Domas

Faltermatt and me used to have a blog at blog.botany.ch where we reported about our summer life at Tvärminne Zoological Station, Finland. Because I don't want to host that blog anymore but want to keep its entries accessible – for sentimental reasons –, I decided to import the entries into this blog. The old blog was powered by Blojsom, the new one by Apache Roller. I was looking for a tool that allows easy "migration" but was too stupid to find one. Therefore I decided to write a simple program that adds the old entries to my new blog via the XML-RPC based MetaWeblog API. Now the old entries are available under category "Tvärminne" (I merged the subcategories in there, too).

One annoyance was that Roller set the last update time to the current time, which resulted in a historically incorrect order of the old entries. I ended up editing the backend database by hand, setting the last update times back to the original publishing times. I'm sure there are better solutions, and I'd appreciate any recommendations.

Hmm, maybe it's true what some people - pretending to be joking - are telling about me and I should loose some kilograms.

Today, we sat on the patio and had breakfast when Jan (a co-dweller in Tvärminne) heard a bird's voice from within the wood covering of the building. Obviously, a young barn swallow from a nearby nest had somehow gotten lost and couldn't find a way out anymore.

So we decided to start a rescue manoeuvre. I fetched a ladder and climbed up. Unfortunately, Finnish construction work doesn't seem to be of the same quality I'm used to. That's why I almost crashed through the ceiling when stepping on the wooden boards, which - as we found out unvoluntarily - were only losely nailed up.

At least clumsy birds will now have an easy way out in case they should get lost.

For some reason I forgot to post this picture showing Annette on her maiden voyage. Maybe I unconsciously feared revenge. In the morning of 17 April 2007, she drove alone to Furuskär – without any guidance from Dieter's or my side. An historical event indeed.

The hares haven't shown up yet, so Howard didn't really miss anything. However, there's another cuddly animal around that would please Howard, namely a young, male moose that's strawling around on the station's grounds (click on the image to get a larger version which shows him in full size).

If Florian had anticipated this, he wouldn't have gone to Helsinki zoo to see a moose in captivity because he hadn't seen a single one in the wild (and returned totally frustrated since all mooses had left to Stockholm zoo for a vacation).

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.