On being (over)prepared

As my brief post from last week showed, things are finally moving in the field over here. That meant a couple field days, several lab days, and generally being more excited about my work again. Everything was so slow that I'd been wondering if somehow I was so inept in the field that I had managed to miss an important (and large!) hatching period.

But no, all is well. And as I was out collecting in everything from misty cool rain to driving sun in a few days, in a couple locations, it occurred to me that it might be fun to talk about the mass of stuff that I keep in my car for these occasions. This was reinforced on Monday, when I quite suddenly needed a small jar to put thousands of little hatching larvae before transporting them back to the lab. I was running through the mental list of things that I had or have had in my car (could I use that old paper coffee cup sitting in the backseat? did I have a water bottle in the car? a plastic sandwich container? a Mason jar?) -- but when I started rummaging around in the trunk, I found just what I was looking for: a tiny Nalgene bottle for keeping plankton samples.

So what does live in my trunk? Clothes for all seasons. I have a baseball cap, a knitted headband, and a knitted hat to be worn and layered as needed. There's an oversized denim long-sleeve shirt for chilly weather and a lined, waterproof windbreaker for rain. I have a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves for cold winter water, and a pair of thin knit gloves to put under them. I have hip waders for cold water and water sandals (the kind with the rubber toes, that look like sneakers) for warm water. And, of course, there's a towel.

And then there's the gear. A bucket, a small lunch cooler, the aforementioned collecting jars, an aquarium bubbler, cable ties, a Leatherman, a mesh bag, an empty water bottle, a stopwatch, a meter tape, a net.

Sometimes I wonder if it's really stupid to haul all of that around, everywhere. It probably is. It would be smarter and more gas-efficient to have a couple of crates in the lab that I could grab before I go out: summer gear, winter gear, collecting gear, field experiment gear. But I really like knowing that I don't ever have to worry about forgetting things. And then, every once in a while (like on Monday), I really need some obscure thing that I'd forgotten about that's stashed back there.

I probably could vacuum out the sand, though.

Spotted (but not collected) this week in the field. Those are Crepidula plana, and they are enormous.
This is the species whose larvae were suddenly hatching and that I needed to transport safely back to the lab, though the individual in question was about half the size of the big ones on this piece of ceramic.