old Wuhan has been bulldozed to make way for skyscrapers and tower blocks but this area still contains old hutong-style one or two storey buildings set around courtyards.  We sipped Oolong tea overlooking Tanhualin Street crowded with weekend visitors but, later, explored the narrow streets where we got a sense of what Wuhan must have looked like before redevelopment.  The Tsung Tsin Church which faces onto Tanhualin Street dates from 1864 and is one of the oldest churches in China, established by the London Missionary Society and, as such, another by-product of the European expansion in China following the Second Opium War.  We could hear a service going on inside, but could not find an entrance to find out more.  

Three scenes from the Wushengen area of Wuhan, May 2023.

Mention Wuhan to anyone in the West and they think of the destructive pandemic that originated here.  Visiting the city, for me, turned this around, especially as I read more about the Opium Wars and their consequences for China.  In this period, the destruction went in the opposite direction: it originated in Western ideas of colonialism and capitalism and had devastating effects on Chinese cities including Wuhan.  The First and Second Opium Wars could be recast as legitimate attempts by the Chinese governments of the day cracking down on the drugs trade, but were portrayed at the time as the British government defending free trade.  It is an era of history that is not widely-known in modern Britain.  Walking along streets shaded by genteel colonial architecture spurred me to read more about this shameful period, a task made more difficult, ironically, by the Great Firewall of China.  

Throughout our visit, the pandemic seemed like a distant memory, with people mingling freely, crowded shopping streets and busy restaurants.  I had some flu-like symptoms towards the end of our stay but tested negative for covid on the day before we travelled home.  Heather, by contrast, now has a lateral flow test that confirms her membership of that most exclusive of groups: those whose infection derives from “ground zero” itself.  Not the greatest of souvenirs, we admit, but a fine tale to recount over the coming years.

Wrote this whilst listening to: Chinese music constantly in the background, but I don’t know enough to be more specific than that.  

Currently reading:  City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir by Paul French, a racy non-fiction account of the demi-monde in Shanghai between the wars.   

Cultural highlight:  Wuhan Art Gallery, which may be the subject of a separate post.   Otherwise, our movements were mostly dictated by the need to amuse a one-year old.

Culinary highlight:  Too many to mention.  A spicy clam soup from a street market just off Jiangan Road in Wuhan and Jiang Ban (a crêpe typically eaten for breakfast) in Shanghai deserve special mention.  There are lots of good restaurants all over both cities, but the street food in China is something else. 

Winning ways: Julia van Etten

For the past few years I have asked previous winters of the Hilda Canter-Lund competition to share some of their secrets to encourage entries to this year’s competition.  Last year, Julia van Etten won the competition with her photograph of Hydra viridissima so, with the 2023 competition now underway, I thought that I would ask her for some tips.

1. “Decisive moment” or carefully crafted composition?

As a microscopist, I like to just see what’s in a sample and not curate the scene too much. But I will wait around watching the same microbes for a very long time with the hope that they will move in a way that looks “just right” to me.  Once in a while, I will edit together a big composition photo of lots of organisms for fun, but overall, I prefer to just see what nature puts on my slide.

A colony of peritrich ciliates, phototraphed by Julia van Etten.  The picture at the top of the post shows the cirri of a barnacle.

2.  What photo editing software do you use?

This is a horrible answer, but I don’t really use a photo editing software. I will occasionally use PowerPoint to edit a photo, which I know is ridiculous. I post a lot of my favorite photos from my microscopy work on instagram (@couch_microscopy) so before doing that I will often do some light editing to make sure the background color is even or to slightly sharpen the photo or adjust the brightness or saturation. I do all of this on my phone in an app called Preview.

3. What routine editing steps do you apply to your image (e.g. cropping, adjusting levels/curves/brightness etc, stitching, stacking)?

As I mentioned above, for most photos I will only do light editing, if anything. I really want to help remove barriers to pursuing microscopy as a hobby, so I don’t feel like it’s important to always present perfect-looking photos. Reality is much cooler and messier. I think it’s more fulfilling to just do a lot of microscopy and end up with an amazing photo once in a while (maybe one truly amazing contest-worthy picture for every 1000+ I take). I still choose to use inexpensive equipment (microscope, camera, etc.) and since I’m on a budget, I don’t have any fancy photo editing programs. When it comes to editing, I will just adjust basic things such as color, brightness, saturation, sharpness, etc. but I often find that with good microscopy, the image almost always looks better unedited. I occasionally sign up for free trials of stitching or focus stacking software and play around with it, but it is possible to get by without these. You can also just manually stitch a photo together in PowerPoint or a handful of Adobe programs.

Snail embryo, photograph by Julia van Etten.

4. Do you ever “retouch” images to remove blemishes and improve their appearance?

Yes, I will often color in the background on my dark field photos to make sure it is an even black.

5. Are there any photographers who particularly inspire you?

I am inspired by all of the other Instagram microscopists who regularly share their knowledge and process with the world. We all use different equipment and live in diverse locations all over the world but seeing everyone else’s techniques and the interesting organisms they find inspires me to keep looking for new organisms and to keep sharing what I find with others.

Gloeotrichia colonies.  Photograph by Julia van Etten.

You can read more about Julia’s work here.

Golden brown …

Back in March I wrote about seasonal cycles of diatoms in Croasdale Beck, a small stream running off the side of Great Borne and joining the Ehen just downstream of Ennerdale Bridge (see “Entrances and exits …”).  Our visit on a cold but sunny day in late April was a good chance to test whether the predictions I made then had come true.  I had initially been interested in the seasonality of Gomphonema, comparing it with members of the same genus in the River Irt (see “High-rise habitats …”) but noted that the Gomphonema would wane and be replaced by Odontidium mesodon.  And this is exactly what we saw.

The river bed, in fact, was a bright yellow-brown as we approached, so it was clear that the biomass of diatoms was high.  It was sufficiently thick that I could run a finger through it and leave a distinct trail behind.   When I was able to check the composition with a microscope, it was obvious that Odontidium mesodon was the most abundant diatom, although Tabellaria flocculosa, Meridion constrictum and Gomphonema parvulumwere also present.   

The substratum of Croasdale Beck in situ (upper photograph) and the thick biofilm on an individual cobble (lower photograph).  The picture at the top of the post shows the yellow-brown colour of the stream bed.

Odontidium mesodon formed long chains and, at the River Calder this resulted in flocs of diatoms several centimetres long growing on stone surfaces.  Interestingly, the Calder is another unregulated stream (confirming a hunch I put forward in “More about Platessa oblongella and Odontidium mesodon”).  At this site, however, the diatoms were less prominent in the main channel but the flocs vied with wefts of Ulothrix zonatain the slack along the right bank.  This suggests that there is something about the rough and tumble of an unregulated river that favours Odontidium mesodon but that it is especially favoured by the less ferocious phases that these streams exhibit.  Gradually, as I accumulate more and more observations, I realise just how “niche” some organism’s niches can be.

Diatoms in Croasdale Beck, April 2023.  a. Odontidium mesodon; b. Tabellaria flocculosa; c. Gomphonema parvulum.  Scale bar: 20 micrometres (= 1/50^th of a millimetre)

Chains of Odontidium mesodon in Croasdale Beck, April 2023.  Note the single cell of Hannaea arcusat the top. The image is composed from a “stack” of individual images and the Hannaea cell drifted across the field of view as I was taking the images at different focal levels. 

Flocs of Odontidium mesodon vying for prominence with Ulothrix zonata in backwaters of the River Calder at Stakes’ Bridge, April 2023.   The picture frame is about 10 cm across.

Wrote this whilst listening to: A Child’s Question: August, new single by PJ Harvey; Sleeper, live album by Keith Jarrett.  I realised after I finished writing that Golden Brown by the Stranglers would also have been appropriate.

Currently reading:  Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard, in preparation for a visit to Shanghai next week.

Cultural highlight:  I’ve spent most of the time since I posted “The small world of a tiny pond” in airports and on airplanes, culminating in a missed connection and an eight hour weight at Beijing Airport.  The time may be right to re-watch Transit starring Tom Hanks.

Culinary highlight:  Beijing duck and numerous side dishes at Quanjude restaurant, Wuhan, celebrating our grandson’s first birthday.  A welcome relief after 24 hours of airline and airport food.