Life on the Outer Coast

The day started out extremely wet and windy, but stopped raining for the parade. The rain had ice in it when I was driving over the bridge. Fork-tailed petrels were on my path this morning, the first morning in a long while. A group of about 15 barrow's goldeneyes by the dock this morning.

Was excited to find dark hyphae in a few cultures this morning, it might be the fungus that is infecting the roots. Poured a few plates, lit the burner, cut out the fungus to transfer it to a new plate, but opened the new plate and the agar was mush! I'm hoping that it was the low pH (5.6) that kept the media from hardening, added extra agar to the two remaining bottles and re-autoclaved. We will find out tomorrow.
Ran the PCR for the amf specific primers today, more finger crossing. I didn't realize the guess work involved in setting the cycle temperatures. Apparently, the nested PCR can get anomolous annealing because of all of the small pieces of DNA in the mix. A higher temperature apparently reduces this annealing. The idea was to start at higher temps for the first few cycles then gradually reduce the temperature to get a better yield of the initial copies. The thermocycler we have doesn't allow this step down procedure, at least we haven't figured out how to program it to do this. So we will see what happened after we run the gel.
I'm puzzling over a kingfisher in a photo I have from drawing class. The photo is of two kingfishers at Starrigavan flying just above the water one behind the other. The one in front is a female with a rufous belly band, the one behind her has a very faint belly band and is ever so slightly leaner in the body. I haven't been able to find out if all juveniles have this marking or it only occurs in the females.
After the parade, transfer ceremony, pioneer home and p-bar decided to start to straighten out the former Asters... not really the clearest head, so didn't get too far. Aster modestus is now Canadanthus modestus and the another potentially local aster is Symphyotrichum foliaceum var. foliaceum. These two both have 3-5 or 4-6 rows of phyllaries instead of the 1-3 for Erigeron peregrinus. I realized that Anderson probably used this character in his key because the species of Aster and Erigeron he had to sort out could be seperated by this character. I haven't yet delved into all the particulars of the new (to me genera), but at least I have a few generic names to start to sort out.

Probably forgot to mention the snow geese flying over yesterday and the pintail in Indian river.