Sunday, April 12th, 2015 at 2:04pm
Hey peoples! I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been very very busy. I hope everyone had a nice Easter! Also, don't buy Olympus "waterproof" cameras. Long story short I'll be buying a new camera soon. Thankfully they are the same price AUD here as they are USD back home which means the same camera is cheaper here with the current currency exchange rate.
I went to the Orpheus Island Research Center for my coral reef class over Easter break. I skipped my class on Thursday and went on the first trip. We left at 5am and arrived at the island around 9am. After getting settled in our rooms and going through a safety debriefing, we changed into our wetsuits and spent the rest of the day snorkeling out on the point. We collected competitive interactions data on our coral species (ours was any porites massive species) and the TA's taught us how to identify different coral species in the water. After a shower and dinner we had a quick meeting and looked at the competitive interactions between the corals in the aquariums and then we all crashed for the evening.
The next day we spent the morning learning about all the research projects taking place at the center and took a tour of the center. We spent the afternoon in the water collecting abundance and competitive interactions for our species again. We finished our data collection early and spent a good amount of time relaxing a looking around. It was beautiful, too beautiful for words. I've never seen so many species of coral and fish in the wild before. After a while my partner was getting tired and wanted to head in so one of the TA stayed in the water with me. I was heading out to the edge of the reef to find one of our coral colonies that had grown to over 10m across but the TA stopped me because the currents from the incoming tide were getting stronger. As he came over he had a baby fish following his hand. When he came near me the fish started swimming in front of my hand. Then a second fish joined the first one. The entire way back the two fish swam just in front of my hand. If I lowered one hand they swam over to the other. If I lowered both hands then they swam over to the TA and then back to me when I put my hand back up. When we got closer to another group they swam over to them. At this point I was pretty tired from swimming against the current so I decided to head in. As I swam into the shallows the two little fish popped up in front of my mask and started swimming in front of my hand again. When I sat down they perched by my knee and when I cupped my hands in the water they perched in my hands. It was an amazing experience. That night we presented some of our findings, helped clean up the center and then went to bed. We got up at 5:30am on Saturday to take the boat back to the mainland and then the 2 hour bus ride back to campus. I grabbed some lunch and then took Saturday and Sunday off to recover. We had Good Friday as well as Easter Monday off so I spent Monday working on my lab report. I also had a movie night with some friends that night as well.
As you can probably guess from above, my camera broke from a faulty waterproof seal. Thankfully my memory card survived and I have a card reader on my computer so there are a few pictures posted. I didn't get pictures of the deeper areas where there was a lot more coral so the few pictures I have definitely do not do the area justice. I'm hoping to get some sunset pictures on my second trip there because I have never seen more beautiful sunsets than the ones I saw there.
Yesterday we went to Reef HQ for my reef fish class. We did dry runs of the surveys we'll be doing on Orpheus Island in a couple of weeks. The nice thing is that we don't have an assessment/field report for that trip so it should be relatively relaxed. Anyways, we did species censuses, cleaner wrasse behavioral observations and feeding behavior observations.
That's all for now. The posts will probably less frequent for a while because sadly I have to actually focus on my academics now :p I have a major report/project due every week until finals pretty much so I won't be going out as much. That being said, I should be going to Crystal Creek with some friends next weekend which should be fun :) We were going to go today but I have a major paper worth 20% of my grade due Friday that I need to focus on. Welcome back to the real world :p
Later peoples!
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