Day 40

Today was a day of work.  I started a lab report, mailed a form for a job, and applied for another job.  Pretty boring stuff.  But there was one exciting thing to happen today:


I just booked a week-long liveaboard trip!

A liveaboard trip is where you live on a dive boat for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.  You dive up to three times a day at dive sites that are too far away to reach and return in a single day.  Liveaboards are veeeery expensive.  Mike Ball Dive Expeditions, the company with which I am lucky enough to be sailing/diving with, charges from $3050 for the week (budget in low season) to $4723 (premium in high season).  Fortunately I am not just going on a liveaboard trip, I'm actually volunteering.  So in exchange for changing a few beds and washing a few dishes, I get to go for free!

Let me say that one more time.  FREE!  Am I a lucky duck or what?

The trip isn't till the end of November, which means I've also got a wee bit of bad news: I won't be home for my birthday/Thanksgiving.  On the plus side: I'll be on a week-long dive adventure for my birthday!  I'm still trying to finagle another week out on the liveaboard, but this pesky university gig keeps getting in the way.

And what kind of boat will I be spending my week on?  Check out some photos from their website:

Oh, and would you like to see the menu?

Pretty awesome, right?  I'll probably be staying in a room with three other people (who may not be of the same gender, how scandalous!) so I'll have ready-made friends!  So I'm an optimist, sue me.  The only other fly in the ointment is that I had to change my flight home, which cost me a pretty penny, but I'm sure it'll be worth it.  It's hard to be even a tiny bit negative about something so incredibly awesome!

Cheers,
Ashton

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!  :)

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!