Anne's Journal

On Earth Day last Thursday Palmer Station personnel once again participated in cleaning up the area around station. Last year members of the station were able to get over to the site of Old Palmer Station, and clear up lots of buried rubbish. This year the snow cover was too great to allow any ...

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The Substrate Experiment, which I have written about earlier, is a major part of what I am doing this season at Palmer Station- but I also have another experiment running. The Bucket Experiment involves lots of buckets, a large tank, lots of plastic tubing and some critters. More scientifically, ...

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There were many things about Palmer Station that I was looking forward to seeing and experiencing again this year. These included, of course, the wildlife and islands and glacier hikes, and seeing people that were here last year and meeting the new people. But for me, and I think for many other ...

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Last week I was lucky enough to spend a very pleasant morning out on Humble Island with Heidi Geisz, one of the birders, and Gary Jirschele. Gary and I had come along to help Heidi with her work on Southern Giant Petrels. Heidi works for Bill Fraser and Donna Patterson who have been conducting ...

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You have probably realized by now that we spend a fair bit of time out in the boat away from station. Most of the science groups here need to do the same, and we feel very lucky that we need to go boating as part of our “work” (especially on sunny days). Most of the support personnel have jobs ...

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One of the experiences we have had when setting up the substrate experiment is a little hard to convey in writing. The aroma of a pod of hauled out elephant seals is something you really have to experience yourself. At the moment there are several groups lying on the rocks around Kristie Cove, ...

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Once the substrates were finally in place we could begin to work on collecting the algae which is not a simple task. The two species I am working on (Desmarestia anceps and D. menziesii) account for a large part of the macroalgal biomass here, and as you can see in the first photo, ...

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The main focus of my time down here at Palmer is investigating the role of brown algal phlorotannins. Phlorotannins are a group of polyphenolic compounds that are involved in constructing and strengthening the cell wall in brown algae. This function is called a “primary” role, but we are ...

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We woke up on Monday morning in the waters around the Antarctic Peninsula. The snow covered islands were all the more beautiful after the previous couple of days at sea, with not much else but ocean and more ocean to look at. It was a cloudy morning but this just made the snow covered peaks all ...

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It hardly seems like a year has past since our last trip to Antarctica. Preparations are well underway for our return this year and I have been spending much of the last few months finishing assays and writing up results from the three months I spent at Palmer in the summer of 2003. Life in ...

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