Leslie and Vostok

While I stayed home, Leslie recently traveled across the pond on a worm collecting expedition.  (More pictures are here and here.)

By "pond" I mean the Pacific Ocean.  She flew to Vladivostok in eastern Russia and then traveled by car to a little marine station called Vostok.  There she and her colleagues spent three weeks collecting and identifying marine invertebrates 

Here is a picture of the Vostok Marine Station taken from a small boat by John Chapman.  John is an amphipod & invasive species expert from the University of Oregon.  I think the picture looks like a model train set.  Apparently some Russians take summer vacations in this area which is reminiscent of New England.  (See a satellite view of Vostok Station in Google Maps.  You can explore from there.)

Across the bay is this small village. (You can click any picture for an enlargement.)

In the foreground you can see John and two of his Russian colleagues digging for specimens.

Here are pictures of Vasily Radashevsky, the Russian polychaete expert in charge of the expedition, and of John Chapman, up to his knees in seawater.

And here is Leslie in her own natural habitat, behind a microscope, putting names to critters most of us never encounter.

The project was sponsored by the North Pacific Marine Sciences Organization (or PICES) a consortium of six countries around the northern Pacific, which also held their annual meeting about the same time in Vladivostok.

Here are a couple photos of life at the marine station.  No, he's not doing what you think he is doing in the first picture.  In the second picture, the bottle of clear liquid holds a Korean sweet potato vodka.  Leslie brought me a bottle as a present - but I haven't tried it yet.

I had asked Leslie to take lots of pictures.  She took well over a thousand.  I will post another couple dozen in two more posts, one with pictures of Vladivostok itself and the other of various animals she encountered.

Here are pictures of two Russian monuments which she saw - their significance is unknown to me, but both clearly have marine themes.  In the first one "Livadiya" is the name of a city not far from the station.

Vasily Radachevsky has appeared in Mixed Meters previously - in the post Maywood Pasadena (about a song called Pasadena which is very popular in Russia, sung by a group called Maywood) and in a video called Going Coastal.  Also he discusses the vital issue of whether a polar bear will eat a penguin here.

Vostok Tags: Vostok Marine Station. . . Leslie Harris. . . Vasily Radashevsky. . . John Chapman. . . marine invertebrates. . . PICES