UQ and Straddie

I had a couple more lectures last week at UQ. We have our lectures at Kings college and the lecture hall is formerly a church. Usually we have lecture for about 5 hours, and then around 11 we have tea time. Everyday we get tea and cakes, pastries, or cookies. The campus is amazing and there is a huge flock of wild cockatoos that fly around. There are also these huge lizards called bearded water dragons!! They can get to 3 feet long and they just hang out around the lakes on campus. Last Friday we left for straddie on a bus and the bus drove onto a big ferrie, and the ferrie took us across morten bay. There are tons of really cool mangrove forests around the bay. Moreton bay is home to huge populations of sea turtles, dewgongs, and lots of sharks. Two great whites were just spotted a week or two ago! The research station was in a tiny town called dunwich right on the water. It was great because on the island we got two tea times everyday so we were fed every 3 hours or so. Our first lecture was on Venomous marine animals and it was so cool!!! The cone snails around here actually shoot poisonous darts underwater at fish which instantly paralyze them with a potent neurotoxin. We didn't see any of those, but one of the other research groups did catch a blue ringed octopus. It can kill you in 30 minutes and it was so crazy to be so close to something that deadly. Our first night we went saining with our prof. Ian Tibbets. He is one of the coolest profs I have ever had and has a great sense of humor. We basically walked out at night to about neck level with large nets and dragged them in to see what we caught. I didn't think I would be cold, even though the water was about 61 F. Big mistake. I was so cold by the end, along with everyone else, that we formed a large group huddle to stay warm. We caught venomous fish, blue spotted rays, barracudas, pufferfish, and tons of other cool things!! We spent most of Sat and Sun doing more lectures. The lady who is in charge of the Moreton Bay research station, Kathy Townsend, is supper nice and entertaining to listen to. She is studying the effect of plastics in the ocean on sea turtle mortality. I learned that there is an island of plastic floating in the middle of the pacific ocean twice the size of great Britain!! So bring your own bags to the store! We even got to see a turtle necropsy, which is basically an autopsy on a turtle. It was soooo cooool. We dissected the turtle and found tons of plastic in its intestine which caused it to die, and it starved to death :(. It was a very unique experience. After the weekend of lectures we all had group projects to work on. There were 4 tutors (like our TA's) and each tutor had 2 groups of 4 to work with. I asked around to see what the tutors were doing and Dana, who works on an invasive algae called caulerpa, was going snorkeling. So that became my group. And......i saw a sea turtle and a shovel nosed ray!!! and a huge triton snail that was about a foot and a half. We were snorkeling for urchins to do a study with caulerpa but we only found one and needed 24, so our experiment switched to crabs. We did a trawl on the boat and caught some cool things like a pipe fish. Dana drove the boat really really fast and we were going on the wake of this huge ferry when a phantom wave came out of no where and we almost flipped. It was so much fun. On the ride back we were all getting so much water in our faces that we put on our snorkel and mask to see. There was this small pub on the island called Little Ship Club that we went to a couple times. It was a really small town so we were basically the only people there. There was a karaoke machine and we rocked out to everything from Grease to Blink 182. So obviously connecting with Aussie culture quite well. One of the people in the group, Chris, had his 21 bday on tues. so we all went to the pub for that and had bday cake. On the very last night the tutors came out with us and it was heaps of fun. One of the tutors, Helen, did the worm. Today we went the the ocean side of the island and I saw my first Kangaroo!!! It was so crazy I felt like I was at a zoo. The other side of the island was beautiful. We saw another sea turtle and went playing on the beach. We saw some bottleneck jellys and this really cool nudibranch. A nudibranch is a kind of sea slug and it feeds on the tentacles of the jellys. The stinging cells of the Jelly are called nematocysts and this type of nudibrach ingests the nematocysts without firing them, then uses them to catch its own prey!!! It so amazing! After our walk around the coast we went to the best gelato place I have ever been too and they had PASSIONFRUIT GELATO!! I had 3 scoops. We also saw some dolphins playing in the waves. After our beach walk we went bodysurfing and frolicking in the ocean for an hour then had a picnic on the beach. This weekend the largest festival of the year in Queensland, called the river festival, is happening. Apparently it is a amazing and they fire tons of fireworks simultaneously and then a jet flies over the city and releases its fuel causing a huge fireball. So that should be pretty cool. Tomorrow we are going to an animal sanctuary where we can hold koalas and kangaroos!! Grad school in Australia seems more inviting by the day.........

Check out photos here:
http://s525.photobucket.com/albums/cc335/USGS08/Straddie/