In Which We Discover Why This Place is Called a RESEARCH Center

DAY EIGHT
Today began the same as most days. Everybody got up and headed for breakfast, with the slight added problem of a certain song about a certain sea animal ringing in everyone’s ears. On the schedule was meeting with various researchers and learning about what they were doing. Today’s forecast: boredom. Massive boredom, as old dudes in lab coats droned on about numbers no one understood
Instead, we got to meet some really cool people doing really cool things. First was Travis, who is doing a study for his PHD. He’s up here researching the effects of temperature and salinity on a certain type of bug called Chironomids. Turns out they’re everywhere, with some 15000 different species spread all over the world. They’re incredibly numerous, especially near bodies of water. Travis was doing in-vitro experiments (that means in a petri dish) where he would modify the temperature or the salinity of the water and see how the little things reacted.
The reason Travis is doing this research is because Chironomids have always been abundant. And since the shape of the Churchill area with regards to water was shaped by the glaciers of the last ice age, which would have changed the salinity and temperature of the water, he believes we can use the information from the Chironomids to build an image of the area’s evolution as a water system.
Pretty neat stuff!
Next we met Monica and Anne  who were doing research on Araci, also known as mites. They had a lot of pictures but didn’t say as much about their research, but they talked a lot about all sorts of different types of mites. They called them cute. Some agreed. Others did not.
Their research is part of a much larger project attempting to gather a DNA encyclopedia for every species. As such, their job is to identify different types of mites and gather data on them. They gather samples live and dead from all over the place and bring them to the lab in order to do that. They have at least one live specimen they’re hoping will breed, allowing it to be identified via its more unique looking offspring.

They also had these cool leaves that had been used by the mites to make something called galls. These are large pods of flesh that grow around a mite larvae, drawing energy from the plant and giving it to the larvae. It’s really cool, and we got to open some up to see if we could find any larvae. Some of us did.

Pulling larvae out of galls for Anne

Greg showing the fruits of his labour

Then we all have lunch, and then we went  out with another researcher named Anne Corkery.  Instead of sitting in the classroom or the lab, we went out to the tundra. There, she told us about her research on Semipalmated Plovers, a type of shore bird. Anne was researching what the effects of climate change, and the resulting changes in bug patterns, were on the success of the Plover’s breeding season.  She would have to find nests via the bird’s behaviour, then basically stalk the "groundbound" chicks until she could catch and measure them, and mark them for later checking. The data gathered from this could be used to predict the effects of global warming on larger animals, which is pretty clever.

 Anne describing stalking the elusive SP plover. 

After that we spent the afternoon and evening working on assignments. Not the most wild day, but a very productive one!