Day 31

DOLPHINS AND WHALES!!!  I saw four humpback whales and two dolphins today!  That makes today the best day in Australia yet!

I went to Green Island on a field trip for my Tropical Marine Ecosystems class today and I saw TONS of stuff!  Before we left the marina I saw a beautiful large red lionfish, which is apparently a pretty rare sight outside of the deeper waters.  Halfway to the island, we passed a pod of four humpback whales, so the captain shut down the boat and let us drift to see them.  They came right up to the boat, crossing just feet in front of it!  Unfortunately I lost my vantage point just as they got closest to the boat (there was a large Japanese tourist group on-board) but I still got some very cool photos!

Fluke!

A fin!

Look at all those scars.  :(

A fluke AND another whale!

After they passed us, one of the whales came up just meters away from this tiny dinghy.  I bet the guy was pretty surprised!

Once on the island we took a glass bottom boat tour, which was neat but not very conducive to photography.  We did see a turtle though!

This is a green sea turtle.  They are apparently named for the green color of their fat, not their shells.  Uh, yum?

Peeking his head up for a breath!

After the boat tour we "surveyed the reef," which I put into quotes because our survey was pretty shoddy and there wasn't much of a reef.  It was mostly dead coral skeletons and rocks.  But there was tons of other cool stuff in there, including a tiny mimic octopus!  I played with him for a few minutes, mostly poking him and watching him change his coloration and patterns to match the sand, seagrass, rocks, and whatever else he landed on.  Mimic octopi are very impressive.  I didn't have my camera, but Ryan took a few photos with his point-and-shoot, so I'll try to get those from him soon.  Apart from the octopus, I saw a pair of clownfish in an anemone, starfish, huge clams, ospreys, and lots of corals I had never seen before.

Ospreys!  The one flapping his wings is a juvenile who hasn't had his first flight yet.

We thought this was a Great Tit.  It's actually not, but it was fun to joke about.  :)

Porites comes in purple here!  In Bonaire it was always an ugly orangey-brown.  I like this variety much better.

This is a clam!  The shells are ugly but the insides are beautiful!

A different species of clam, this one is much larger, but still very beautiful on the inside!

A starfish of the Linckia genus.  It's about 10 inches in diameter--pretty big!

This is what a honeycomb coral looks like up close.  In each of those little holes is an animals called
a coral polyp, and together they all make up the coral colony!

This is an egg 'sac' laid by some type of marine snail, I believe.  Pretty impressive!

This is a sea hare.  It got its name from the two rhinophores (the antennae-looking things) on the head, which apparently
make it look kinda like a rabbit.  Hey, gimme a break, I didn't name it.

Another shot of the ospreys!  They build their nests in these towers, and spend a lot of time just sitting around.
They don't have any predators.  If I'm reincarnated, I wouldn't mind coming back as an osprey.

Yesterday was the first toad dissection/killing in Venomous Australian Animals, and it went well!  We cut open their chests, exposed the hearts, hooked the little guys up to heart rate monitors (which is harder than it sounds, you know) and tested the effects of various drugs.  What I learned: too much of anything will probably kill you.  In a weird accident, Charlie actually escaped death--I noticed in class that only one big toad was in the big-toad-box (I just thought my prof had already removed it), and today my roommate discovered him behind the couch.  I recaptured him but didn't want to keep him for a whole week, so I let him go.  Congrats, Charlie!

You win this time, Charlie.  Congrats!