Fish Face

Why g'day mates!

Long time no see. Let me tell you that this story ends with me getting hit in the head with a fish. We've been out and about since we are arrived at Straddie AKA Stradbroke Island. We are staying at a research center. Yes a legit research station. In fact its SO legit it even has its own t-shirt.

Here we are doing some field work and research. My group and I chose to do ours on diversity and evenness of various fish populations between day and night. We are looking into other possible contributing factors such as visibility, thermohaline circulation and thermal vertical migration. It's been a good time so far but very hard work. We are doing our project by using netting and doing a drag sweep through the ocean water with a 50m net. That's pretty big! Basically in the sweep you catch fish in the netting and then put them in buckets. During this time you sort the fish out and make a tally of the different species you pull in and measure them. Afterwards you throw them back into the ocean. We found some pretty neat stuff like eels, cuttle fish, goat fish, blennies, and tons more.

We went out last night around 9:30. We need the netting thing again, except this time we pulled in over 1,000 fish!!!! When we were doing the sweep one of the girls said she saw a HUGE ray. We are going out to do this tonight so wish me luck. There were so many fish we couldn't even collect them all, we had to just start instantly throwing them back. DOINK! All of a sudden when I was shaking out the net in the ocean, I got hit square in the head with a fish. It was definitely something that could only happen to me and me alone. haha.

Photo by Kelly

Also we've been doing a lot of field work by just walking on the mud flats since we got here, looking at different organisms for instance during  the first day here we looked at the biodiversity of gastropods (snails) by collecting different samples along the shore of Moreton Bay. It was really fun. We even found a chiton, which is this 8 dorsal plated prehistorical organism. Its really cool looking. It was stuck really hard to the rock. Doug, one of the leaders, had to come get it off with a pocket knife.  Then looked at all 12 species more closely that night in lab. We've all had tons of fun lectures and we need lots of tidial walks were we found things like coral, sponges, sea daisies (tunicates), sea cucumbers, crabs, rays, star fish, etc. The list goes on forever!

Photo by Kelly

Photo by Kelly

Its been very busy and fun. I hope to continue to keep you all posted after I leave the island.

Photo by Kelly

Night mates!