Day 2 in Thonon

Today I cooked breakfast, but needed help from my landlord Brigitte to turn on the stove. She said it was easy, showed me, and now I will not starve.

I went to the lab. Few souls were there because today the French observed Easter. I had gear to unpack so God is ok with me. I thank God for the opportunities and challenges my job provides. Scientist like to make "to do" lists and here is my current one. Since Jean Guillard, Orlane Anneville & I are starting a new project it will grow longer before it grows shorter.

We are going to try and develop an acoustic method to enumerate food available to larval coregonids (aka whitefish). This is an important topic because coregonids are an economically and ecologically important fish species in both Eurasia and North America. There is some evidence that heavy ice cover may be important to larval survival. If we are successful we will be able to survey vast areas quickly to identify which habitats should best support larval growth and survival. That is the dream we pursue. Researchers try to test boundaries of what is possible. It is what we are paid to do. That and explain what we learned. We have a lot to do before we can begin our field studies. 

Here is my unpacked gear. Tonight I must read a GPS manual and reread some proposals Jean, Orlane & I wrote a few months back. That is, I need to refamiliarize myself with our objectives and hypotheses (it means plausible and testable explanations for an observed phenomenon).  Tomorrow we will be meeting to discuss our next steps.

My wife made it home safe. Hoorah for that!