Drawing Hypoliths
Annalea Beattie

One of the goals for our science is to understand the physical ecology of hypoliths.

I spent this morning drawing the colonized undersurface of our hypolith samples.

The sample I drew is of lithobionts found under quartz pebbles. I used the microscope to examine whether the colonies are growing on the surface of the underside of the rock, (hypoliths), within the rocks, (endoliths) or within the cracks of the rocks (chasmoliths). Then I carefully drew the outline of the base of each rock to scale, noting orientation to the north and marked in lithobiont growth to get a sense of the data that is hard to quantify numerically. Last night I dreamt of drawings of boulders rolling down a hill!