8 June 2021 The Berry Survey

Don’t worry, Mom, I’m doing Berry well!

Saturday marked the start of the spring annual Berry survey: something this group only began recently (which is unique as most of the projects at Toolik are at least 5 years old and often are 20 or more years old). Normally, the berry survey only focuses on the berries found in Toolik and Imnaviat, but with Sarah’s initiative and persistence, it has been expanded to include Berries found in multiple places along the haul road.

Sarah, the magical berry fairy, walking through the boreal forest at Marion Creek.

So on Saturday morning, we drove halfway down the Dalton to start our Berry Survey at my favorite stop: Finger Mountain.

Always in my element when I'm near rocks. Photo courtesy of Jeremy May.

At each stop (three in total), we would select random plots of land to survey for specific berry species, counting and harvesting them as we did so.

Counting and harvesting berries in a beautiful landscape. Photo courtesy of Jeremy May.

After a restful Sunday, we headed North to see how the berries were doing on the other end of the Dalton.

Jeremy counts berries on a slope in front of the Sag River.

I’m not going into too many details about the berry species and what we found, but I will say that I have a lot of respect for the animals that have to dig around to find berries because some of them are not obvious. We also now have enough berries that we could maybe survive one or two more days.

Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral

Now if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’re probably expecting the animal and mineral (rock) pics since this was a Dalton Highway day, and I won’t disappoint, we did see some cool animals and some cool rocks. To spice things up a bit (and since I’m learning more about the biology), I’ll also throw in some flowers that are finally blooming up here!

First up, animals: lots and lots of caribou, seen when we were on the northern end of the Dalton. Interestingly enough, we also found a piece of a caribou when we were on the southern end, but which I'll attach a photo of just for fun. We also saw plenty of musk ox up there, but they weren’t close enough to get any good photos.

This caribou stood up to pose for us as we drove by. The caribou foot we found. Our berry frame for size reference. Each white mark is 10 cm.

On the southern end, we saw another mMoose, this time with her baby close behind. We also saw a porcupine, but he ran away too quickly to get a good picture. There was also a mysteriously quick brown being that ran across the highway just far enough away that it was difficult to make out, but after a decent amount of research coming home, we have decided it was a wolverine. Those things are fast! I did get a picture of the wolverine, but since the wolverine was so far away, it is the same kind of evidence that people use to support their claims of having seen bigfoot.

Do you see the black dot in the distance in this picture? I PROMISE THAT'S A WOLVERINE!

But I promise we saw a wolverine!

Next, vegetable. We saw quite a few pretty flowers and interesting plants along the way, but my favorite were these crunchy lichens that covered the ground at Marion Creek and made the whole place seem like a magical fairy land.

Forget the floor is lava, the floor is lichen, amirite? Photo by Sarah Ansbro.

We’ve been doing a side project on lichens in the lab and so I was recently informed that lichens are actually a symbiotic relationship formed between a fungus (which provides the structure) and an algae (which helps to provide the sugars). We then promptly discussed why “lichens” are still classified as such, which dissolved into the standard “well at some point, everything in science is made up out of convenience”. Still, this lichen was pretty, so I’m cool with it being its own thing.

I’ve also become fond of these cacti looking plants called Pedicularis, because they were the first plant I remembered the official name for. Sarah helped me remember the name because she said they looked like a big toe. Now, in the field I find myself pointing at them and yelling “toe” as I find them.

A flowering Pedicularis and Jeremy.

Finally, mineral. I’m gonna keep this one pretty short because I covered most of the stops in my earlier Dalton highway posts, but this round I got to collect some pretty rocks.

Some of the best samples of the bunch!

And we collected some berries under slope mountain, where you can easily see some beautiful stratigraphy.

Collecting Berries in front of Slope Mountain.

We still have a few more berries to collect, but they will be collected while back at the field station!