Train strike musings if you need a laugh

The good news is the bus I took from Thonon to Bellegarde was ten minutes early. I arrived at my platform to catch my train well ahead of schedule.  The bad news is I decided to stand on the wrong end of the platform. My train to Lyon was five minutes late which seemed a minor inconvenience and nothing more. I met a nice lady that explained the delay as she understood the French announcement over the intercom. When the train finally arrived it was really long; I'm guessing 15 cars. My ticket was for first class and as the train drove past me, my new-found friend and I realized there was only one 1st class car at the very front of the train. So off we ran some 300 m to catch up. 1st class = better be able to run fast. So we ran and ran and we ran some more, and we got on board. I was able to get my heavy luggage stowed in the overhead bin just as the train started to move towards Lyon.  I'm getting too old to sprint 300 m pulling behind heavy luggage. Ok. I'm still on schedule.

So I arrive at Lyon Part Dieu on time. I had what I thought would be a 1.5 hour wait, but the "Strike Gods" have struck again and my train to Paris is running 30 minutes behind. So here I sit now resting against a concrete pillar. It is not exactly comfortable on the floor, but I cannot change the circumstances I find myself in. I gave a beggar two euros. He came back a second time and I told him, "no".  If all goes as "planned" I will only need to sit here 45 more minutes. I brought with me some 5 carrots so I ate three. So I started to have a sore seat so I decided to stand in front of the departure monitors to kill time. The beggar tried a third time and I pretended I did not hear him. Eventually it was revealed that my train would depart from platform letter I so I went in the direction of platform I (sweet irony that I could use "I" so many times in one sentence). I became confused because there were two trains leaving from the same gate at the exact same time. How can this be? There was a picture of a train on a monitor so I thought that I was to be in cars 11 to 18 to get to Charles de Gaulle airport. I asked a guy if I was right, but he did not speak any English, but he asked his friend. The second guy said train 18 was right so I got on. Ok, to back up, this morning I had an assigned seat on a train heading to Paris from Lyon. Then, because of the strike, my first train out of Thonon was cancelled and I was assigned new trains that were traveling to Paris sooner. That sounded good at the time, but I never was assigned seat numbers. I asked a lady who works for SNCF at Lyon about the lack of a seat assignment, and she said that was because the train was probably full. She suggested I get on the train, look for a seat, and stand for two hours if I could not find one. I thought to myself, "Great advice, but not very helpful." So when I boarded up in Lyon, I just went down the isle of train 18 hoping I would find an empty seat. No such luck. I eventually found a place to sit in 2nd class on car 18. I'm more a less the only one in this part of the car. The train conductor came and asked for my ticket, and he was a bit mad at me because I'm not on the train that my ticket reads. I'm on the one an hour ahead of my original ticket because of the change. I tried to explain my situation in English twice, and both times he pointed to my ticket showing a 2000. hour departure from Lyon. It is true. In the end he tore up my ticket (I thought - oh great) and he walked away no doubt thinking I'm a stupid American. This is also true, but at least, I think, I'm headed for Paris. So if I was to arrive at 2102. hours and the train left 40 minutes or so late, I hope to arrive at the Paris airport by 2142. hours. The conductor guy was cold to me so I didn't have the courage to ask when we would arrive. The sun is to my left so I'm heading north (assuming that during train strikes the sun still sets in the west) so I consider this fact somewhat reassuring. The train, I must say, is traveling at a very fast pace. I think the beggar stayed in Lyon.

A girl walked towards 2nd class and through the grey glass she looked exactly like my daughter. Same height, similar weight, identical haircut. It was not my daughter. She's in Belgium right now. I'm losing it. At 2045. hours a guy with me in second class, who had stowed his suitcase above him in an overhead bin, had said suitcase fall on his head. He and his laptop are o.k. Not good.  I decided to eat a carrot. Make it two carrots. I'm out of carrots.

The trained started to slow at 2115. I think there may be one stop before the airport. I'm expecting it to happen. We sped up again. I do not want to end up in Brussels. The sun has set so I've lost my sense of direction. We slow again. We are stopping, but only one guy in car 18 is leaving. We are at Marne La vallee-Chessy. This must be the stop I remembered. A new guy got on and I asked if the next stop was Charles de Gaulle? He said, "Of course. In 10 minutes." I said, "Thank you." He said, "You're welcome." We move again.

Once arriving at the Paris airport, things went rather smoothly. I followed signs to airport shuttles. I found a board which told me to take the "black" bus. Just as I got to the buses the black bus was about to depart. 15 minutes later I was at my hotel. 10 minutes later and I got into my room. Hoorah!

Last day at Thonon lab

My last day in Thonon was very busy. I ate breakfast and then I had to finish cleaning my apartment. I walked to the lab and spent some time on a PowerPoint talk that I gave at the lab about preliminary findings of our research. Before my talk, I visited the office of Eric and Valentine. They have an amazing collection of unique artifacts in their office. For example, they attached baskets to legs of a doll  so they could pass back and forth a tennis ball. The legs of the ball are the handles. They call it "doll ball". They had several strange items and each one had a funny story. Crazy PhD candidates. They envision a website where people with strange offices could share pictures and stories. It is a good idea.

 My talk was at 11 am. It was so wonderful for the students to have attended my talk in such big numbers. Almost everyone was there. Several people said I did a good job. After the talk we gathered for a group photo. Can you find Dan? I look like Waldo. Thanks for taking the photo Agnes. Also missing is Severine. So later a photo of just the two of us was taken. Severine was missing from the group photo because she had to go to the rail station to change my tickets for the trip to Paris because the train workers have been striking.

 It is strange because some trains continue to run, but the one I was scheduled to use was cancelled. So now I'm writing as I ride a bus to Bellegarde. The rest of my trains are supposed to run. I hope so. I want to get to my Paris hotel without incident. Friday I fly back to the USA.

 The students play a very cool ping-pong game that was new to me. It is a game of round robin elimination. It starts with 8-10 or 4-5 per table side. The ball is served and people move around the table returning the volley when it is their turn. There is actually a fair amount of strategy, but explaining all the complicated nuances could take days. Suffice is the to say, if you screw up your turn, you must exit. The others play on until only two are left. The round championship is decided by a quick game to three points. Then the 6-8 players join in for a second game. It is truly a ton of fun. Normally I am quickly eliminated, but in the video I lasted longer than I normally do. I think the students were trying to give me my first win, but I messed it up. I had so much fun with the students. It's a great group of young adults. So I hope my travel to Paris is uneventful. That is the best kind of travel.

Flottins

When I first visited Evian in 2012, I found it to be an amazing place because 1) it is so beautiful, & 2) so much of the economy is based on the selling of water. This time I got another surprise when I saw the Flottins. They are mystical creatures created from driftwood. Each winter thousands of visitors flock to see the new creatures that artists create. I understand it is a real family event with stories about the Flottins told to children. I found them interesting and a bit amazing. Some are huge spanning meters high by meters tall by meters deep. I decided I really like to Flottins. Evian never ceases to amaze me.

An elf?

A strange creature?

A rhino?

A big bad wolf!

Great trip to Brest France

On Tuesday we traveled from Thonon to Lyon to Brest to meet with Ann - an expert in using multiple frequency acoustics for fish and zooplankton assessment. I prepared a talk of our preliminary results and she did a great job of answering my questions and offering ideas for analyses to better interpret our data. She provided me a list of papers that I should read to become more proficient at multiple frequency acoustic applications. Still, I think she was impressed by our nice data and preliminary results. Thanks for your help Ann! Thanks Jean for coordinating the meeting and our adventure to Brest.

She took Jean and I to a crepe restaurant for dinner. Her husband & son joined us. You are served a buckwheat pancake made with water and salt. They are very large in diameter (say 35 cm) and thin (2 mm high). They pour over the top sauces with meat. I had two pancakes. One with scallops and leaks; the other with mussels and shrimp. The pancake is folded over the sauce and meat so you're presented with more or less a square. This is a dish that is served in Brittany (in French Bretagne). It is fantastic!! I never would have thought to combine pancakes with seafood in this way. You can select a variety of types with a variety of meats and sauces (not just seafood). If you get to Brest, you should check out L'Auberge de la Crepe. Awesome. We drank ice cold apple cider (hard cider) with our meal. If you have a crepe in Brest you must be careful because I believe them to be highly addictive. Eat too many and you will need to relocate to Brest. For dessert I had a sugar pancake with apple and ice cream. Perfect! The new flavors I encounter in France always make me smile. Happy Dan!

On Wednesday we went back to Thonon. It is now time for me to pack for home and clean the apartment where I lived the last five weeks.

Small acoustic targets in Lake Geneva

I mentioned in an earlier post the acoustic detection of some very small targets. We saw them in early April and found it curious, but their numbers were low and we did not think too much about it other than to consider how we might mask them to prevent our measurements of zooplankton back scatter from becoming biased high. Over the course of April their numbers increased dramatically, almost exponentially so. We decided that we needed to make an effort to try and capture these creatures so we could explain the backscatter when we publish our data. Scientists must thing well in advance to defend their work. So we rigged a larval fish trawl (1.5 m x 1.0 m mouth with 1000 micron mesh) so it could fish the pelagic zone (open water) at depths of 5 to 15 m below the surface where the bulk of the small scatterers reside (see video of the trawl being retrieved. Be patient.). So we did that and caught zooplankton and some plant debris, but we also caught chironomid pupae and what we believe to be newly hatched flies (see photos). They are also known as midges or non-biting mosquitoes.  They are about a one centimeter long.  I thought we might be detecting larval fish, but I was proven wrong with this important sampling. Thanks JC and Jean for making it happen, and Phillippe for helping us trawl and his expertise in the pressure probe we used to understand the depths fished.

When we got off the water, I did a quick internet search and found a paper written by my friend Jean Kubecka in 2000 describing the acoustic target strengths of chironomids he had sampled in some European reservoirs. He reported they had target strengths of -75 to -64 decibels, just a twitch bigger than the targets we were seeing (-80 to -68). Apparently we can detect them because they carry air in their exoskeletons or because the exoskeleton has a different density than the water. Whatever the reason, I'm convinced that is what we've been detecting in Lake Geneva. Jan's description of their position in the water column is exactly what we observed. He described them as sedentary in the water and that is what we saw. Apparently they are in Loch Ness and Jan concluded his paper by saying that the Lake's monster as seen on acoustic echograms may in fact be midges.

Thanks Ann for helping me take the microscope photos of the chironomids.

Taking the platform and transducers off the research boat.

Our experiments on Lake Geneva are over so it was time to take out the platform and transducers. We went to a local marina where we could use a crane. Jean-Christophe had a plan and he executed it like a master. Here is the crane.

Here the platform has been removed and is hanging in the water.

Here the platform and transducers and safe on the dock.

The system was struck (taken apart), thoroughly cleaned (Thanks JC) and boxed for return shipment. I'm now headed to Brest, France, for a meeting.

Evian and Annecy continued.

The shops in Annecy are amazing. Here are photos of the store fronts of a bakery and a meat market. The food is presented to make it appealing. It all must take time, but the people of France take great pride in their work. It is an amazing country for so many positive reasons.

The rain let up in the afternoon and our spirits improved. We shared a lot of laughs. Thank you Jean for giving me your Saturday. You've been an amazing host.

Evian & Annecy

I have a few minutes to post some pictures from the last three days. On Saturday Jean gave us a tour of Evian. I drank from the source.

We had lunch and I had a meal of potatoes and perch fillets smothered in lemon butter. Each bite was delicious.

We drove an hour and fifteen minutes through heavy rain to Annecy. Here is a picture of the lake. Normally the lake is picturesque, but we had a day with heavy clouds and rain.

Annecy is called little Venice because through it flows a beautiful river. Here is an ancient prison in the middle of the river.

Sunny day & a great crew.

Thursday the boat crew was Jean-Christophe, Francois & the boat captain Lisandrina. Both students are lucky! Francois is about to defend his PhD (good luck - you're going to do great) & Lisandrina has one of the coolest graduate student projects ever.  Smart young people! Jean-Christophe has been my rock.  Thank you for all that you did to make our science project possible.

Great cake and an awesome gift of music.

Jean brought in cake today using a recipe that has been in his family since 1911! It takes a couple of days to prepare because grapes must take a rum bath. It is fantastic! I definitely want the recipe.

So it was a long week for me. By Friday afternoon I was tired and grumpy. Then I got a great gift from Marie & Rosalie. They surprised me by playing the theme of my favorite tv series, The Game of Thrones. I don't think they could have made me happier. It was a very very very very cool thing to do.! I'll never forget the day two lovely French ladies played me a song! They are talented scientists and musicians also!

ping-pong tournament.

I have had a busy week, but I have a few moments to write my blog so here goes.

After lunch, on nice days, the students at the lab will enjoy ping-pong. They have organized a tournament to find a champion. This week, my host Jean Guillard, played in two hard fought matches. In match one he used an aggressive approach to defeat Sophie (see video). Sophie enjoys the game, but I can tell that her pursuit of her education in lake ecology is her true passion. The students use ping-pong to break up the hard work they do during the day advancing their projects.

Jean lost his second match 3 games to 2. Here he must swallow final defeat which he does with dignity.

The tournament is being organized by Eric & Valentine. In this video, Valentine is serving as line judge. Eric video bombs the match at the end of the video. I enjoy Eric & Valentine's company very much. They always greet me with smiles and kind conversation. They help make the lab a great place to work.

Here the distinguished scientist Marie takes on the hard working Laurent. Marie may not have won the match, but she definitely wins the style award with sunglasses and cool red sneakers.

Fondants au chocolat

Tonight I enjoyed Fondants au chocolat prepared by Maeva (Severine's daughter). It should be illegal because it can become highly addictive. Thank you Maeva for this special treat. It was the perfect way to end my day.

I have video of the ongoing ping-pong action, but need to check with a few people to see if it is ok to post their game action.

18 April field and lab work & swimming larvae

Monday morning I awoke to hear a heavy rain. As I walked to work, I imagined an unhappy boat crew soaking wet and cold. Fortunately for the crew the rain stopped falling about an hour into our sampling so crew spirits were high. Here JC and Jean are working to stow the trawl on the front deck after we completed our larval coregonid sampling. We caught a record number of larvae on 18 April, about 3 times more than the last sampling event.

Marine has been very supportive of our project helping with field work and lab work. Here she holds the zooplankton net we are using. It is called a Bongo net. It has one net with a very fine mesh (63 micron) and another with a coarser mesh (200 micron). The nets catch different sizes of zooplankton.

The counting and measuring of zooplankton is a time consuming endeavor.  Since we are doing experimental work to develop a new acoustic method, there is a chance we may not succeed. So instead of processing all the samples thoroughly, we will begin with a more rapid method of measuring zooplankton biovolume. The sample is poured into a graduated cylinder. The preserved zooplankton are allowed to settle, and the volume of zooplankton is read. Thank you Leslie for starting this work.

Here we captured video of a coregonid larvae. All fish start life at more or less a tiny size. The proportion that survive to adulthood is normally astronomically small.

Chicory prepared right, bells & fondue

Last week I told Severine that I did not much care for chicory. She said that my batch had been prepared in less than a tasty manner and that she would make me a better meal. Here chicory is wrapped in ham and covered with white sauce and cheese. I loved it Severine!

On Sunday morning I decided to walk around the Thonon city center. It is a very lovely city with a number of nice squares and parks for relaxing. At around 10 am the bells of a church began to ring so I went to investigate. I read that the church has stood there since the 15th century. You can hear the bells in the video. They rang like this for 20 minutes. I assume signaling churchgoers that service was about to start.

Brigitte invited me to a meal with two of her friends. She had me prepare fondue. I once had a date with a girl and she made me fondue (I think), but we broke up a day or so later (her major loss). So, to my knowledge, this was my second batch of fondue. Here I am measuring the bubbly wine and the cheeses. Three cheeses were used, but I forgot to ask Brigitte the varieties used. We dipped bread into the fondue and it was heavenly. It is said that if you lose a piece of bread in the fondue that you should buy the host a bottle of wine. I lost enough bread to keep Bridgitte with wine for months.

Dessert was soft cheese (like yogurt) with a layer of fruit, topped with granola and peanuts, smothered lightly with honey. FANTASTIC MEAL for sure!

Target strengths & baby bunnies

We've been working to understand the sizes of acoustic targets we've been detecting in Lake Geneva. These analyses will help us interpret the acoustic data properly. We make frequency distribution plots (right hand plot below) and plots of target strength versus water column depth (left hand). Here we limited the analysis to the uppermost 4-25 m of the water column. Each crosshatch is an echo that meets what we call single echo detection criteria or SED criteria. The fish have target strengths that are more or less > -60 decibels (dB). We also see a distinct mode at -75 dB, especially with the 123 kHz transducer. This is, in all likelihood, an invertebrate, but we will need to process our zooplankton samples to know for sure. At this point we are speculating it is either Leptodora or possibly Bythotrephes, but that is pure speculation. It is too large of a target to be Mysis. We also have some acoustic noise. We can tell this because it increases in magnitude with increasing depth. We remove noise before attempting to estimate abundance. The distinct trough between the noise and the "invertebrate" in the frequency distribution down to 25 m is a good situation to have because it seems the "invertebrate" may be detectable down to the greatest depth of interest (25 m).

The bunny at the lab became a mother bunny last night. The newborns are hidden in the nest. Thanks to Valentin for showing me this miracle of life. I made everyone read about boring acoustic data before getting to the bunny story.

Saturday

Last week I was rather busy. I had to set an alarm to rise at 5:30 am on three mornings. Today I decided to sleep in. I awoke with new-found energy. I worked on laundry & went to the market around mid-morning. I bravely bought a new brand of pickles (cornichons) based on a recommendation by Kalman & Jean. This is a much tastier pickle - very nice indeed!

For my American friends, I have decided to share a picture of some food items so one can judge the cost of food here in Thonon.

So here we have 250 grams of onions costing 2 euros. Roughly $4/pound.

125 grams of blue cheese costing 3.15 euros. Roughly $14/pound.

130 grams of chips costing 1.60 euros.  Roughly $5.40/pound.

A dozen farm-raised eggs costing 2.82 euros. Roughly $3.20.

A red pepper costing 1.04 euros.  $1.17

200 grams of pepper sausage for 3.70 euros.  Roughly $8.40/pound.

So a little more than we normally pay in northern Wisconsin. You can find some very interesting snacks to try and that makes shopping here a lot of fun for me.

After a morning rain shower the weather now is picture perfect! This from the vantage of my upstairs room in my apartment. Very nice!

Day 20 in Thonon!

The other day I finished reading a book entitled 11/22/63 by Stephen King. It is about time travel. I put the book in the break room where people gather for coffee and said it was free. Today I found the book gone. Great!

Today was another day on the lake. Orlane joined the crew and served as captain. I went up to the bow and took these photos of the two larval nets fishing at the same time. 

In one of the trawls we caught a stickleback.  I forgot to ask if it was a 3-spine or 5-spine or something else. It is common for this species to be found in the surface waters of lakes.

We caught fewer larvae this Tuesday (N = 12 individuals in 16 trawl samples) than last week (15-16 in 16 samples) so we decided to add a station over shallower water right next to the Lab's safe harbor. It started and ended where water depths were 7 m. We caught 17 larvae in the two paired trawls! Orlane had been encouraging shallower sampling to increase catches and she was right!

Severine made me tartiflette last week as a gift and today she showed me a bumper sticker on a car.  Instead of "In God we trust" they use the funny saying "In tartiflette we trust". It is perfect.

Here is what a zooplankton net looks like as it is returned to the boat. We use these nets to capture zooplankton utilized by larvae as food.

Banana & pickle

I eat lunch at the lab. Food is brought in daily during the week and I think we pay 2.5 euros per meal (about $3 US). I was on the water yesterday for lunch so I missed the meal. Today I found someone nice (named Severine) had written my name on a banana to make sure I got it.

I love what we call baby dill pickles in the states. They are salty and taste of dill. I tried to buy some here in France. 

The jar I bought was labeled Petis Croquants Aigres-Doux which translates to little bittersweet crunchy.  I ate one and I thought I would never eat another in 100 years. I told some people at the lab about my experience with pickles, and they told me this is how pickles are commonly served in France. Today I ate a few more.  I'm trying to like them. I take responsibility for not being happy with the purchase. I made it with free will. Still the jar has a plastic lift so you can easily get pickles without having to put your fingers in the juice. What does this say about the pickles?

I'm tired so I decided to leave work early and take a nap. Naps are important.

Breakthrough day!

Today was awesome! It began for me before sunrise. I walked to the lab about 6 am and as I walked a glimmer of gold caught my eye. I moved closer to investigate thinking I may have suddenly become rich. Upon closer examination. I learned I had not found gold. Instead I found either a land snail with a shell or a slug with a snail's shell. I decided that because it moved rather slowly that I would pick it up and move it off the bike path. So I guess I'm no richer, but my new acquaintance is safe.

At 7 am the good crew of Jean-Christophe (Crew leader), Guillaume (Lover of outside work), Tristan  (Our young and enthusiastic worker) & I (your faithful story teller) set sail for a day's work on Leman. It was absolutely gorgeous today with little to no wind and a sunny blue sky.  We observed with the echo sounder an absence of scattering from the surface (minus some noise that is always present in the first 1-2 m depth) to a depth of about 4 m. I assumed this meant that during sunny days that the copepods in Lake Leman were moving down into the water column to avoid the high light levels. It is common for zooplankton to avoid light because when you are small yet can be seen, you can be eaten. It is called negative phototaxis I think. The phenomenon was most evident in the 420 & 208 kHz acoustic data (see below).

I had the good crew collect zooplankton tows from both 25 m to the surface & 4 m to the surface to validate the echosounde data. We collected data with 2 meshes (63 & 200 micron) or 4 samples in total (see picture below). Note that the two samples from 4 m to the surface were largely void of zooplankton and the water was crystal clear. So the acoustic data makes great sense!

Today we caught a 21 mm larval coregonid. Tristan & I agreed it was a monster!

Student seminars

Today I traveled with the INRA team by bus to Chambery to the University Savoie Mont Blanc to listen to 19 student talks. Most of the talks were in French, but a few kind students presented in English. They had been encouraged to use English text in their presentations which was very kind and helpful + good practice for them. Here is a photo taken during a break.

Here are some things I learned (in no way ordered by importance):

1) One can model reasonably well the thermal regime of a large lake in 3 dimensions.

2) Diatom communities of French Alpine lakes generally fall into nine categories.

3) Peridibactor starrii is the most common predacious bacteria in French alpine lakes and during the "attack" phase of life they are highly mobile.

4) Year after year the same macrophytes are dominant in Lake Bourget.

5) Trianophorus nodulosus is a common parasite in the livers of perch in Lake Annecy & other French lakes.

6) Fish in Chasma Reservoir, Pakistan, eat some mud during winter when phytoplankton and macro-invertebrate numbers are low.

7) The mean temperature of the top 10 m of Lake Geneva has increased 2 degrees from 1970 to the present.

8) Phosphorous levels in Lakes Bourget and Geneva have been in steady decline.

9) Regime shifts in lakes can be large, abrupt & persistent.

10) Char eggs incubated at 5 degrees in a lab survive at higher rates than eggs raised @ 8.5 degrees.

11) Char egg survival declines with increasing turbidity in the lab.

12) The effect of copper & sulphamethoxazole on Char egg survival is under investigation.

13) Mayotte is an island near Madagascar.

14) Copper & arsenic can reduce benthic bacteria in lakes.

15) The effects of pharmaceuticals on lake microalgal communities is going to be studied.

16) Indices of stream water quality as measured with morphology and DNA bar codes provide similar   results. 

17) I wasn't the only scientist to have the warm winter of 2015-16 foil a study of ice in a large lake. It happened also on Lake Ladoga.  Thankfully the nearby Lake Onega did freeze.

18) I learned Mercedez Benz makes a very nice bus.

The students and their advisors can now judge how well I can learn from listening to French speakers. The students, everyone of them, did great in my opinion. It was a day to celebrate the great educations they are receiving!