19 June 2013 Inquiring Minds

I ask a lot of questions here at Toolik. Some of them I pose to myself and puzzle over the answers independently, some I share with others. I have interviewed a few scientists while I have been here at Toolik and during my time at sea last summer (stay tuned for a video of the interviews later this summer). At some point during the interview, almost every scientist touts the importance of remaining curious, asking questions, and paying close attention to the world around you. Developing an inquiring mind is important for scientists. This is exactly the type of attitude we want our students to develop. It is an attitude we should all adopt.

I have certainly been an inquirer this month, so I thought I’d share a couple of the questions I have had and how I went about finding the answers to my questions.

Mystery Bones

A few days ago, I was setting a squirrel trap on top of a hill not far from camp. At the bottom of the hill was part of an animal skeleton. I scurried down the hill and examined it. Initially, I thought I was looking at a spinal column and a skull from some type of caribou or reindeer. I assumed this based on previous skeletons I have seen and since I know caribou frequent this area. I shared my discovery with Kate who agreed that it was probably a caribou, but questioned if it was a skull or a pelvis we were looking at. After closer examination and thinking about what we know about anatomy, we decided it was likely a caribou backbone and pelvis, though the hip sockets seemed very small. We searched the area for additional bones to give us more clues, but with little luck.

A Google image search (a few searches, actually, to narrow our search to exactly the information we needed) back at camp confirmed that our guess was probably correct when we compared the photo I took with the photos online. We asked Cory, but he wasn't sure. When Jeanette arrived yesterday, I showed her the picture, since she has experience working with reindeer and caribou. She confirmed that they are definitely from a caribou and that it is a pelvis, not a skull. Mystery solved! (But now I have more questions: Are all caribou hip sockets always so small or was this a young one? What happened to the rest of the skeleton? Why were some vertebrae on the spine so much larger than others? It seems that answering one question often leads to more questions. Pursuing answers to your questions is an exciting journey of thought, typical in science, that more than one scientist has described to me with a twinkle in his/her eye! )

Mystery Sounds

From the first night I arrived at Toolik, it has sounded like a really strange chicken is clucking just outside the door to my tent. I got out of bed on a few occasions and looked around outside, but never saw the culprit. I mentioned it to Kate who said that she heard it too and was not certain what it was, though she suspected a bird of some sort. We spent the next few days keeping an eye on the birds in the area, listening to the sounds that they made. We had a few suspects in mind, but none really panned out. Kate consulted her Bird Guide book with limited success. Eventually, we asked other people who have spent time at Toolik in the past and they immediately told us, “That’s the sound a ptarmigan (a bird) makes”. We had seen lots of ptarmigan feathers around camp, so that seemed to make sense. Sure enough, we later ran across a ptarmigan roaming and making all kinds of noise….just like what I hear outside of my tent on an almost nightly basis. I captured some video so that you can hear the sound, too. Fun fact: The Willow Ptarmigan is Alaska’s state bird.

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Science is all about observation, asking questions, and seeking answers to those questions. We want our students to become the kind of people that engage in this type of thinking all the time.