dLet me tell you, there was something deeply satisfying about waking up and watching my friends get ready for the early morning dive, and then contentedly turning back over into bed. I could hear the wind blowing about through the trees, and it almost sounded like the waves. Cold waves, from the sounds of it. When I finally did wake up and get out of bed a little while later, one look outside confirmed my thought. The sky was grey, and cold wind blew through the main street of the camp. About 15 minutes after they had left, my classmates were back onshore due to low visibility and poor conditions. I worked on my math homework that I had long delayed (for good reason, I promise, Mom), and waited for whatever new miracle Pat had planned for breakfast. I swear the man was born with a skillet in hand.
Class was right after breakfast, and Trish and Edd changed plans, deciding to do our invert lecture and lab today as the wind would likely prove challenging in gathering any data further out at sea. After two days of talking about the big and beautiful statement pieces of the ocean, we were turning our attention to the less obvious foundation of animal life in the ocean, invertebrates. According to Edd's lecture, invertebrates make up about 80% of the biomass in the ocean, they're just all so small that we hardly notice them tucked away in the seabeds and crevices all around us. Not all invertebrates are small though. The major phyla we covered today ranged from the tiniest of jellyfish (cnidarians), to the humungous monolith of the giant squid (Mollusks). Lots of invertebrates remain relatively unchanged since the times of the Cambrian explosion, while it apparently took us spend creatures (Chordata) a little more time to figure everything out. We learned about all of these creatures and more (I skipped echinodermata and arthropods) because our lab for the day was going to be taking soil samples out near patch corals and counting all the little beasties we could find skulking about beneath the surface. With a slightly more than friendly wind blowing, we all got suited and booted and headed over the north part of the island, towards Shark Beach. There, Edd and Trish explained the challenge before us. We were to take a syringe and a measuring tape, walk out into the reef, measure out 15 meters, and take three samples of soil starting at a coral base and moving away into open sand. Now, the easiness of the concept made the absolute blinding difficulty of carrying it out all the more frustrating. Hailey, Brynn and I wandered out into the reef, attempting not to step on any innocent sea cucumbers, and trying to find a clear patch of sand big enough to satiate our parameters. The wind decreased any visibility into the water and I eventually gave up and put my snorkel on to see better. However, the water was shallow enough that I just had to pray to the buoyancy gods that I would be light enough to float over all the coral and not dash myself to pieces. Or the coral to pieces. Come to think of it, the coral probably takes priority. Eventually, we found our way fairly far back into the water (which was still at knee level) and in a patch that was not perfect, but enough. Then came the second problem of pushing the syringe into the sand and attempting to get it to the right depth and bringing it back up without losing any of the sample. For our first sample that we took, I stood right behind Brynn and plunged my syringe into the ground. Almost immediately I hit rock and felt something on the syringe bend. I brought it back up and could see a sad trickling of sand with a spout bent into one of the sides. On my second attempt, I moved a little over to the right and plunged my head under the water to make sure I could see what I was doing. I managed to get the first part in, but the syringe was catching and making it hard to get all the way to base. The ocean water kept rising and falling, hitting me in the face just enough to make me wish it was a person that I could punch. I settled for yelling into the current, and drove the plunger all the way into the sand. I dug out the bottom and brought up the plunger, pushing the sand into the back. As we moved to the next sample, the sand gave a little less resistance, and by the third one, Brynn was able to push it in with practically just her foot. With our samples gathered, we made our way back to the lab and began the long process of sifting through all of the sand under a microscope and picking out all of the organisms that we noticed in our petri dishes. To keep all the organisms inside alive, we filled our sample bags with sea water, and made sure each petri dish had about a millimeter for things for flit about. The annelids (sea worms) were by far the most prevalent, and looked like little black strings trying their very best to tie themselves into a knot that would make them unappetizing. Fortunately for me, this made them all the easier to pick up with the forceps and gently place them in our white bin to be returned to the ocean. Pretty soon in my first plate, I also caught sight of a tiny arthropod, making his way right across the bottom of the petri dish, leaving a tiny trail behind him wherever he went. The arthropods mostly looked like tiny clear lobsters with a small black dot in the middle, and two specks for eyes. They moved around in quick bursts of energy, stalled for a second to pick a direction, and then jetted off again. There was another that looked slightly like a small tick, but bright red, and they would get right up on the surface of the water and just take off as fast as they could until they ran into the wall of the petri dish or something pushed them in a direction. These two phyla were the most common, and pretty soon, the whole class settled into a routine of sifting through sand while vaguely singing along to the 80's classics in the background that Hailey played from her phone. We took a lunch break a little ways through and then were back at it again. Even with the three of us it took almost 4 hours to sift through our three baggies of sand, picking out every worm or translucent crustacean we could find. One cool find in the middle of all this was a clam that was pushing itself about and making quite the fuss in one of my samples. It's appendage poked out of the shell, picked up rocks, and through them to the side, flipping it self closed to the side of the petri dish in the process. As soon as my tweezers got close though, the clam retreated inside its shell, and all you could see was the vague outline of mass through its bright white shell. We compiled our data and finalized our report (I might have to write more later about my deep and abiding love for excel) and rushed off to try to catch the sunset. I figured it probably wouldn't be anything too crazy today given the still overcast sky, but as I got to the docks, I decided that even on a non sunny day, the beautiful color of the water gave this place a paradisiacal element. A couple eagle rays swam languidly near the end of the jetty, two sea turtle occasionally poked their heads out, but most everything seem fairly subdued. Sharing their frustrations near the beach were a whole conference of cow headed rays, at least twelve of them, all gathered right in the same area, in many cases even overlapping. I don't know if they were planning a complaint about the lack of sunset or what, but they settled into the sand together as though they weren't planning on moving any time soon. Almost without any sign at all, the sun had set, and most of us headed back to the main compound to wait for dinner. Janna, Brynn and I sat talking for a little while about Frankenstein and Sir Gowther, an Middle English hero who was the son of a fiend, pillaged from the age of ten, and then turned his life around and decided to repent. Gowther allegedly ate from the mouths of dogs and slept in stables for years as a servant to pay penance, but when time came, he served his kingdom and his God, and totally snagged to hand of a bodacious princess in the meanwhile. Be like Sir Gowther: pay your debts, be humble, and snag whichever bomb-diggity prince or princess life has in store for you. Maybe don't pillage first though, that part I don't think has to be a prerequisite. After feasting once again on the delicious machinations of Pat, we all spread out to study, write, or look at the stars. I was sitting on the stairs by the teaching lab, when all of the sudden a winged shadowy spasm exploded across the corner of my view and crashed staring into one of the wooden beams holding up the shade overhang of the kitchen. I looked closer to see what had just fallen, and it was a bird, all black and with a skinny tapered beak, but also some downy feathers still sticking out from its neck and underside. Unsure of if it was going to get back up or not, I sat there and watched it from a distance, until Brynn walked out of the bathrooms right past it, and it didn't move at all. She noticed it and I walked over and got a closer look at the bird with her. It sat, almost like it was nesting, right next to the base of the pillar. Nothing appeared to be wrong with it, no sticky seeds or broken wings, but it just sat there, as if the dirt was exactly where young scruffy birds belonged, and it was just including us in the program. Then, without warning, it stood up on shaky legs and put its wings all the way back waddling away as quickly as it could without losing balance to a corner by a pipe, where it tucked its head and sat down in fake nesting position once again. Pat walked by, and saw Brynn and I watching the odd bird doing its best impression of its larger ostrich cousin and began to explain to us that it was a juvenile short tailed shearwater bird, or mutton bird. As adults, shearwater birds spend their whole lives out on the open ocean, only returning to land to mate. As a result, they are entirely USELESS on land, like a plane where someone forgot the third wheel in the front leaving it hopelessly top heavy and little recourses to balance. This poses quite the ordeal for the juveniles as they start on land, and have to learn how to walk and fly at the same time. They're genetically hopeless at walking, but don't have quite strong enough wings to fly yet, and have a tendency to fly towards any kind of light, resulting in the aforementioned explosion of feathers that I had witness shortly before. Eventually, when they get good enough, they fly around the island a few times, gather their courage, and fly out into the open slipstreams of the the ocean air, not returning for at least a year. Some shearwaters will attempt to fly out, and end up crash-landing in the ocean, waterlogged, and forced to try again. If they stay in the water too long, often sharks will come along and snatch them right off the surface of the water. Mutton birds have what they call a severe learning curve. I feel like in science, I identify quite often with the shearwater birds as juveniles. They know they have a critically important task in front of them, and they really, honestly want to complete it. It just turns out they're not gifted right away with the knowledge of how to fly. And so, they fling themselves headlong into the dearest doorpost, just trying to get the hang of things until eventually their wings are strong enough. I've moved around the island a fair bit in the last couple days, and tomorrow, we're supposed to head out to the ocean. I'm headed out to open air, and even if I crash land, I'll try not to sit on the surface for too long.
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Today was the first of our 6:15 early morning swims along the coast. Not that I needed to set an alarm. The tropical warm weather, combined with a jet lag that keeps hanging on like a hungry cookie cutter shark has me waking up around 4 in the morning every day. I woke up this morning to something that I have to assume is going to be a constant. Sand in my sheets. I had acknowledged before that sand was going to invade every crevice of my life (we are living on an island after all) but the immediacy and placement of this tiny sandbox still seemed to be a personal affront by the beach. In any case, I lay around for a little while, then when Russ's alarm went off (When I Grow Up, by the Pussycat Dolls) I started to gather my things to meet by the Touch Tanks at 6:15. Luckily for me, my wetsuit was surprisingly dry, so it was a little less of a battle to wrestle my body into it than I had anticipated. The scales of karma began to tip back towards the middle, and my mood improved. In fact my mood rose like a rocket as soon as we started moving and arrived at the beach. The sky was light pink, with good weather ahead, and I already felt less like an absolute poof while trying to get my fins, mask, and snorkel all adjusted. Trisha, one of my professors, said that there was a sea turtle not far off the shoreline, so I put my fins on out of the water, and walked like a demented penguin towards the water until I realized that I could just walk backwards and still retain maybe a fraction of my dignity.
Then again, dignity may be overrated. I was partnered with Sam today, who I had spent part of my time in Sydney with. We swam out towards where the turtles were, and immediately spotted the lethargic greenback on the floor, who was apparently still waking up and slightly put off to discover there were several humans inbound. With a couple gentle strokes, it lifted off the floor and was moving out towards the end of the jetty. We had just turned away to follow Trisha, when we spotted several cow headed rays laying on the floor and moving gently across the bottom as well. Something about the size and their gentle floating motion was both beautiful and alien. We swam under the jetty, spotting already a couple more green sea turtles moving around. We kept a gentle distance from them, not wanting to disturb their early morning ritual, and moved over the the divider wall, which just earlier the day before had been completely exposed, giving me a much more tangible realization of just how much tide affects the island each day. The parrotfish were already munching away at small pieces of coral, and the butterfly fish were picking away at the sand on either side of the wall, creating a continual crackling in the background all throughout the water. Apparently part of that is even contributed by the tiny shrimp that invisibly move around, cleaning and maintaining the beach, but I have yet to confirm that for myself. Apparently cleaner shrimp are still in the "a good servant is neither seen nor heard" phase of their ocean service. Once past the divider wall, we swam out into the open, deeper water, and several of the class, including Sean, gave diving down beneath the surface a go. Most people seemed to manage getting a couple feet down, and then the natural buoyancy and air bubbles trapped in our wet suits would inevitably bring us back to the surface. Surprisingly quickly, we were at the base of the old shipwreck just off the coast, but no octopus guarding a chest of treasure was hiding in the keel. Thankfully. Instead, a couple Orange Spotted Surgeon fish lurked in the back, looking like they were trying to have a private conversation and would appreciate it if I left them too it, thank you very much. I decided they had a fair point, and returned back to find Sam and some of the others outside of the boat. Sam pointed out that we were falling a little behind, and so I shifted directions, powered forward, and prompltly swam past the entire group without seeing them. I had to lift up my head and look back before I realized that there were most definitely no flippers in front of me. I turned around and tried to swim as though I had seen something interesting, and was now returning, satisfied in my exploratory efforts. I don't think Sam bought it. I was glad to return to the group, however, because as soon as I met back with everyone at the boat, Edd pointed out that slightly beneath the shelf in the rock at the very base of the boat was a Wobbegong, a type of shark with a beautifully Australian name, that kind of looked like a mossy boulder had decided it was a good idea to grow teeth. They are a mottled brown color, have absolutely outrageous bumpy fronts to their mouths, and three rows of razor sharp teeth that can break off like shards of glass when they bite you. I was quite excited at the prospect of hovering just over one, to say the least. I made my best effort to swim down and see him, and indeed, there was a slightly mobile, off color boulder. It was slightly blurry, and I was trying quite hard to ignore the pressure building in my ears, but there was no way I wasn't going to see this shark. I caught a glimpse, and that was enough, I returned back to the surface. We swam around the ship and over some deeper reefs, eventually turning around and swimming right over some giant cowheaded rays. They don't move when you swim over them, but there is something bizarre about looking down and seeing their outline in the sand with large pair of eyes poking out and keeping watch. Right past the rays, Sam and I stopped as we saw a black tipped shark slide into view. Even at their small size, Black tipped sharks move as a top tier predator. No unkempt movements, constant and metered, they push their tail and glide through the water keeping track of everything beneath them. It passed us and swam into the distance, disappearing in between seconds, its grey tail blending in with the green of the seawater. We swam back to shore and everyone began swapping stories about what they had seen, what had jumped, what had disappeared, and in pieces broke off to go shower and get ready for our first day of actual schoolwork. Okay, brief side note: Breakfast was absolutely amazing. The chef here, Pat, is an absolute wizard, and I am convinced that all the kids in the class are slowly becoming convinced he is capable of actual food magic. We had eggs, bacon, and toaster breakfast, nachos for lunch, and quinoa for dinner, but saying that is like calling the David some nice chiseling. This man knows his way around the stove, and breakfast, lunch and dinner were absolutely phenomenal. In any case, we had our first lecture on coral reefs history, dietary habits, and growth patterns, and if I hadnt've (theres a word) been thinking of how we had seen them literally that morning I'm pretty positive I would have fallen asleep right at my desk. I didn't realize how much being in the water so often was going to tire me out. Luckily, I managed to avoid a total faceplant off of my rolling chair, and was able to learn about how barrier building reefs actually go through stages. You always hear the name the Great Barrier Reef, but you don't really think about how it is quite literally a barrier from the outside sea for all of the little islands that dot the Australian coast, and the continent itself. Apparently the fact that the reef is a barrier reef is due to the fact that Australia, and its surrounding islands, have sunk slightly below the ocean due to melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and time (all things which are currently having their reality debated by the US government). This sinking leaves a gap between where the water starts and the reef begins, with a mostly empty stretch of sand in between, with only the corals that could withstand the temperatures and wave motion vaguely dispersed without. Our task for today was observe sample parts of the ocean floor along a straight line out from the beach and determine if this gap-then-reef theory actually held true. The key is to walk in a straight line, to get as deep as possible within the thirty meters, so you can get at least some of the back reef, maybe. Walking in a straight line in the water is apparently a lot harder than it seems, or so my partner Katie tells me. She patiently pointed out to me when I was walking it a bit of a squirrelly line, even when I was quite sure that I was straight out from her and maybe she was just standing at an angle which she could tilt a little towards me if she would be so kind...like I said, she's a patient woman. We mostly measured sand, but we were able to see a Sea Hare that Edd found, and an Epaulette shark which was hiding under a little rock outcropping which was taking advantage of the low tide. Epaulette sharks are some of the only sharks whose fins double as proto-limbs, allowing them to walk (wiggle) across rocks when the water gets low. There was also a nudibranch pointed out to us by Trisha which was sitting on the top of a small rock outcropping. The nudibranch (pronounce New-di-brank, not nudie branch, as I first thought) eats coral polyps, and with keep the cnidocytes (which I haven't the faintest idea how to pronounce), or toxic barbs that corals use to bring in food, and will expel them through their back when touched. It makes a fair amount of sense. Why create your own self defense system when you can just hijack your foods? Once all the data had been gathered, we were back to the classroom, where we worked of combining and analyzing our data and writing our lab reports. Katie and I bickered in a fun way about what to put where (she didn't share my love of all the tiny strokes in excel) but came out with a very nice looking final product, just in time to go out for sunset. It was beautiful, again, and I was struck by how I already felt more comfortable with everyone on the team. Cat, Brynn, Janna and I sat out on the edge of the dock and saw a turtle poke his head out the water just where he had last evening, and I sat comfortably until I decided to make my way back a little closer to the island. Katie was right by where the jetty connected to the water, and she pointed out 5 baby blacktail sharks swimming in a group all together close to the shore. I remarked how strange it was to see them so close to being beached and Katie turned to me and said "Well, they're a lot better swimmers than you".with a smile on her face. I mean, she's right, but dang. Katie walked out to join the rest of the group, and I went ashore to try to get a better look at the birds coming in to roost. There are some beautifully noisy gulls fond of stealing muffins right out of your hand, and the naughty terns, that sit in their poop filled nests, on poop covered trees, pooping, but then there are the egrets. Egrets are funny looking birds, with long necks and legs, but spend most of the time scrunched up, walking around with long steps. When explorers first came to this island, they took one look at the egrets, and being the gifted taxonomists they were, saw the long stretched out birds, and decided that this island was filled with herons. Again, it seems to me that Australia has themes, and one that keeps coming back is that no matter how sure you are of something, there's always a twist left to be uncovered, something to prove you wrong. But as I saw the tern picking through leaves with the sunset behind it, that kind of seemed like it might be okay. It was my third day here in Australia, but the sunset I saw when I came up the stairs challenged even the most beautiful of sunrises I had ever seen in my home state of Utah. The colors of purple, orange, golden yellow, and blue merged together into one perfect backdrop that you would expect a cigarette smoking cowboy to ride off into with his little Señorita and trusty horse Trigger. The color explosion lasted for about 15 minutes, and then slid apart, leaving behind a welcoming yellow color that promised warmer weather to come.
After a quick brekky and the 1,045th form that we had to fill out, we all gathered our suitcases and jammed into the van outside the hostel we had been staying at for the past couple days. The van was old, mostly bare metal, and had a concerning amount of lights blinking angry colors inside the dash, but was totally functional and roomy, so I have nothing but praise for it. We took the van to the marina, had a short wait, and the boarded the catamaran to come over to Heron Island. That yellow sun from before was true to its promise about good weather, and we had smooth waters the entire ride. It was slightly disconcerting to look back at the land once we were a little ways out and actually see the haze of pollution sitting around the town. Gladstone is primarily a factory town, so I guess the smoke shouldn't be that surprising, but its always a little disconcerting to see streaks of brown in an otherwise clear blue sky. With the weather being as good as it was, most of the class passed the trip up on the top deck, spotting islands as they came into view and talking. I spent part of the ride up top, and part of it inside the cabin on the bottom deck practicing naming fish and talking about the incontrovertible merits of sea turtles with Nora and Janna. (There's a lot, in case you were wondering.) Finally Heron Island came into view. The water was a bright blue, which was kind of a jarring sight for someone who grew up around the toxic waste dump that is Utah Lake, and so clear that you could see all the coral benches as we passed, and even the occasional flitting shadows of some fish near the surface. Right by the dock, the is a shipwrecked boat which was very beautiful, but slightly menacing in the same stroke. It seemed like the island was offering a picturesque opening but also trying to remind us that at any minute this place could just decide to up and kill us. I get the feeling thats a running theme in Australia. Once the resort guests that had come over on the catamaran with us had gotten off the boat, we grouped up and got out onto our home for the next eleven days. The island was slightly bigger than I expected, and certainly had more buildings. And more bird poop. I shouldn't be that surprised. There are a lot of birds out here, and everybody has to poop somewhere. We were lead by Megan the guide from the University of Queensland through parts of the research facility, past the kitchens and finally to our rooms. Outside the rooms, off to the side, we already had some permanent residents of the island though: Golden Silk Orb Weavers. Big beautiful spiders whose webs really do look golden, and have wonderfully menacing legs to match their formidable size. Just in one spot there was ten of them all clustered together, a family reunion that is doubtless to end in cannibalism. Once we had all suitably freaked out about the spiders, everyone passed by and went to their rooms. We met back up for lunch (which was amazing) and then had some free time before we had to meet up with Edd and Trish at the teaching lab. Sam and I, killing some time, wandered off the back end up the path through camp through some trees and over to beach. It was coming back from low tide and so the water was still fairly receded, and we were lucky enough to see some guitar fish, parrot fish, and several chitons clamped on to the rock side. The chitons are interesting, they kind of look like rocks themselves, but like a lot of things in the reef, are just moving very, very slowly. While we were walking we also came across something that both Sam and I agreed was a cone shell, a highly toxic something-or-other apparently can kill me, although no one has bothered to tell me so far. My current bet is a very tiny handgun hidden within its shell. I poked it once with my phone and then thought better of it and left it alone. Hopefully it doesn't tell its friends. We went back to the classroom, got all of our scuba gear, had a brief explanation of class information, and then decided that with the time left in the day we would have an afternoon scuba excursion to acclimatize to spending the next 11 days facedown and floating around. The trip was amazing. We saw parrotfish, butterfly fish, 2 gigantic grouper, and as we swam out into deeper water, my partner Russ pointed out a pike to me. It looked like a sword held perfectly aloft in the air, ready to strike at any movement. We swam over it, but it didn't pay any attention to us, likely because we are too big to eat, and too slow to pose it any real threat. As we came back into shore, we saw a couple black tipped sharks, and Russ was able to see them feeding some dead crabs a little further down the beach. We came ashore right before dark, and so we all rinsed off as quick as we could and the headed over to the marina to watch the sunset. We got there right in time. Its a beautiful sight, watch the sun rapidly plummet into an endless expanse of ocean, and as it got closer and closer to dark, the larger animals in the water started to show some action. Almost all of us were sitting on the edge of the dock watching the colors change when all of the sudden there came a splash to our left and an eagle spotted ray jumped right out of the water, a foot into the air, and then came back down. It was amazing! The rays already are beautiful when they swim, but there is little known about why they jump, and that somehow makes it even more startling and beautiful. As if given the signal, right after that, all the wildlife came out, with a black tip shark swimming right under the dock, and four green sea turtles swam around, coming up for air, as within 3 minutes, the sun was falling, falling, gone. |