Heyyyyy all ye bloggers!!
I totally fail at blogging....because today is November whatever, after Thanksgiving and I've already been home for a week. My bad. The semester got so busy toward the end, and some things I did would be a bit repetitive to write about so I haven't posted in a while. Such is my life; so disjointed, wheeee! :)
So without further ado, here is a jumble of things that I can think of that I did over the last half of the semester in Australia:
My Coral Reef Ecology class went on a field trip to Orpheus Island for 4 days to do some coral survey work and learn about general field techniques. Orpheus was only about a 2.5 hour trip from campus, but we had to wake up at 4 in the morning ( -__- ) to do it. The bus came and picked us up, at which point we rode up to the Hinchinbrook Island ferry terminal to be picked up for the 40-minute boat trip out to the island. Once we arrived, we chose cabin rooms shared among 4 students each, then went to the cute little dining hall for breakfast. During our stay at Orpheus, we did two snorkel activities per day, each totaling about 1.5 hours in the water. Including travel to and from the reef, each activity lasted about 2+ hours each, twice a day. You can only guess how we felt on the first day after waking up at 4 am....
The activities we did mostly dealt with identifying corals to either family or genus. The Master's students designed most of the activities we did. The last day of the trip, we were allowed a "free" snorkel for 2 hours, where we just took pictures and saw whatever cool critters were out and about.
Following are some pictures of what I saw while snorkeling:
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| Acropora coral |
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| Six-banded Angelfish | |
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| parrotfish |
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| identifying corals |
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| clams (family Tridacnidae) |
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| surgeonfish |
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| Giant clam Tridacna gigas |
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| Montipora digitata |
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| starfish with a broken arm! (don't worry, it will regenerate) |
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| Honeycomb grouper |
After Orpheus, I still had half the semester to go. During this time, I wrote 4 reports for Aquaculture of Tropical Species, a big coral reef literature review that consisted of over 60 references and was about 20 pages long including figures, gave 2 presentations, went on another field trip to the Paluma rainforest and completed an assignment for that, and then took finals!
Right now I would rather bake something fun than finish writing this, so I will have to continue at another time. But you got all the important stuff, so...
We'll see you all later, hey?
-K
