Odonata and master's thesis, part 1

Hiyall,

I've been updating very irregularly. Main reason has been work and my master's. Work has been standard fare: nature surveys (mostly birds and habitats) in Helsinki area, including Inkoo, Järvenpää and Espoo. After that I worked as an intern in Finnish Enviroment Center's ecosystem service group in Archipelago Sea, interviewing people. Of course, I got some vascular plant ticks as well, including but not limited to: Agrimonia eupatoria, Melampyrum cristatum, M. arvense, Cardamine impatiens, Helianthemum nummularium, Polygala vulgaris and Carex caryophyllea. Right now I am theoretically working on another similar project, writing ecosystem service indicator lists and searching for raw data. "My work here is essentially cut and paste."

However! Since may I have also been working on my master's. My subject is generally aquatic communities, and more precisely "how does changing hydrology and fish predation affect Odonata communities?" I have gotten helpful advice and locations from a researcher in UEF, who focuses on Greater Crested Newt Triturus cristatus. GCN ponds are excellent study subjects due to absence of fish and highly variable enviromental gradients, randing from irregularly drying "aro/lössä" habitats to stable kettle ponds, prominent in glacifluvial formations of North Karelia. My comparison data is mostly from more stable, fishy ponds, and I intend to seek patterns in vegetation heterogenity, hydrodynamics and community structures. Hope it works! I will probably vent my anger and frustration here.

Yesterday me, Elina and Leo took a day off from office and drove to collect my last samples of my second sampling tour. We saw several GCN larvae - including some in very young habitat that is in very early stages of aquatic macrophyte succession - and an adult Aeshna crenata. Of course, of more common Aeshnas grandis, cyanea, juncea and subarctica were also prominent. My greates surprise was when we netted a F-0 crenata larva from a fishy pond. Handling it carelessly, I soon noticed that it can use it's cerci and paraproct (which, together with epiprocts, form a structure known as anal pyramid) to grab, slash and stab potential enemies, which happened to include my fingers. It actually drew blood, something I had never seen an Odonate larva to do successfully before. (Crenata larva is easy to identify in F-0, being very large and having obvious lateral spines in S5-9, often even in S4.)

That defence mechanism has been described several times before, even from almost fully metamorphized individuals (Corbet 1999), and I was both surprised and happy to see it in situ. Larvae use threats, waving their abdomen, when encountering conspecifics in nature (own obs., aquarium, 2007), so the stabbing is most definitely not just an aberration, but a real, concrete defence mechanism.

Revelation Space

I just finished Alastair Reynold's sci-fi opera, Revelation Space. Reading it now, 13 years after it's publication, the book still feels fresh. The concept of quite hard sci-fi without FTL travel (and, obviously, the modern social media enviroment that was successfully embedded into Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince) works well when you do just what Reynolds did: add a pinch of decline and post-apocalyptism, mix it with Lovecraftian concepts of horrors from beyond the stars and stir. As a result the book's visual storytelling was enjoyable, plot was a rollercoaster of twists and slowly unraveling revelations, and in the end - yes, there are horrible machines that kill all sentient species if they can. You can now cross over that pesky Drake Equation, boys.

The 335 Towers - 4.5.2013

BirdLife Finland has been organizing a combined birdwatching-competition / birdwatching introduction day for twenty years now. The basic concept is simple: a team is gathered, they pick a birdwatching tower ("tower") and try to see as many species as possible in a limited amount of time. Recently the time has been limited to about 8 hours (5am-1pm) and date has been the first saturday of May (unless it's 1st of May, which is a traditional holiday in Finland). This year we even had a Twitter hashtag. How delightfully modern - Twitter is practically unknown in Finland.

This year we (Elina, Pirita and I) decided to capitalize on the heavy birdwatching effort around North Karelia and decided to go on a field trip to Tohmajärvi, again - third week in a row. Weather forecast had changed from extremely favourable to slightly favourable, but we took off anyways. Maybe we would see something or got a chance to twitch something spectacular...

Day gave us a whopping 96 species. Best among the bunch were Jack Snipe, White Stork, Black Kite, Horned Lark, lots of Lapland Longspurs, two Peregrines, three Black-Tailed Godwits and a female Capercailie. We missed a Black-Legged Kittiwake and didn't stay long enough for a Greater Spotted Eagle. We also didn't see a number of common species (eg. Goldcrest, Dunnock, Hazel Grouse, Blackbird), but 96 species in North Karelia in one day without too much effort was great.

The Algrebraist

Banks! We know you consider yourself funny. You dont't have to prove it all the time. How about you hire an editor and cut a bit on the mid-dialogue exposition? Like, we don't exactly need four pages of that. And don't even get me started on abrupt endings, I already reas Look to Windwards.

Enjoyable and fantastic, but I have read this before. And way overlength. 3/5

Hey guys, I have an idea!

"Yeah, what is it?"
"You know how we're really popular around Finland?"
"Yes, and..?"
"How special beers are all the rage nowadays?"
"Like they were back in... 1999? Yeah, that really took off well."
"Ok, no, but our organic weissbier is  selling really well. And we we're so successful that we had to raise the prices for about.. what was it? 15 %?"
"Something like that. What are you getting at?"
"Let's take the same can design and replace green with red! It'll be awesome! I'm sure I can come up with something to justify it."
"Umm... Guess since we're rolling in money, we can fund all your drug-induced dreams and fund them. Permission granted!

. . .

"So, this is your result?"
"Yes!"
"This smells like something you would be brewing in the corner of your loo. Doesn't taste that bad, though. Kinda nondescript. Its just beer, I guess? What is your glorious idea, exactly?"
"Its... wait for it... cranberries!"
"Cranberries? Dude, we have cranberry long drinks. People call them pony booze and get way too wasted on them. People who are 16-year old."
"But this is beer, not a long drink or that industrial waste product we label as a cider."
"Cranberry beer? Doesn't sound too bad. Is it like lambic, then?"
"Nyah, couldn't be bothered, and I don't think we could even sell lambic without some idiot banning it in two days. I just took some aroma and added it to normal beer."
"So... you have beer. That you infused with cranberry aroma."
"That's pretty much it."
"Your description in the report mentions something like... GTI? What is it?"
"Oh. That. Gonadic taste index."
"Oh for god's sake."
"Seriously, I'm absolutely positive we can sell this somehow. I have thousands of liters of stuff."
"What?"
"I went a bit overboard."
"I'm so close to firing you. This close."
"Fear not, I have a marketing idea. We can label this whole malt beer."
"I guess that works..."
"And we could capitalize the word "barley" in the ingredients list as well!"
"Fucking SOLD"

17.3.2013 - Aurora borealis

Aurora borealis in the northeastern sky, Kontiolahti, North Karelia, Finland, 17.3.2013

Last evening me, Elina and Leo left Helsinki and drove back to Joensuu. Perfect driving weather. After sunset we started to notice aurora borealis, the northern lights, in northern, eastern and western sky. Couple of stops gave us a magnificent view. We observed the standard green (ionized oxygen) and also faint red (ionized nitrogen). We also observed a flashing corona ("crown") in the "zenith of the auroras", which was - according to a couple of aurora enthusiasts we met by chance - quite a rare sight. Red coronas are understandably even rarer than green ones. During the entire trip from Varkaus to Joensuu the sky was ablaze with outlandish, alien dance of otherwordly colours. If you don't know what aurora borealis are, I recommend you do a bit of a search. The basic wiki article seems to be a good starting point. Basically, sun is at a point of its sunspot cycle activity peak (these go in 11-year cycles), and bombards us with solar winds. Aurorae are easily seen during the spring equinox, due to their higher frequency and generally favourable conditions.

In Joensuu, there wasn't much to do. We grabbed a couple of cameras and drove to Häikänniemi. I was stuck with 50mm/1.8, so not much point in trying to pry the tripod out of Elina's hands. Leo was timelapsing the sky. I punched in some random numbers in full M and shot a couple of artsy pictures. In case you didn't know, artsy means out of focus and generally low quality. Still, I am somehow perversely fond of my low effort.

Most pictures of northern lights are much more vibrant than what we see with our bare eyes. Faint glows become much more visible, but depending on the camera, settings and the photographer's personal aesthetics, the colours may or may not coincide perfectly with those observed. In my picture the greens are yellowish, even though when shot with different WB settings they are much colder in temperature. The faint red-purplish glow in the middle left is nitrogen; however, the reddish glow in the lower right-hand corner is not aurorae, but city lights. Leo's and Elina's pictures paint a much more "truthful" view of what we saw. For example red nitrogen glows are often quite faint when seen live. And, of course, what the pictures lack is the alien movement of the northern lights; the flickering, the dance and everchanging view. But - do not completely trust all the pictures you see.

There's something funny about the way the aurorae move. You don't always see the motion - you just look at the sky and the view changes, but your brain doesn't quite get the movement inbetween. It can be like a series of still images, the newest one already fuzzying your memories of the previous seconds.The finnish name for the phenomenon is "revontulet", literally "the fires of the fox". The mythical fox - not just a red fox, no arctic fox, but the Fox of Fire, runs over the fjells. It's tail writes the aurorae... or sparkles flash from it's fur, pick what suits your imagination more. The more northern the language, the more arcane yet trivial the names become.

No owls. We heard a troll or some other monster, though.

What I learned today 1

Cortinarius evernius exists.