Day 132

I couldn't help myself--I had to go back and try to measure that orb weaver I found yesterday.  Armed with a ruler and sellotape, I trekked back out into the rainforest alone.  The spider was busy eating lunch, some type of beetle, I believe.  More spider photos!

Yum yum?

Omnomnom.

Look at all those pesky scavenging males.

I taped the ruler to a stick and held it up as close as I could to the spider.  I even hit the web a few times, so this is really right next to the spider.  I then copied, pasted, and opaqued sections of the ruler from each photo to give an accurate measurement.

Body length is 2 inches in this photo, but the spider is tilted--the body is actually a bit closer to 2.5 inches, I estimate,
but for the purposes of this experiment we'll stick with 2 inches.

The first two segments of the leg measure out to exactly 2.5 inches, and the third segment is 1.5 inches.
That's a 4-inch long leg, ladies and gents.

So with a 2-inch long body and 4-inch long legs, and noting that the legs are basically all attached in the same place, this spider is a minimum of 8 inches long.  However, due to the spider's tilted position and not-so-straight legs, I think it's safe to say this gal is a bit bigger than that.  I'm sticking with my estimate of 10 inches!

Also, I saw a few sulfur-crested cockatoos.

Do those eyes remind anyone else of the eyeball candies that ice cream places stick on kids' cones?

I really don't understand why people like these things as pets, they're obnoxiously loud and their eyes are scary!

After my scientific experiment, I headed over to the aquarium to pick up my bright-yellow crocs (I love those things, but they're so ugly that I never get to wear them anywhere!) and took a few shots of Snappy, our resident crocodile.  He's a baby, and he thinks he's a ferocious predator.  Adorable!

He likes to sit at the front and watch you--probably thinking about eating you.  Awww.

Weird double vision.

Snappy's itty-bitty baby teeth!

Looking more like a real predator now.

Crocodile eyes are pretty cool.  They have two sets of eyelids:
a clear set to see underwater, and a normal set to close their eyes.

Look at that eye!  Makes me want to sing "Eye of the Tiger" for some reason.

I've started packing everything up, taking down all my decorations, and making bags of trash and donations.  You never really realise how much stuff you've got until you try to fit it all into two suitcases.

I leave for my liveaboard in two days, so I probably won't post anything new until I come home.  I promise lots of neat pictures of underwater stuff!  :)

Cheers,
Ashton

Day 131

Almost everyone I know has left, and for the past few days I haven't been able to muster up the enthusiasm to go do things on my own.  But today I vowed to stop being such a waste of life and make the most of my last few days in Cairns!

I was initially going to have a beach day, but sleeping on the beach still felt like a waste of life.  Plan B was hiking.  I grabbed my camera and donned my new explorer hat (which is pretty snazzy, might I add) and headed out into the forest with the intention of scaling a mountain.  Unfortunately, I vastly underestimated the effects of humidity in the rainforest.  I'd emptied my liter of water after an hour and wisely decided to head home after that.

On the plus side, I found lots of very cool stuff on the trails today!  The highlight of my hike: a GIGANTIC orb weaver spider.  Now, I know I've shown you orb weavers before, and yeah, they were big.  But this one kicks those other orb weavers to the curb.  I could scarcely believe my own eyes, this thing so huge.  This spider was at least 8 inches, but I'm gonna estimate it at 10 inches.  I have half a mind to go back tomorrow with my ruler, tape it to a stick, and hold it up for the camera just to prove it.

Warning: massive nightmare-inducing spiders ahead.

Hello, gorgeous!

See the little spiders?  Those are the males.  They just kinda sit around, eating her leftovers until she's ready to mate.
And then they die.  Not a very exciting life, mate, sorry.

There's those beautiful colours.

I had to duck underneath the web to get the spider's underside.  This web is easily 6 feet across and 4 feet
tall, but I had a nice clearance of about 4 feet.  

Orb weavers often build their webs in the gap between two trees.

See the spider?  Just left of the center?  That spider is the same distance as the skinny tree on the right edge of the photo.
THIS SPIDER IS HUGE.

I think I accidentally hit the web when I ducked back onto the trail.
Whoopsie daisy.  (I'm lucky I survived!)

This spider is bigger than my face.

Beautiful in a kind of terrifying way, don't you think?

But that's not the only spider I found today!  I found a huge communal web of dome tent spiders, too!  The web was so large and thick that I spotted it from about 20 feet away and had to make my own path to get a closer look.  There were about 20 spiders in there.  I think it's getting close to their breeding season because they're all bigger and fatter than I'm used to seeing them.

They have lovely patterns on their backs.

Pretty!

That tiny one is a male.  The size difference isn't quite as great as that of the larger orb weavers, but they
lead basically the same life: wait, eat leftovers, mate, die.

Sick of spiders?  Don't worry, I also found some other nice, somewhat-less-scary bugs.

This appears to be a stinkbug.  It's roughly 5 times the size of the ones in the States.
(No, I did not squish it to be sure.  I know you were wondering.)

And these aren't quite bugs, but whatever, they're cool.

I got a bird photo!  This guy was fluttering around while I was photographing the dome tent spiders.
I don't know what it is yet, Will (my bird expert) is gone.  :(

This is a tadpole, I think.  Except that it's about 5 times bigger than any tadpole I've ever seen.  I want to catch it!

And Ulysses butterflies, which are the Queensland tourism emblem.  They're quite pretty.  I didn't realise what I was photographing at first, because this is what I was seeing:

Meh, kinda boring.

And then this popped up on my camera:

Whaaaaat?  When did that happen?

As far as I can gather, the flash would scare the butterfly into opening its wings, only the movement was too quick for me to see.  Good thing my camera is faster than me!

This isn't pixelation.  This is the actual pattern on the wings.  Photos like this are why I love my telephoto lens:
they let you see things not possible with the naked eye.

The blue is very brilliant, and these guys can be spotted from quite a distance.

I guess you're okay, Ulysses.  But I still don't like your proboscis, it freaks me out.

After returning from my hike, I swung into town to pick up a few more souvenirs, grab some sushi (gotta get cheap sushi while I still can!) and run errands.  I finally found a new plastic cover for my dive computer--it's a tiny piece of plastic, just a millimeter or two thick, and yet it cost me $25.  I also spent my $30 theater gift card on snacks for my flight, since I didn't want to see any of the movies out right now.  I even ran into Gigi, one of the chefs from my liveaboard trip, on the street--it was his last day in Cairns, so I'd definitely call that lucky.  Now it's time to start packing!  Yikes.

My 21st birthday is in four days!  Unfortunately, nobody celebrates Thanksgiving here, and I'll be on a  dive boat for the big day, which means no drinking.  But I trust that I'll have plenty of folks ready to help me celebrate when I get home!  :)

Cheers and see you all soon,

Ashton

P.S.  Scroll down for lace monitor lizard photos and video!  I forgot to link to them on facebook but they're pretty cool.

Day 126

Finals are finally over (thank goodness) and now I can start worrying about the truly hard things that lie ahead: the GRE and organic chemistry.  Woohoo!  Other than studying, though, I admit that I have been a complete and utter waste of life for the past two weeks.

Well, not a COMPLETE waste of life.  I went out and bought all the souvenirs a girl could possibly need at the Night Markets, which is one of the major markets in cairns.  It is an assortment of cheap tourist crap, fake Aboriginal art, beady-eyed masseuses, fake Ugg products, and bad Chinese food.  There are a few good things there, though: cheap shotglasses, discount leather products, and the rare-but-worth-it good souvenirs.

So what did I buy myself as a souvenir?  A kangaroo-leather hat!  I was thinking of getting a crocodile leather one, but I don't think I'm quite badass enough to wear a hat covered in crocodile teeth.  (Frankly, I'm not sure I know anyone who could wear that hat and not look ridiculous.)  I have a picture of myself wearing it (and looking pretty fly) but sadly I left my camera in someone's bag at a beach party and have yet to reunite with it.

But fear not, I still have photos of something awesome: a Lace monitor lizard!  Also known as the Lace Goanna, they like to climb trees and can grow to over 6 feet in length.  They feed on carrion, and are a favourite traditional Aboriginal food.  Like Komodo dragons, their mouths are pretty nasty--you do not want to get bitten by this thing.

I also took a short video:

I am going to stop being such a waste of life and start enjoying my last few weeks in Australia!  I plan to do a fair bit of hiking soon, so expect more photos of wildlife.  Especially spiders, because they're so big and they hardly move!

Day 114

My right big toe has been numb since Tuesday, after my last dive.  It's getting worse and I'm thinking I should maybe get it checked out.  I called the DAN (Divers Alert Network) hotline and they didn't seem terribly concerned, but said it could be a compressed nerve.  I wonder if that insurance I bought from them covers compression chamber visits for numb toes?  Hopefully it'll go away and I won't have to find out!

Anyhow, it's for the last set of photos and videos from my liveaboard trip!  The videos are all super short and totally worth watching, I promise.  :)

Another Glorious Flatworm!

Melon butterflyfish!

Orangespine surgeonfish!  This fish can change colours very rapidly depending on its mood.  It's also known as a
Naso tang, redlip surgeonfish, and orange spine unicornfish.

Parrotfish!

I regret to say that the most exciting dive of my trip was one of the two dives I failed to take my camera on.  It was the morning of my second day on-board, and I was still feeling horribly seasick and tired from not sleeping all night.  Reuben, one of the chefs, convinced me to get in the water because it would make me feel better.  I was dubious, but willing to try anything, so I suited up and jumped in.  I immediately felt better--literally, within a minute the nausea was gone--but didn't think to grab my camera.  Which was a shame, because on this dive I saw dolphins!  A mom and baby came up to check out our group of divers, and while they only stuck around for about 30 seconds, it was still magical.

We also saw a hairy ghost pipe fish, which I'd never heard of but Reuben was excited about.  He kept pointing to something that looked like a tiny chunk of red algae.  I knew that seahorses sometimes covered themselves in algae as a disguise, so I mimed 'seahorse?' to him by making a "C" shape with my hands followed by pretending to ride a horse.  (Communicating underwater is challenging but fun.)  They're related to seahorses, so I was close!

Photo by Dave Harasti.

We also saw two green sea turtles, a shark, a peacock flounder, and three beautiful nudibranches, which are colourful sea slugs.  Nudibranches are types of sea slugs, but not all sea slugs are nudibranches.  They're really gorgeous and diverse, and really fun to find.  They're also good to photograph because they move so slowly.  I love them!

This is similar to one of the nudibranches we saw.Photo by John Johnstone.

Here's a nudibranch photo that I took:

Isn't it pretty?  I love nudibranches!

We also saw a gigantic stingray, called a "botched fantail ray," one of the largest species of rays.  They can grow to 6 feet wide, 11 feet long, and 330 pounds!  (That's 1.8m wide, 3.3m long, and 150kg for metric folks.)  I wanted to ride it but I couldn't catch it.  Good thing, too, because there's been at least one recorded human fatality from--you guessed it--a diver stabbed while trying to ride it. We saw it on a night dive and it was too large to get the whole thing in a frame with flash, but here's what I got:

It was HUGE.  If you look close, you can see the eye and spiracle (breathing hole) on one side!

Don't you just want to ride it though?  It looks like the perfect size.

And a few more photos from various dives:

Crowned puffers only get to be a few inches long.  They're so cute!

Pink anemonefish in an anemone.

Sailfin surgeonfish.

Another Napoleon wrasse!

This here is (what I think is) a juvenile rockmover wrasse.  He's cute, in an alien-type way.  I got a video of him!

Look at that face.  Cute!

More anemonefish:

Anemonefish!

Clownfish!

Another anemonefish!

Not sure what type of butterflyfish this is.

A parrotfish.  I love their colours!

A patch of reef, probably 10 feet long or so.  Good thing I had my wide-angle lens with me!

Bluespotted stingray!

I believe this is a goatfish, but I could be mistaken.

We got face-to-face with a Hawksbill sea turtle during one dive!  Hawksbills are very similar in appearance to green sea turtles.  You can tell it's a Hawksbill because of the curved 'beak' and by the jagged edges of the shell.  I managed to get video of him!

Hawksbill sea turtle!

Hi there!

This is a Barramundi Cod!  They're supposed to be pretty delicious.

Another unidentified but pretty fish.

Forcepfish!

Not a clue, but he's pretty!

More white tip reef sharks!  You can actually see the white tips of the fins in this photo and video!

They look perfect for riding!

Moorish Idols are one of my new favourites!  They look so pretty and elegant when swimming.

I love this guy's fin!

We've also got the Titan triggerfish, which I think is one of the prettiest fish around:

He's kicking up sand while trying to eat something.

We took some silly photos on my last dive:

Reiko!

Gigi.

I love the mask marks on our faces!

Hopefully I'll get a few more photos from my dive buddies, but that's all I've got for now.  A big thank-you (and ありがとうございます) to everybody on Oceanquest, and I hope to see you all again soon!  :)

Cheers,
Ashton