Domas

There are lots of stranded "goods" on the skerry islands. Unfortunately they don't always contribute to the beauty of the landscape, which is why we began to clean up a little bit.

This fridge has been out of duty for a long time and lying around on Granbusken. Now it will hopefully be recycled – metal prices are high.

More waste pics coming soon...

I just realised that we had stopped bloggin in May. To revitalise our diary, I'm going to post some pictures that we intended to upload months.

Here's the first. It's not a clochard but our commander-in-chief in spring on a birdwatching tour. For those of you who wonder why he's unshaved: That's how we all walk around here. Nowadays, razor blades are expensive, and furthermore, female beings complaining about scratching kisses are usually far, far away.

The island on the upper picture is not covered in fog, it's actually smoke. The smoke originates from large forest fires in Russia and Estonia and is carried over hundreds of kilometres into Finnish territory.

The situation hadn't been as bad as in Helsinki. You could sometimes smell that there's a little bit of smoke in the air, but the sun hadn't been dimmed out. But that changed when I got up yesterday morning. It stank like in a room with an open fireplace and a chimney that doesn't draw at all. Everywhere.

Update: Today at noon, there was the first significant rain since months. I hope that's going to clear the air. And of course, it's also good for the vegetation (brown meadows, half dead trees, dry swamps). Not to mention the rock pools, which are mostly empty, and the ones that still contain some water are so salinous that no Daphnia could survive. Hopefully it's going to rain enough so that I don't have to carry any more deionised water to Furuskär...

As you might know, FinnTurf makes us happy. But now it makes us even happier than ever before. We love FinnTurf. We've already paved one island with it. Soon there will be one, two, three more. And then we're going to pave all islands in Tvärminne. Next is the Finnish skerry coast, and finally, nothing can stop us anymore! Harharhar! World domination! Hard Rock Hallelujah, but our Hilti is much stronger than that!

The "Haubentaucher" (Podiceps cristatus, engl. Great Crested Grebe, picture from Wikipedia) is a very sympathetic bird, although its mating behaviour might be irritating. I know what I'm speaking of, there used to be one of these birds in front of our office making advances towards me – at least that was Sandra's interpretation.

However, some people have even stranger associations when they see this bird. For them, "Haubentaucher" becomes "Taubenhaucher", which is not quite the same. The literal translation would be something like "dove aspirator". What the heck is that? Another member of Lordi? Finnish mythology is rich in weird characters, but I couldn't find anything close to a "Taubenhaucher". Well, don't worry, the author of this fine piece of wordplay will soon come back and explain it to you.

The new Tvärminne T-Shirt collection is here! Have a look at these exclusive 100% cotton heavyweight pieces of art. Make sure not to buy cheap knock-offs and look for the authentic Tvärminnen eläintieteellinen asema logo including the stylised Saduria. The shirts come in various colours. There is also a lady-fit series available in pastel blue, light gold and - of course - decent pink.

Frida, I'm accepting orders :)

When sitting in a white dark room and doing electrophoresis, one has enough free capacities to think. To think about the real fascinating phenomena in this world. For example about Daphnia fitting perfectly into the well plates used in allozyme electrophoresis. These wells look like little bathtubs. Although, rating the Daphnia's fate within the next couple of minutes, the wells are rather cute coffins. Or are these suiciding Daphnia, ready to cut their antennas with a razor blade in a warm bath where the blood flows easily and death is comfortable? But I digress - I wanted to say that this perfect match of the twelve little Daphnia into these twelve wells can't be a coincidence, can it? It looks too perfect, matches as if it had been planed by a clever chap. So were the Daphnia intelligently designed by Him to fit into these wells? (Of course it was Me who placed them in this wells for this time, just if there will be ever some priority claims between Him and Me.) But then, how comes that He's that cruel, creating harmless, innocent animals, that are perfectly designed to be mass-executed? They won't be shot right on the spot with a six-shot colt, but the 12-fold applicator awaiting them ain't much better.If anybody can throw some light on that observation and the subsequent interpretations, I'm happy to learn more about it. It would somehow disburden my conscience when continuing with electrophoresis.

PS 1: Is it a sign of worship, when some people (let's say, we don't tell the name, but only give a little hint) have instant noodle soup on their menu list as well as in their cupboard quite often?

PS 2: While seeing 12 little Daphnia whose short lives are fading away, there are some differences. Most die innocent (and happyless?), but at least nr. 5 and 9 had their joy in life.

PS 3: 12? Yes 12! 12 in the wells! You haven't got it? Well, then you are on the wrong track. Ever heard anything about disciples?

On several islands near Tvaerminne Zoological Station - yet unconfirmed - activities concerning project "blind date" have started. A reward has been promised for getting a blind Daphnia clone, preferably magna. Immense quantities of gold ducats are ready for the first one who gets them. Needless to say, that this might attract pirates...

Something more serious for a change.

Contrary to Basel, there are absolutely no seminars up here at Tvärminne Zoological Station. As the first withdrawal syndromes already show up (on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we begin migrating around in the building at certain times), we quickly had to organise our own seminar. The program looks very promising. I'm confident that there'll be more people volunteering for talks in June and July.

Feel free to join in anytime! Directions can be found here :)

In State College, Pennsylvania, where our dear Sandra will soon move to, they might have deeeecent cars, but they certainly don't have such cute hares as this one. We know an aborigine of State College who will confirm that.

This hare symbolises – now I have to steal from Dieter's and Florian's quotes – Tvärminne. Everything is the same every year. Also things you'd expect to change. The hare is hoping around our flat – it did so last year as well (OK, it was a newborn then, but still). The common merganser couple does some grooming in front of our office window - it did so last year as well. I could also provide examples with people, but that's too risky, I don't want to end up on the ground of the Baltic Sea...

The only thing that changed a lot is the sauna building. Dieter won't recognise it anymore. Bad for him, because sauna is the main reason he's coming to Tvärminne anyway. But that's another story.

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As wished by D. G. and S. B. (initials interchanged for privacy reasons), I wanted to install my webcam in the sauna. (Un)fortunately, the cable was way to short (and what's more, the camera would probably melt in seconds - I suspect somebody fiddled on the thermostats). And: it would be pretty time consuming to program an algorithm that covers delicate parts of the live stream with the almost fish tanga. That's why you have to live with sporadic live pics from our office: open webcam.

On the left, you see some output from the webcam. The snapshot has been encoded solely with characters. That's called ASCII arts. An interesting software project that provides a character based video codec can be found here - just in case you want to watch a movie in your terminal.

Really? I've seen some the other day as well, but still a very nice bird, and worth to note whenever possible. As it is an important bird (at least I like it a lot), here the necessary words to communicate with other people (at the moment it is german-english-finish-swedish. French contributions are welcome): Austernfischer = Oystercatcher = Meriharakka = Strandskata.

As I'm more into taking pictures of butterflies, this picture of the oystercatcher has been taken from wikipedia.

As in other animals, hibernation allowed us conserving energy during the winter (in our case the hypothermia affected the whole country, which might sound familiar to some of our mediterranean group members). Now when we are back in Finland, we have to regulate our temperature up again. The usual way is the Finnish Sauna (a so called regulated hyperthermia). In a less controlled way it also works with eating more than usual, producing heat and power (think of us as a little block power station). But this doesn't work when one is ignorant while shopping. Only Thomas' sagacious foresight made me buying a double portion of emmentalmozzarella, two dozen eggs, plenty pirogi and 1.5 kg of butter. This prevented me of starvation after today's boat trip, and I got an adequate meal (auch wenn eigentlich ein Müsli reichen würde....). Why do I always forget that I get hungry anyway?

After a hibernating period of over seven months, we're finally back blogging.

Same procedure as every year. Or at least almost. As usual, we wanted to go to Tvärminne by train and ferry. One takes the 9 o'clock train in Basel, changes in Hamburg and arrives in Rostock before 18:00. The ferry leaves at 21:00 arrives the next evening at 18:00 in Hanko, which is just a 20 minutes' car drive from Tvärminne Zoological Station. Unfortunately, that's history because the Estonian company Tallink bought the three Superfast ferries circulating between Rostock and Hanko. Tallink fired most of the people and changed the timetable without further ado. Now the ferry leaves Rostock at 05:00 and arrives 26 hours later in Hanko. Because we had already booked our train tickets, this meant our trip took half a day longer, which is quite annoying. What's more, the new ferry crew is a bunch of lazy buggers. At least Florian was happy. The bed was very comfortable, almost as cosy as an eider nest.

After roughly - ahem - 13 hours of sleep, our Daphnia had to be fed, and all the bad air could pass off the falcon tubes. (BTW, if anyone cares, all clones are in good health, they're glad to be back in their home country.)

After another - this time rather short - night, we had a hefty French breakfast. The nice thing about it was that it was filling AND at the same time reminding us of Laurence :)

Don't worry, we won't post photographs of sausages anymore but would like to refer to a very good source of reviews on dodgy food.

And then we finally arrived in Tvärminne. How much did we miss the view out of our office window - at day and at night.

More to come. Stay tuned.

Don't fiddle around with God(s), and especially don't mix up with their lordship. The later obviousely happened lately to some of us in the report about Neptun. A sight for the gods, but the wrong ones. The whole assemblage of Andhrímnir, Baldr, Borr, Bragi, Búri, Dagr, Delling, Forseti, Heimdall, Hermóðr, Höðr, Hoenir, Kvasir, Lóðurr, Loki, Magni, Meili, Modi, Ódr, Odin, Ríg, Thor, Tyr, Vali, Ve, Vidar, Vili and their female counterparts Bil, Eir, Frigg, Fulla, Freya, Gefjun, Gna, Hlín, Iðunn, Jord, Lofn, Nanna, Nótt, Saga, Sif, Sigyn, Sjöfn, Snotra, Sol, Syn, Var, Vor and Þrúðr was offended and kind of complained. It was probably Thor who most disliked the intrusion of some Italien and Greek folks. Soon after, heavy storms passed over Tvaerminne. Lightnigs illuminated the sky, thunders made us shaking of fear and the wind blew up trees. We dare only now to show these pictures, still fearing these gods.

(and – just to mention – Thor's physique isn't to bad, is it?)