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...Research team Assembles........................................Kat's Weed Gear
KAT WATCHING CAT DO YOGA
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.............White Water Lily..........................................Eurasian Milfoil
It’s six o’clock AM on Saturday and quiet as a mouse. I brew a pot of tea while I watch the sun pull clear of Powow Hill on the eastern horizon. I’m up early to advance the cause of environmental science. Science is my favorite subject, so why not? But I’m a little worried that today’s expedition won’t get off the ground. Gabriel, my 16-year-old science helper, had a fight with his Mom last night and is grounded. Bummer!
I immediately offered Rena the chance to go muck around the lake at the crack of dawn. That didn’t fly. Rena is definitely not a morning person. Finally, in desperation I called Kat. I know she’s not a morning person either, but I think I talked her into it. Still I’m not sure if she’s actually going to show or not. How many amazing scientific discoveries have been lost due to failure to show up? Woody Allen says 95% of life is showing up and I tend to agree.
At 6:32 AM Kat’s Jetta pulls into the driveway. Amazing – she’s early!! I hand her a mug of my special Kenya tea – a mix of super-strong Kericho Black cut with Borden’s sweetened condensed milk and flavored with a special spice blended by Rasik Sangrajka’s wife and sent to me from Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It’s heaven in the morning and packs quite a caffeine jolt!
The tea combined with perfect butterfly weather (no wind, warm sun and blue skies) dispels any lingering cobwebs. We sit on the deck sipping tea and rubbing the sleep from our eyes as we gaze at the perfect mirror surface of Lake Gardner.
“What exactly are we doing again?” asks Kat.
“Saving the planet from invading aliens,” I respond.
“No way!” exclaims Kat, She throws me a skeptical squint through a cloud of chai vapors
“You’re right, “ I admit, “but pretty close. Bruce thinks that Lake Gardner is besieged by exotic alien plant species which have invaded our backyard ecosystem and are strangling the waterway. Today we’re mounting an expedition to find out.” (My neighbor Bruce is a member of the town Lakes and Waterways Commission.)
“Wow,” says Kat. “Why so early in the morning?”
“Tradition,” I explain. “Vampires and alien invaders are best tackled by teams of scientists and always at the crack of dawn.”
“Vampires?” Kat expostulates. “Who said anything about vampires?”
“Don’t worry, I’m packing garlic just in case.”
I load up Kat with a ton of scientific gear – weed rake, life jacket, paddle, fresh croissants, zip lock baggies, yellow plastic rope, hot-pink measuring tape and a clove or two of garlic – and we head down to the dock. We dump the water out of the old Alligash canoe and clamber aboard. Kat is an experienced kayaker so we have no trouble paddling a mile or so to the Amesbury town beach. We are the first team there. Bruce’s wife Bernadette has baked a fresh blueberry coffee cake to nourish the troops.
At 7:20 we have eight teams of two, each with a canoe. Bruce hands out the maps. Kat and I have sector 1 and sector 2. We re-embark in the canoe and backtrack another 1 ½ miles to the opposite end of the lake. The warmth of the sun on our backs and the calm reflection of the dark green forest ahead, mirrored on the still surface of the water, is delightful. Dragonflies are everywhere and the white water lilies are in bloom. My favorites.
When we reach the first sector line we set up gondola-style, facing each other. I get the boat in position and measure the depth to the bottom. Then Kat dredges the bottom with the weed rake. The resultant smelly collection of bottom weeds is decanted into a ziplock bag. Then I re-position the boat 10 feet further out on the sector line and we repeat the process. When the water is about 8 feet deep, the amount of sunlight reaching the bottom is too little to sustain plant growth. We tie our specimen zip-locs in a trash bag and paddle off to sector 2. What a team!
At sector 2, Kat receives morning greetings from a black cat doing the ‘downward facing dog’ pose on an upturned rowboat. It is a beautiful shot and I snap a pic with the digital before we set to work sampling the bottom feeders at our new locale.
Kat and I are feeling it in the biceps, as we paddle to Bruce’s backyard to examine our finds. All the other teams join in and we discover that only one species is truly threatening our beautiful Lake. It’s the Eurasian milfoil, Myriophyllum matogrosense, and it’s ubiquitous to a depth of about 6 feet. The milfoil is a popular home aquarium plant which has escaped into the wild and now threatens lakes in every state except Wyoming and Montana. Now we know what we’re up against! Bruce says milfoil is a pain to control. One idea is to lower the level of the lake in the winter, exposing the milfoil, so it will freeze to death!
Kat spies a piece of goo sticking to the underside of a lily pad. Oh-mi-god! It’s a Plasmodial slime mold. I get so excited over this little critter. A Plasmodial slime mold involves numerous amoeba-like cells attached to each other. There are no divisions between the amoeboid cells. Instead, a common cell membrane encompasses the whole colony. This "supercell" is essentially a single bag of cytoplasm containing thousands of individual nuclei. Most slime molds are smaller than a few centimeters, but the very largest reach areas of up to thirty square meters, making them the largest single cell organisms on the planet! Our little guy is only about a square centimeter in size, but even so, it’s a rare treat to see a one-cell organism with the naked eye.
By 10 AM the party’s over and we paddle back to my backyard, where Rena is sipping coffee and reading a book on the back deck. “You missed a good one,” I enthuse to Rena. Rena casts a glance at our slimy and smelly exteriors and shakes her head.
“Too early and too dirty, if you ask me!” she says.
Still, Kat and I feel satisfied with our morning’s accomplishments. Kat has a two-year-old’s birthday party at noon, so I wave goodby as she puts the top down on the Jetta and speeds away.
“Vampires, slime molds, crack of dawn, ubiquitous Eurasian invaders – all in a day’s work for Daktari,” I muse as I head for the showers.
“De gustibus non disputandum.”
Daktari
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