Thoughts, Rants and Subliminal Suggestions

Snorkeling on Ningaloo Reef

Well then, I am going to try to add more detail for the benefit of my now quite large audience of readers!!! Hello to FIT Admissions Office and Mrs. Perkins' Sixth grade Classroom! And to you sixth graders, ignore bad grammar in here, it isn't like I'm getting a grade for this blog, be nice :-) I suppose I should mention that if anyone is insanely curious, they could email me at aperkins@fit.edu. That being said, lemme get down to the good stuff :-)

I spent the past two days snorkeling in the lovely waters of Turquoise Bay on Ningaloo Reef. The bay is aptly named, ahhh, turquoise water...... We arrived at the beach yesterday and gathered to organize our research projects that we will be completing here on the reef. Brenda and I will be doing focal follows of parrotfish on the reef. This means that we will be picking an individual parrotfish and following it around for about 5 minutes and recording what it eats, where it swims and the coral it swims to. Once this data is collected Brenda and I will be looking at all of the information and putting together a presentation for the whole group once we reach Broome. These can be totally informal and our plan right now is to make a childrens book in the theme of Dr. Seuss called, A Day in the Life of a Parrotfish. That should be great!

Anyway, back to the reef. The water was wonderfully warm, especially compared to ocean water in New England, that stuff is cold! I swam out to the coral reef to find some parrotfish and I see a coral outcropping. I look down into the coral and immediately see an octopus! It was brown with some white spots so it would blend in with the rock. I later identified it as a Common Reef Octopus. I continued swimming around and saw a sea turtle as well! Unfortunately, it swam away too quickly for me to get a photograph. I explored the rest of the reef and then came out for a lunch break. We went to a second part of the beach after lunch but there was more surf, although less current. Because of the constant pounding from the waves the coral was not as abundant although I did find a parrotfish that was about 2 feet long! I followed this fish for about 15 minutes as it swam from isolated coral to isolated coral. At each coral head the huge fish was chased away by 5 inch damselfish! They were fierce! The damselfish were guarding their food. Damselfish actually farm algae on dead coral so that they always have food and they chase away any other animal that they perceive as a threat to their food supply. Sometimes these fish will attack photographers lenses when they get too close! After swimming there for a bit we returned to our original spot. Most people chose to 'thermoregulate' i.e. suntan, but I chose to go back out in the water and look for the sharks and sea turtles that other people had seen. While I didn't see any of those animals, I did see some awesome giant clams! One was even 2 feet long! They had huge incurrent and excurrent siphons that pulled water in and out to get food. We were able to tickle their colorful mantle!

The next day (today for me, add 12 hours!), we went back to Turquoise Bay to keep working on our research projects. I saw two more octopodes (octopus plural, pronounced octo-po-dees) Both were red. One was hiding in a crevice in the coral and the other was sitting on the sand! The one on the sand stared at me for a while and I stared back. Then, I tried to reach out and touch it and the octopus inked me and swam away to a hole where it hid! It didn't have much ink and the ink got nowhere near me. It was really cool! After following a couple more parrotfish I decided to swim around the reef and see what I could see. I saw another sea turtle and this one let me swim up to it and take some close pictures! Then, as it was swimming away, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye and I turned and saw a shark!!! It was a black tip Australian reef shark, 5-6 feet long and about 20 feet away from me!! I was so excited!!!! Then I realized that it might not be a good idea to be out alone on the reef with a shark....soooooo.....I started back for shore. But we know that I must be okay since I'm writing this blog!!! I saw some people who were from our group and started swimming towards them when I saw another flash of movement and there was ANOTHER blacktip!!!! My day was totally made! A couple minutes later I was shown a completely white stingray rustling up some food in the sand. At that point it was time to meet with the rest of the group and eat lunch so I headed in. While we were eating Dr. Shenker gave us a short lecture on the community structure of the coral reef. I love lectures like that, sitting in my bathing suit and scuba booties under a pavilion while listening to the lecture and the waves crashing on the reef. I'm really learning a lot!

Matt Scripter, our GSA (graduate student assistant) is pretty wild. I'm in the van that he's driving. This makes for some fun times, take today for example. We were driving through the national park, coming back from the beach when Matt suddenly shouts "EMU!!!!!", stops the van, jumps out and runs across the road and into the bush. I scramble for my camera since he wanted shots of it (so did I, I must admit) and lean across Diane and yank open the window. When emus run, it is a hilarious sight. They look like an ostrich and their bushy butt shakes back and forth as they run and their heads bob up and down. Luckily for Matt and the emu, the emu was faster and got away. He tried this yesterday too, at the goading of the rest of the van, only with a FLOCK of emus. Thank goodness today was only one. We continue on in the van when he suddenly stops again, leaps out of the van and races back up the road where we came from. I turn around only to see him crouched on the ground, not moving. All of a sudden he springs forward and leaps up triumphantly holding something but we're so far away we can't tell what it is. He ran back to the van and lo and behold he's holding a small lizard called a Central Netted Dragon. It was so cute! And very very tame it seemed. I even got to hold it! Matt has also caught another lizard called a horny devil, on the road out of Kalbarri. We have fun with Matt.

Tomorrow we'll be going snorkelling again, then hopefully hiking up into some of the canyons and getting some nice views. Unfortunately, it's raining like crazy right now and the trail might be washed out. This is the first time it's rained since we've been in southern Australia but we are getting into the tropics zone. That's all for now!

posted by Amy M @ 9:11 AM