Day 39

Today was Open Day at JCU, which is basically a prospective student day for kids in primary and middle school.  I thought it would be for high schoolers, so seeing hundreds of kids running around was a surprise.  I helped out at the aquarium  by manning the touch tank.  I handed starfish around, showed kids how to pet an epaulette shark, let them poke sea cucumbers, and so on.

At first the kids were mostly coming in with their parents, and they were well-behaved and handled the animals gently.  It was fun to pass around the animals and see how excited they got about everything.  Everything was going swimmingly (pardon the pun) for the first four hours, until a class of obnoxious kids came in and squeezed, poked, and dropped everything in the tank half to death or worse.  By the time they left a starfish was missing a few legs, the epaulette was traumatized, and the sea apple (a type of pretty sea cucumber) was dead.

On the whole though, a long but good day!  I learned a few things by listening to other people who work/volunteer at the aquarium, and I got to watch Jamie give a presentation on the venomous animals by picking up stonefish and crown-of-thorns.

That's a stonefish.  They hide in the sand and impale your foot with a barb on its head when you step on it.  :(

Jamie with a crown-of-thorns starfish.  He's standing in the middle of the big outdoor tank.

Here is the touch tank I operated all day.  It's not very big, so try to imagine 20 kids all crowded around at once, all grabbing things!  The metal rig above the tank is for cameras.  Here's a secret: you know the docos you see where they take close-up shots of animals or plants?  Those aren't shot in the wild.  They're shot in tanks like this one with rigs, and in the big tank (see above photo) by diving/snorkeling.  The BBC just finished filming a new doco here a few weeks before I arrived.

The aquarium is not a big place.  There were a LOT of people in there.  (We had over 800 people come through today!)

Apart from the touch tank, we had a lovely exhibit of Jelly Blubber Jellyfish (Catostylus) that Jamie caught last night.  The jellyfish are in a large round tank called a kreisel.  The tank is round to keep the
jellyfish afloat in the 'current,' because they'll die if they don't keep moving.  This is why you never see jellyfish in the normal rectangular tanks at aquariums.  Also, Catostylus is edible, but  I don't think it would taste very good.

Catostylus  are usually brown down in Sydney, but up here they're blue.  The color difference is due to a different type of zooxanthellae living inside them.  Zooxanthellae give the jellyfish food, and the jellyfish gives it a home.

Me in front of the kreisel.  And look, I've got an official shirt and nametag!

I also got to check out a few other exhibits in the sciences, mainly people doing research with Australian animals.  My friend John is a grad student working with spiders, and while I didn't get any good pictures of his stuff today, I promise I'll get some nice photos of big scary spiders on here soon!  In the meantime, I've got pictures of stuffed marsupials for you to enjoy.

This is a flying fox.  They eat nothing but fruit, the teeth are just to show off to the ladies.  (Or so I was told...)

Australian marsupials are pretty cute.  All we have in America are those nasty opossums.  :(

Everything was really soft!  I was pretty surprised, I thought they'd be nasty.
Apparently Australian opossums are soft and not smelly at all!

Short Bandicoot.

Loooooong bandicoot!

I admit that I have completely forgotten what this is.  I remember that it was soft!

Echidna!  Those spikes are pretty sharp, actually.

Bug collection!  To give an idea of scale, that grasshopper at bottom-center is larger
than my entire hand, and that blue fly to his right is an inch long.  

Other than Open Day, the past week has been busy but otherwise fairly uneventful.  I went back to Yule Point on Wednesday with Roxanne, but we didn't find anything except for soldier crabs, which are actually pretty cute.  BUT I've got two field trips coming up this week, so get ready for lots of photos!

Soldier crab!  They're tiny but their shells are a beautiful blue or purple, and when they move in huge packs across
the sand it's like watching a big blue-purple blob!

They're itty-bitty.  They burrow in the sand and hide most of the time.

Soldier crabs do not live up to their name.  They're easy to catch because all you have to do is put your hand above
one to create a shadow, and he'll immediately curl into a helpless ball.  Cute!  :)