Day 106

In the time it took me to go through all the family-trip photos... well, not a lot has happened, actually.  First, the rainy season started.  This is not good.  It rained for a week and not once in that time did I see sunlight.  I HATE the rain and being wet.  You may be wondering, then, why I came to the rainforest.  I knew there would be rain, but this... this was something new.  I have never seen this much water fall from the sky in so little time.  It was apparently a record high in 30 years.

The best part?  My umbrella broke.  And then got stuck in my hair.  While I was coming back from class with my laptop.  :(

The walkways were flooded, the whole world smelled like wet dog, and I was without an umbrella.  I finally forced myself to go down to Smithfield, where I wandered around an industrial complex until I found a store that sold umbrellas.  Not that it mattered at that point, because I was already soaked.  (Rain makes me cranky, can you tell?)

But enough about the miserable stuff!  I'm still volunteering at the aquarium, and now I've got a new thing to do there: feeding jellyfish polyps!  One of the grad students is trying to raise an unidentified (and possibly brand spankin' new) species of jellyfish.  I come in twice a week to feed them and change their water.  It's very peaceful, actually.  Jellyfish are relaxing animals.

The white bits with the strings are jellyfish polyps.  The tiny orange things are brine shrimp.  The orangey polyps
are ones that have already eaten some of the brine shrimp.

Jellyfish have two life stages: polyp and medusa.  The polyps are can be floating or sessile, and the ones I'm working with tend to stick to something and stay there.  Polyps asexually produce medusa, so there are alternating generations of polyps and medusa.  The medusa are the jellyfish you think of normally, with the bell and tentacles.  Some jellyfish species don't do the polyp phase and produce fertilised eggs, but most do the polyp-medusa alternation.

And here's a short video of the polyps.  If you watch carefully you can see the polyps reaching out and grabbing the brine shrimp, which get stuck in their tentacles and are subsequently eaten.

The only other thing of interest to happen recently was the last session of my Venomous Australian Animals class.  It's been my favourite class here and the only one I truly looked forward to attending.  I've learned so much about not just venom, but also physiology, first aid, and neuroscience.  We finished up the semester with the real story behind Steve Irwin's death.  

Our professor was on the boat as the venom expert and was with him when he died.  The whole incident was very unlucky, but if I've learned one thing from it: never swim up behind a stingray.  Steve Irwin did, and the stingray instinctively snapped its tail and hit him with a barb, which is a miniature barbed spear.  The spear went through his heart, and he bled out into his chest cavity within a few minutes.  Only three people have ever been known to die from stingrays.

See how it's barbed?  It rips like crazy
when you pull this thing out.

Bet you thought that last photo was under a microscope, right?  Nope.  These
barbs can be huge, and very sharp.  They are brutal on flesh.

In the afternoon we had a first aid 'practical,' where we had a 'victim' and had to figure out what happened to her and treat her accordingly.  We also got to watch a stonefish being milked for venom!  The process involves taking a hypodermic needle and sticking it parallel to the spine into the venom sac, then sucking out the venom into the needle.  People often step on stonefish, and they've got a nasty venom that will eat up your foot if you don't get antivenom.  I've seen photos of people who thought they could tough it out--not pretty.

Photo courtesy of Monash University.

We also had the good fortune to have the hosts of the Nat Geo Wild show "Python Hunters."  They were brash, tough American dudes, and they were absolutely great to chat with.

Look at these guys.  They look so serious!  (They're not.)
Photo courtesy of Throng.ca.

From left to right we've got Michael, Shawn, and Greg.
Photo courtesy of National Geographic.

These three guys came from different fields, but they're doing what they love--which is apparently snake wrangling.  Our class spent a lot of time talking with them about their experiences, and we also got into a heated America-vs-Australia debate about weapons ownership.  (The Americans won, by the way.  Once the folks here found out that robbers can sue them here, they came around pretty quickly.)

One more bit of exciting news:  I'm going on a liveaboard trip on Friday!  I signed up to volunteer on a second boat, this time for 5 days.  Hopefully it'll be a lot of fun, and I'll update with photos when I get back!  :)

Cheers,
Ashton