By Lucas Eckert, a PhD student at McGill University

June 4^th was my last day of fieldwork that season, and the sun set at 11:27pm. It’s a crazy thing to watch the sun setting when it’s almost midnight. It’s even crazier that it never got truly dark but retained a dusky glow throughout the night. But I guess when you do fieldwork in crazy places, you should expect to see some crazy things. It’s clear that fieldwork allows us to go to places we might otherwise never get to go, and to see things we might otherwise never get to see, and of course these types of experiences have unique value in our lives. However, that’s not exactly what I want to discuss here; not because it isn’t true, but rather because I doubt it needs stating. What I want to talk about is the intangible value of fieldwork to the research itself, and perhaps even more so, to the researchers. 

I started at McGill as a Master’s student in the fall of 2021. As will come to no surprise to the readers of this blog, starting graduate school is a fairly overwhelming experience. Starting a research project is no easy task, with a heap of new conceptual background and methods to learn, all while trying to make tangible progress on your thesis. As such, the first few months are more or less a blur. Despite diving into the relevant literature and making some actual progress in my first two terms, I had a nagging feeling that I still didn’t have a complete grasp on my project. Something was missing, and I especially felt that hindrance when trying to generate new ideas or directions for the project. Shortly after the end of the spring term, I left for Alaska to go catch some fish. 

In 2018, nine lakes in the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska were treated with rotenone to kill all the fish in each lake. This was done to eradicate Northern Pike, which are invasive in the region and had ravaged all other fish life in these lakes. In 2019, a group of researchers (including my supervisor) reintroduced threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) to these nine lakes. Stickleback are small fish, usually around 5cm in length, and have become a model system in evolutionary biology. They readily colonize new environments, often producing impressive patterns of adaptive divergence. For my thesis, I was tracking how these populations of introduced fish respond to the environments of the new lakes, especially in terms of morphological adaptation. The fieldwork is pretty simple: catch and euthanize some fish from each population, taking a range of measurements and tissue samples.

Unsurprisingly, being out there in Alaska was quite the experience. The combination of mountains, forests, lakes, and ocean is quite the sight, and as a lover of natural history, I greatly appreciated the unique mix of biota, seeing everything from moose to godwits to orcas. But the fieldwork also made significant contributions to my thesis, aside from generally improving my quality of life. Of course, it provided crucial samples and crucial data. But more than that, it finally alleviated my nagging feeling of something missing. To put it plainly, fieldwork provides a perspective on the research that can’t be replicated by any amount of reading or planning. Now, I would be lying if I said I had some sort of epiphany out there in the field; rather, I think it took some time to sink it. But seeing the organisms in their physical environment really made some things click. I got to go snorkelling in the lakes and see the behaviour of these fish: the schooling behaviour of the females and the males tending and defending their little nests. I got to see the diverse environmental variables of these lakes, ranging from large open water to small swampy ponds. I got to see the environmental heterogeneity within each lake, the changing substrates and the pockets of vegetation. The totality of what I saw can’t be accurately put down in words, nor can it be accurately quantified with data. If you study populations in nature, then there really is no substitute for watching how the organisms behave and interact with other individuals, with other species, and with the environment. And it is exactly this type of insight that drives new ideas and allows for meaningful interpretation of results. 

As I said, I think it took some time to sink in. But by the end of the summer, I felt I had a much firmer grasp on my project, so much so that I decided to roll up to a PhD. I’d like to say that level of clarity has stuck with me since then, but as is the nature of science, digging deeper only causes more questions and complexities to arise. I only hope that my subsequent seasons of fieldwork will provide more answers.