petroglyph in the pahoehoe lava

road closed due to lava, that plume in the background is from lava hitting the water.

A week in Hawaii, and this is as close as I have gotten to the beach (yep, that's a cliff)

It’s 5 o clock on Friday and I have just finished my first week of work. Of course, when I say work I really mean crashing through underbrush in search of elusive and invasive ants. Mapping the ant presence around the park is our main goal, however little things like rain and high sulfur dioxide levels periodically force us into retreat, back to the comforts of lab: microscopes and all the frozen ants you can key out and count.
Assuming you are now wondering how one maps ants, it goes something like this:
Two people pick a transect to do together. The first person sets out armed with tuna fish goo (aka ant bait) and bait cards and sets a station every 100 meters. An hour later person #2 comes along and checks the bait cards and the surrounding area for ants. Any ants silly enough to be lurking around are sucked up with an “aspirator” into a vial and returned to lab to be identified. In this age of modern technology, our ant collection device is basically a bottle with a cork and two drinking straws sticking out of the top. Point one straw at the ant and suck on the other, and if you are lucky, the ant goes into the bottle. I have yet to swallow an ant, but it is only a matter of time and uncoordination until the inevitable happens.
Our primary transect area is full of pokey bushes and a a lava fields. On these sites person #1 gets to carry a machete and look like an adventurer on safari (ant safari, that is). While the second person doesn’t get to carry a big sharp knife, the orange vests and army surplus pants we all wear are enough to convince most onlookers that we must be doing real science (and know the directions to any trail in the park). The transects full of unpleasant plants and lava have a tendency to be in the path of the vog. Vog…. Volcanic fog: heavy on the rotty egg stench with an essence of headache. When the vog comes creeping in we go running out. This has been the story for the last two days, so instead of mapping the shrub land we have been mapping the trails around the main park area (ie where all the tourists hang out). This makes for excellent fieldwork. We walk on nice trails and get to see cool things like smoking calderas while searching for ants and looking official in our orange vests and camo pants.
Today, as person #2 in the ant survey, I had to wait for an hour to hit the trail. Conveniantly, the lava tube was a half mile away. LAVA TUBES ARE AWESOME!!!!! I jogged over to the lava tube and as I crested the top of the trail I found myself facing four school buses, three tour buses, and a small squadron of minibuses. OK, so I was going to have to share the lava tube with the tourists. The first section was well lit, and full of shrieking running kids, still cool though. After ~200 meters the first section ended with a large hole and some concrete stairs back into the tree ferns, Ohia trees, and non-native ginger plants. On the other side of the stairs was a gate, allowing entrance into the rest of the (unlit) lava tube. Out comes my headlamp and in I go!

After the family with three small shouting boys realized the sign was serious when it said flashlights necessary, I had the whole lava tube to myself. At fifty meters in the sounds of the outside world had faded and were replaced by the chimes of water drops falling from above. The beam of my light made every surface glisten, the translucent tips of forming stalactites sparkled a few feet above my head, like an oddly claustrophobic night’s sky. I turned my light off and it was perfectly dark as the chorus of droplets rained to the floor around me. Yeah, it was really, really, cool. I think I will go again tomorrow. My lava tube exploration was cut short because I had to return to our transect exactly an hour after my partner began setting it. As I walked out of the tube, towards the growing light of the entrance, I heard excited calls of “oh, look, someone is down there!” I was greeted by a gang of plastic poncho clad onlookers, staring quizzically down at me; and I wasn’t even wearing my orange vest!


The ferns here have the coolest fiddle heads. I now have a very large collection of out of focus fern pictures.