What’s Underneath
I had originally come to Marney Pratt’s office with a list of prepared questions about her research on aquatic invertebrates. It was a cold, rainy, October afternoon. She brewed me a cup of tea. Her computer screensaver was a photo of ocean waves crashing onto the shore. It was a photo from a recent family trip she had taken to Maine, which, in her opinion is the most beautiful place in the world. I agreed. The conversation I had planned was thoroughly derailed.
Pratt and I both grew up on rocky Maine beaches. I hadn’t realized we had this in common when I was a student in her biology 131 lab last fall. She had been a summer only resident of the “vacation-land state” whereas I lived there year round, harsh winters very much included. Pratt cites her summers in Maine as being a key inspiration for her life’s work in marine and aquatic ecology. Maine has also shaped me, it’s there that I developed my love of wilderness and cold water and it’s there that I miss whenever I’m away.
We traded stories of places we both knew. It turns out we both had similar formative experiences of the exact same beaches. My stories were all scenic vistas, far off lighthouses I itched to get into, floating on my back and staring up at clouds buoyed by the salty water. “I always brought a shovel and at least three buckets,” Pratt explained. “The buckets were the most important thing because I liked to catch crabs, and little fish, and whatever I could find.” Her stories were digging in sand, catching shrimp in her hands, crouching over tidepools and examining them layer by layer; all things that, while I suppose I had technically known were activities one could engage in at the beach, were never at the forefront of my mind while I was there. It was as if we were discussing different places. Our experiences were separated not only by decades but by fundamental differences in our respective worldviews. It was like the first day of lab all over again. Once again, I found myself confounded and amazed by this woman who cared so deeply about things I scarcely took the time to consider. For completely different reasons we had arrived at the same destination of loving and finding beauty in a place.
These were the things she didn’t expect me to write about in my final article. Every time we veered from the specifics of the Mill River sediment redistribution project she prefaced her words with, “well this isn’t what you’re interested in but…” She still didn’t know me well. The Marney Pratt beyond the mechanics of her research was exactly what I was interested in.
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What Pratt wanted was to teach science- to the students in her intro to biology lab section, to her research assistants, to her community at large. “My class gets featured on the Smith College Instagram a lot,” she said matter of factly. “It’s something about the waders and looks of intense concentration on my students’ faces when doing fieldwork.” While she appreciates the congratulations she gets from colleagues and the outward recognition of her student’s work, she usually finds these features lacking. “They don’t usually get at the biology.”
Pratt had responded promptly to my request to interview her with excitement and a couple of conditions attached. “Whenever the pond is emptied I get so many questions about what’s going on,” she wrote in an email to me, “I think it would be great if you could write an article explaining the project.”
This “project” she was referring to is the sediment redistribution project in Paradise Pond. The pond, which sits at the center of Smith College’s campus and all its admission materials, is a pond only in name. In reality, the body of water is formed by partially damming the section of the Mill River that runs through campus.
The obstruction is low enough to never fully stop the movement of the river so water flows out of the pond by use of the “spillway”, a man made waterfall. The structure allows water to pass but prevents most soil and rocks from moving from the upper “pond” down to the lower river. As a result, sediment builds up over time making the already shallow water shallower still and creating quasi islands from mounds of dirt. If left to its own devices long enough, Paradise Pond would fill itself in and cease to be a pond. To keep the water photogenic and passable by bright eyed students in canoes, the pond must be periodically excavated and have sediment removed.
When Pratt arrived at Smith in 2009, the pond was regularly hydraulically and mechanically dredged. Operating under permits they received from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, the Smith College facilities department drained the pond and brought in bulldozers to mine 15,000 cubic yards sediment and dispose of it in a landfill.
“When you think only in terms of keeping up the appearance of a picturesque body of water, sediment bad. It’s something you want out of the system” said Bob Newton, Professor of geosciences at Smith College. He also pointed out that the removal of sediment also means the removal of all the sediment’s nutrients from both the dammed pond and the river downstream of the spillway gate. “The sediment has nutrients and real value. When we used to hydraulically dredge the river, the downstream river was considered nutrient starved. Moving the sediment downstream naturally replenishes the ecosystem.”
In Pratt and Newton’s opinion, the hydraulic and mechanical sediment redistribution process in place posed an unnecessary interruption to the Mill River ecosystem. So they partnered together to design a new system, one that would maintain Smith’s beloved pond while supporting natural river ecology. In the summer of 2016, the first “natural dredging” of Paradise Pond was completed. Newton explained how, by opening a gate in the dam, they drained the water and then used bulldozers to push accumulated sediment into the path of the stream that had formed on the bottom of what used to be the pond. The stream transported the dirt and rocks past the dam and downstream into the Mill River. It was not a sediment removal but a redistribution.
Still, Pratt wanted to more precisely quantify the ecological effects of this massive ecosystem change. So starting in 2015, Pratt’s Biology 131 lab section has been collecting water samples to analyze the organisms present before and after sediment redistribution efforts. “Invertebrates are easier to collect than frogs,” said Pratt. “There are also way fewer permits involved. That’s honestly how this project began. I felt that monitoring the Mill River over time was important and the most sensible means to that end was invertebrates. I didn’t begin with a surplus of passion for the organisms.” It was over time that she came to appreciate the invertebrates themselves. “I sometimes have to censor myself when talking about my work. I forget that many people have genuine disgust for insects.” At this, I laughed and tried to squash down my own genuine disgust for insects welling up inside me.
“What people don’t understand,” she went on to explain, “is that invertebrates can be excellent signals of ecosystem health.” The invertebrates Pratt studies are bioindicators, organisms whose population density can reveal the overall health of their environment. High biodiversity, in the form of the presence of many different species, is a sign that an ecosystem is balanced and productive. One species dominating an area may be an indication of unhealthy conditions. Recognizing whether a specific sample of organisms is biodiverse or not relies on comparison to historical data which Paradise Pond did not have until Pratt began the Mill River monitoring project in 2013.
Pratt had a goal. She wanted “to establish a baseline of ecosystem health and organism presence” so she could compare those numbers before and after sediment redistribution efforts. “And lucky for me, I’m a lab instructor! I have 20 to 30 students every semester to help me collect and analyze data.”
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I got to know Pratt and her research when I was a student in her lab. Despite her warm and enthusiastic introduction on the first day of class, I left feeling intimidated by her. She was a fiercely knowledgeable and hyper organized leader and had all the answers to all the questions one could possibly imagine about the minutiae of the ecology of the river that flowed through our campus. Prior to taking this class, I hadn’t really considered the insects found in river sediment beyond perhaps a brief shudder at the thought of their existence. I wasn’t especially enthused to, in Pratt’s words, “spend a semester celebrating ecosystem health and invertebrate biodiversity.”
At the time I was enrolled in her class, I considered myself an environmental science and policy student with an emphasis on POLICY in all uppercase letters made bold and underlined and (science) in parentheses and 8 point font. I had added the course not out of passion for or even interest in its subject, aquatic invertebrates. I was taking the class purely out of a necessity for my major, and I was dreading it. Pratt did not seem to even consider that any of her students had this motivation (or lack thereof) for taking the course.
Our class met once a week. It was an intro biology lab, so very few people in the class had ever done biological field work before. Pratt devoted a good deal of time in class discussing proper methods for organism collection. In one of our pre-lab assignments from before a water sampling day, Pratt wrote, “Label everything, think very carefully about your process, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Mistakes happen, but try not to make preventable errors.”
We would suit up in too-big waders and stomp out along the Mill River path to climb into the river and scoop up water samples. The work was done in teams of three students, each group outfitted with a scientific YSI meter, a yardstick, several test tubes, and one big plastic bucket. One student would wade into the pond armed with a yardstick and the YSI meter they knew how to use only in theory while the remaining partners would shout directions and encouragement from the shore. The yardstick was to measure the river’s depth at the collection point and the YSI was used to measure the water’s salinity, dissolved oxygen content, conductivity, and temperature. At that collection depth, the YSI would be lowered down into the water and held as still as possible for approximately 30 seconds in order to collect all necessary data.
Water samples were collected by the remaining lab partners who would work together to cast out the big plastic bucket into the middle of the river. One person threw the bucket and the other clutched the rope attached to it. We’d drag back the bucket all heavy and sloshing with water. We’d break the sticker seal on the test tubes, dip them once, twice, three times, into the water to make sure the sample was full and pure.
The test tubes were brought back to the lab and preserved with formaldehyde. When the New England days got short and cold in the second half of the semester, we turned our attention to processing the samples we had collected earlier. Each lab group set up a microscope and prepared to identify the invertebrates in our sediment. We sifted the collected sample through a series of three mesh sieves of varying thicknesses. The intended result was that the largest organisms were left in the sieve with the largest holes while the smaller organisms slipped through and so on with medium and small sized sieves. The results in actuality were that the largest organisms were left in the sieve, along with a plethora of pebbles, plant matter, and sometimes litter. Before we could begin to process the sieves and try to identify the individual organisms, we had to pick out all the material that was not aquatic invertebrate.
This became a game that my lab partners and I called “trash or bug”. It was more difficult than it sounds. The aquatic invertebrates were very small, and because of the formaldehyde, dead and unmoving. What at first looked like a bug would be, upon further exploration, a small bit of pinecone. What would seem like a worm would actually be a tiny string of plastic. Just sorting out organisms from the rest of the collected material would take several hours. Pratt always checked our work before we proceeded to the identification phase, and her quick eyes and tweezers would always make at least a couple corrections to mistakes we had overlooked.
The actual identification of invertebrates was even more challenging. One lab partner would hunch over the microscope and slowly move a petri dish around under the light attempting to classify each individual using the field guides and charts Pratt had printed for us. We had untrained hands, and even setting up the microscope was challenging. We were not used to getting the slides in focus, selecting the proper light setting, or moving the petri dish deftly using the scope’s mirror image reflection. The actual identification process was made difficult by all the invertebrates being small and earth toned. Additionally, some were slightly mangled by exposure to jostling, tweezers, or too much formaldehyde.
As a lab group, we switched off operating between the microscope and supporting the process from the side. We offered second opinions when the scope operator was unsure about an i.d., offered reminders to be cautious when a petri dish was pushed precariously to the edge of the plate holder and gathered tools to help poke and prod our invertebrate subjects. The process was tedious. We were being challenged to act as experts on a subject we were inherently inexpert in. The lab was longer than any of my other classes that semester. From 1 to 5 pm each week, I was hunched, squinting, over a microscope looking at water bugs in hyper detail. This gave me a headache, caused vague disgust, and generally frustrated me completely.
Mill River water samples occasionally produce macro-organisms like crayfish, snails, and freshwater mussels. The most common organisms, however, are Elmidae, Ephemeroptera, Trichoptera, and Plecoptera better known by their common names riffle beetles, mayflies, caddisflies, and stoneflies. We were responsible for being able to identify these species in both their larval and adult forms. Riffle beetle larvae were the most distinctive with long segmented worms with capped heads, feather like tails, and six short legs hugged close to their bodies. They transformed into round red beetles with splayed legs and long antennae. Mayflies, caddisflies, and stoneflies have always looked the same to me and still do. They have flat heads attached to segmented bodies complete with six spindly, bendy legs. From their heads, all three species have antennas protruding. From their rears, all three species have tails that, to me, look exactly like antennae. We were provided us with extensive field guides to aid in our identification process, still, we were inexperienced biologists and frequently wrong. Pratt knew this, she double checked almost all our work and deftly corrected our mistakes.
“Look here,” Pratt said one Tuesday afternoon in lab while checking my sorting process, “under the microscope mayfly wings refract light.” She had positioned the mayfly wing at the perfect angle for the glow from the microscope to shine through and create the subtle effect of a rainbow. A dead insect preserved in formaldehyde had become a crystal. And there Pratt was, a woman who led lab class with precision, expertise and focused science talking about river bugs like they were not only interesting but beautiful. That enthusiasm was harder for me to understand than the biological concepts she tasked me with learning.
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In Pratt’s lab, we documented our scientific process and findings in a lab journal. These journals took the form of an app called OneNote which we had to download and keep on our personal computers. Each week Pratt would send us a template for the entry. The first templates from the beginning of the semester were wordy with lots of subheadings and specific questions. We were new to the lab. We were new to Pratt’s expectations. As the months progressed the templates became looser and eventually stopped looking much like templates at all. “Students, your lab journals are really improving! You should be very proud of yourselves, you’re doing beautiful work,” she wrote in an email to my class last fall. We knew more. We could be trusted to write the journals that Pratt needed. These documents would be the records referenced in the history of place Pratt was compiling.
I have been keeping a very different sort of journal since I was small, very small. That project began like many people’s first journals begin- as a parent suggested way to improve my writing and reading. Those first few diaries I kept are written in the shaky hand of a child who has very recently been taught to hold a pen and scratch out words. My sentences are simple: “I LOVE MY MOM,” and “I LOVE MY DAD,” all caps, all short words, all simple ideas. I remember being frustrated that I did not have the vocabulary nor the spelling ability to express what I wanted to say. Luckily, an education teaches you to write and express yourself. With practice and time, I was able to write more. My passages transformed into: “I love my mom and dad but man they can be annoying sometimes! Gosh seventh grade is stressful. I have to study for my geometry test tomorrow, there are so many formulas to estimate the area of a triangle” pages, with teenage angst and more words and more vocabulary, (though admittedly still quite bad spelling and penmanship). In my childhood bedroom, I have an entire trunk of all the journals I’ve ever kept, numbering somewhere in the range of 25 to 30 volumes.
My current journal is orange and plastered with circular stickers: Smith College Student Government, “Healthy Workers Keep Portland Maine Healthy”, a Sea Urchin, and “Sisters of Anarchy Ice Cream - Burlington Vermont.” Though I am only about halfway through the pages it bulges with ticket stubs, flyers, and mementos I’ve taped to the pages and stuffed in the back pocket. It is a departure from the aesthetic of my journal of last fall which was navy blue, stickerless, neat, and slick. This is, perhaps, a subconscious attempt by me to manifest a different reality than mine of last fall.
That journal begins in an airport at the end of August. I was watching the sun set over Baltimore waiting to board my plane back to Maine. My grandfather had died early that morning. Later that afternoon, my girlfriend of two years, who I had spent the past week visiting, had told me she would always love me but wasn’t sure if she wanted to see each other anymore. Then she drove me in awkward silence to Thurgood Marshall airport. I felt that I was entering a new moon phase of life and these events didn’t exactly feel like harbingers of hope and good fortune but I also hadn’t yet fully processed the ways in which they would affect my life.
It was the death of a loved one. It was a breakup. It was similar to many other people’s experiences with the death of loved ones and breakups. The paradox is that, though most people experience the pain of first heartbreak and loss, that reality does little to make anyone really going through it feel any better. I knew that my tears were cliche and I chastised myself for the weepiness, but that didn’t stop me from crying. Every time someone told me that I would be okay and would emerge from my own grief fog, my only thought was, when? And, are you sure of that?
I don’t remember a lot from the fall. Reading that navy blue journal seems a bit like reading the work of another. It’s a distinctly unhappy chapter of life. My days were a lot of going-through-the-motions. I wrote myself detailed to-do lists to try and hold myself accountable for getting everything I needed to accomplish done. On good days I started to forge new habits for myself and tried to make Smith feel like home again, and on bad days I stayed in my room. I was taking a heavy academic load of five classes that were required but completely unexciting to me. I felt constantly unfocused, displeased with my current direction, and prevailingly alone.
It was that semester that I took Pratt’s class, which in and of itself felt strange because it had been my girlfriend who had encouraged me to enroll in it despite my anxieties about studying science. She was a biology student and had promised to help me study for the class. I resented that it had not played out that way, and I resented that every time I went to lab, I found myself distracted and thinking not about river bugs but about her. Mostly though, I was just sad.
I think that’s why Pratt’s complete delight in aquatic invertebrates stood out to me. In a week of me completing tasks out of a sense of duty instead of a sense of curiosity or passion, Pratt’s class consistently at least invited me to consider the wonderful. Pratt’s wonderful just happened to be river bugs and water samples. I was not completely convinced by her message, but I was intrigued by her passion.
…
Eventually, all of the student’s invertebrate counts and YSI meter data was entered into a shared excel sheet with all the student data from the study since 2013. Pratt took an average of all the reported numbers to use in her official retrospective log. “My students are excellent but inexperienced biologists. I figure averaging all the collected data is a way to reduce outliers and confounding data points.”
Pratt’s official log is a painstakingly color coded google sheets file that she, understandably, gives her students viewing but not editing access to. The sheet contains the averaged ecosystem factors as well as the completed sample counts of aquatic invertebrates present. There is a specific note at the beginning of each new semester’s sample detailing river and pond conditions.
Now that she has been working on the project for six years, Pratt has enough data to begin to draw conclusions about the ecosystem. Based on her detailed sampling and record keeping she now has the numbers to prove that pond mechanical and hydraulic dredging is more disruptive to ecosystem health than natural sediment redistribution methods. As a direct result of this research, Smith now engages in sediment redistribution every other fall.
“It’s definitely a disruption to the ecosystem,” said Pratt in regards to the sediment redistribution process. “We typically see far less biodiversity and far fewer organisms after the redistribution.” However, within the span of a couple months the ecosystem starts to gain biodiversity and population density. “Invertebrates typically have short lifespans so within the space of a couple months several generations have lived. That’s useful for quickly returning an ecosystem to a stable state.” It takes longer for the river ecosystem to bounce back after hydraulic or mechanical dredging. “The process of suddenly physically removing the top layer of sediment from the riverbed removes far more organisms than if the soil is allowed to redistribute from the pond throughout the river downstream.”
Currently, Pratt’s copious collected data about the ecology of the Mill River and Paradise Pond have been useful in compelling Smith College to engage in particular landscape management practices. In the future, she hopes that her data can be useful to people studying climate change. She mentions the “shifting baseline theory” which hypothesizes that people’s baseline idea of what is normal in a natural state is based entirely on the reality that they experienced in their youth or first interaction with place. This theory is frequently applied to fish stocks; fishermen view the normal population of a fish species as the number of that fish species that were available when they started fishing. Most fish species overall have been decreasing for decades. However, as a result of shifting baseline theory, with every generation there is no recognition of this trend of decrease because each subsequent generation views the overall reduction as normal. Pratt thinks this theory applies to Mill River ecology as well. “If no one is keeping detailed records of what was here in the river when, no one will know when there are major shifts.” Many of the invertebrates in the Mill River require cool water to thrive. The records Pratt is keeping will help to pinpoint when certain species begin to decline or disappear due to overall warming conditions in the Pioneer Valley.
This is the science Pratt wanted to get out there. She wanted an article written and in print that she could point to or email out when people had concerns and questions about the empty state of Paradise Pond. She wanted people to know about tiny invertebrates that are capable of indicting river health. She wanted the article to exist outside of her reach of biology students so people who had never met her could conceptualize her work. She wanted Smith students and Northampton residents to understand that they too are part of this complex, beautiful ecosystem.
Ever since I interviewed her in October she has emailed me weekly to inquire about my writing progress. She wanted to proofread all my sections on science. She wanted veto power before I published my final draft. She is, after all, the woman who keeps a hyper organized excel database that only she has full access to. It’s hard for a master record keeper to give up editing power.
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From my past few years I have memories, moments that stick out, and prevailing themes. My extensive journals preserve the details I would have forgotten. My class schedules, daily concerns and triumphs, and long forgotten anecdotes are preserved in those pages. It’s beautiful to have such a thorough record, and it’s also deeply embarrassing. When reading back my old writing I always find myself judgemental towards my past self, both about the quality of my prose and the intensity with which I describe my feelings. It’s a struggle to keep openness and non-judgment at the forefront of my mind. That person I’m cringing at is my past self. At the time, that person genuinely felt the way she described here. That person didn’t have the gift that I currently bring to past writing, hindsight, and knowledge of what was to come. That record of the ecosystem was less complete.
I was talking to a friend the other day about senior year and how the inescapable reality that our days in this place are numbered shapes our day to day life. I know I have at least one existential realization per day: that this is the last October 22nd or November 5th or whatever date that I’ll have here in this specific place. I frequently find myself considering the stark differences in my years here at Smith. There’s first year where I felt so unsure and nervous, sophomore year and the unwarranted confidence that came with that, and my white hot grief fog of junior year.
Last fall, the college campus that had once been unfamiliar and unmarked by me became a maze of memories I was trying to forget and people I didn’t want to see. I stopped calling my parents as much because thinking about the world outside my little corner at Smith felt too painful. I was far from the Maine beaches that felt like home. The pervading loss and loneliness of that time made all my duties feel large. My progress in any task was marked by my slow steady progress through small goals. I put my head down and focused my foresight on the day ahead, not the distant future that my advice givers promised would heal me. The ecosystem of my world was in a drawn out crisis of loss and grief. I didn’t recognize it at the time but my world’s baseline had shifted, a good day then was one where I managed to go through all the motions required of me.
When I reflect on last fall I always have to stop myself from ridiculing my past self for the depth of my melancholy. After all, Grief did not consume me. One intense period of my life did not define me. Who was I at the time to consider that it might? It’s only the journals that I kept that remind me to treat my past self with empathy. That white hot grief fog was real to me then and I was doing the best I could to weather it. My world’s baseline was different.
A year later, my current senior year state is still too close to analyze, but I think it will be marked by sweetness and reflection. Perhaps I received the same advice over and over again last fall because there was merit in it. Time heals most things or at least gives you space to grow, and I have grown a lot. I think most everyone grows a lot in between their 18th and 22nd years. I think most everyone leaves college a different person than they entered it. Anyone could have predicted it, yet, to see that change in myself still feels profound.
The mess of sediment has settled in my world and life has come back. The baseline of my current state of being is more motivated, confident, and joyful than I was a year ago. It’s the companionship, triumphs, and successes of recent days that have allowed me to recognize the depths of last fall’s low. Major ecosystem upsets cause stress, but bouncing back is possible. I am grateful that my lifecycle and capacity for reflection exceeds that of an aquatic invertebrate.
…
I have been emailing Pratt back and forth for weeks. She answered my minute questions, read over my paragraphs, and sent me notes. I did my best to fix them without sounding entirely like one of the field guides she has her classes use. I was proud of this final draft, the science was solid, Pratt had made sure of that. It did not escape me how ironic it was that I now know far more about river ecology than I had the semester I was actually studying river ecology. But the article also remained my own.
This had not been the project I had intended to develop from the experience of interviewing Pratt, but after all her excitement and willingness to help me it seemed like the least I could do to thank her. Like our perceptions of Maine, our ideas about the article I was writing were fundamentally different. Where I wanted character and catharsis, she wanted citizen science and outreach. Luckily, in this case, I could do both. Last week I sent her a draft of my article, and for the first time since I had begun writing, she didn’t have any notes for me. Her email was short: “Thank you, this is beautiful.”
