In December of 2010 NASA researchers announced that they had found bacteria in Mono Lake that could subsist on arsenic instead of phosphorus. The study prompted much discussion on the web and in the scientific community, and raised welcome awareness for Mono Lake’s unique and exciting ecosystem as well as the ongoing research in the area.

Recently, Nature published the news that a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada have been trying to reproduce the results of the original study without success.

Since the January 20 post the web has been buzzing with fresh debate about the original study, the refutation of it, and the further research that is surely to come. Those of us at the shores of Mono Lake look forward to hearing and reading about GFAJ-1 for a long time. And the bottom line? Mono Lake—the source of the bacteria in question—is definitely worth protecting for many, many reasons, including the fact that there is value in looking deeper into research like this.

Have you heard? Mono Lake is for the birds … the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua planning team is hard at work putting together the eleventh annual weekend. Make sure June 15–17, 2012 is marked on your calendar.

Wilson's Phalaropes in flight at South Tufa. Photo courtesy of Marie Read.

Check out the recent updates to the website, and stay tuned as we add this year’s program and schedule. Remember to get up early to register on Sunday, April 15 since spaces fill so quickly.

Mono Lake Committee Outdoor Experiences Manager Santiago Escruceria gives everyone a nickname. Beyer High School senior Tom Rydquist’s was “Mr. Muffin.”

In December 2011 the California Museum and Comcast announced that Rydquist won the Northern California Grand Prize in their Dreamers Challenge for a video he produced. His video “Funding the American Dream: Helping California Lead the Way in Water Reclamation”  suggests a fee on sewage utilities to create water recycling programs. You can see Rydquist’s video here.

Beyer High School senior Tom Rydquist, left, monitoring water quality at Mono Lake with his classmates. Photo by Santiago Escruceria.

Along with fellow Beyer students from Modesto and their teacher Kay Myers, Mr. Muffin (more…)

Here in the office we call it the Collaborative Aqueduct Modernization & Management Plan, or CAMMP for short. But when we say things like, “Geoff, Lisa, and Morgan are CAMMP-ing,” it’s not what it sounds like. CAMMP is a State Water Board mandated series of facilitated meetings embarked upon by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, the California Department of Fish & Game, California Trout, the State Water Board-appointed Stream Scientists, and the Mono Lake Committee with the goal of working through the details of implementing the scientific streamflow prescriptions issued in 2010 and the associated aqueduct modernization necessary for the aging infrastructure to be able to reach the restoration goals at Mono Lake.

So … what does all that mean? It means that (more…)

You simply must read the fun and heartwarming post by Birding Intern Oliver James, who captures the spirit of the intrepid bird lovers responsible for this feat perfectly. Even if you’re not a birder this is a great story. As it turns out, the crew was so enthusiastic that just days later they did a second Big Day and beat the 150 species with 153, so that’s the new number to beat….

Justin, Chris, and Oliver celebrate a Big Day well done! Photo courtesy of Nora Livingston.

For this and more interesting bird sightings in the Mono Basin:

• Lee Vining team breaks Mono County Big Day birding record
• Mono Basin bird sightings

A Varied Thrush spotted in Lee Vining in December 2009. Photo by Justin Hite.

As the holiday season approaches it’s nearly time for a wonderful winter tradition—Audubon Christmas Bird Counts. Join in on one of these local counts:

• Mono Basin—Tuesday, December 27. Contact: Kristie Nelson
• Yosemite National Park—Sunday, December 18. Contact: Sarah Stock
• Bishop—Saturday, December 17. Contact: Chris Howard

Christmas Bird Counts are one of the oldest and largest citizen sicence events in the world; this year the 112th annual counts will take place. The results (more…)

Researcher Sean Boyd from the Pacific Wildlife Research Centre in British Columbia spent the past few weeks diligently counting Eared Grebes on Mono Lake from over 425 photos taken this fall. Before going completely bug-eyed, Boyd was able to get a total count of Eared Grebes on Mono Lake for October 14, 2011 (the day volunteer Lighthawk pilot Geoff Pope and photographer Rick Kattelman did the aerial survey). Boyd was able to calculate the final number of grebes by taking the initial count from the photos, converting that number into a density (#/km^2), adjusting it for scale (which we created through three white X markers that were 50 meters apart near the lake shore), and used the current lake surface area to find the final count.  The final count was 886,500 +/-4.4% Standard Error.

The annual aerial Eared Grebe survey has been happening with the exception of a few years, for the past decade. See the listing of past year’s grebe counts here.

It’s that time of year again, time for the Eared Grebe (Podiceps nigricollis) count at Mono Lake. Most visitors in the Mono Basin can easily say that they have seen a lot of birds at the County Park and Old Marina sites, but how many grebes are there exactly? That’s where photographer Rick Kattelmann, volunteer Lighthawk pilot Geoff Pope, and researcher Sean Boyd come into the picture.

What look like tiny white specks in a black abyss are actually Eared Grebes on the surface of Mono Lake. There are 76 dots in this photo. Photo by Rick Kattelmann.

Since the mid-1990s aerial photographs have been taken of the lake surface. These surveys of the Eared Grebe populations are (more…)

Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep. Photo by Bartshe Miller.

As head of the California Department of Fish & Game’s Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep Recovery Program, Dr. Tom Stephenson has a job which takes him all over the range, from Mt. Langley to Dunderberg Peak. On Wednesday, August 31, it brought him to the Mono Lake Committee’s Theater & Gallery, where he gave a presentation as part of our “Refreshments with Refreshing ‘Ologists” summer lecture series.

Bighorn sheep are the only federally-listed endangered species in Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, and the only federally-listed endangered mammal on the Inyo National Forest. The species has been (more…)

Researcher Sarah Dalrymple of UC Davis spoke at the Mono Lake Committee on Wednesday, August 4 as part of our “Refreshments with Refreshing ‘Ologists” lecture series. Dalrymple is a PhD candidate in biology whose work centers in the Jeffrey pine forest just south of the Mono Basin on the Deadman Plateau.

If you’ve ever taken a stroll in the woods near Obsidian Dome or Wilson Butte, you may have noticed distinct rings around certain pine trees where the ground has been cleared of needle litter. Intrigued by this phenomenon, Dalrymple did some preliminary investigation and discovered a strong correlation between the presence of these cleared rings and the survival of trees during a forest fire. In one recently-burned area, trees with clearings around their trunks had a 60% reduction in mortality compared to trees without clearings. Dalrymple set out to determine what creates and maintains these clearings and what role they play in the fire cycle of the forest.

The cleared area around a Jeffrey pine. Photo courtesy of Sarah Dalrymple.

First, Dalrymple compared clearings in forests that had and had not experienced a recent regime of prescribed burns. She found (more…)