Straddie and Moreton Bay Trip 3/13-3/15

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March 15th 2009

Published: March 15th 2009

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Rob S

Random Photo

This is a random picture I took from my King's balcony a couple days before the trip. The sunset was nice. Ooo look at the skyline.

Fri March 13- This weekend was the first of two weekends which I’ll be going on trips with my Australian Marine Ecosystems class. We went to the Moreton Bay Research Center on North Stradbroke Island. The day started early, we met at the main UQ bus stop at 7am to catch a ferry. There were 58 students from the class on this one particular trip. Anyway, we took about an hr and a half bus ride to get to the ferry (mainly because of traffic). When we got to the ferry we were surprised. We had figured we’d be unloading our bags and carrying them onto the ferry which would transport us to the island and we’d be picked up there. No such thing happened. This was one of the ferries where you drive right onto the barge and it takes you across. I was entertained because it was my first time on something like it, as were many of the other kids. We had heard of those types of ferries but hadn’t ever been on one. The one possible obstacle to the entire trip everyone was focused on was the weather. A cyclone had just been in the area and

Ferry

A view from the car ferry

the clouds were pretty ominous. It sprinkled on us a little bit on the ferry. With the kind of luck I have, I figured we were screwed and the trip would be a washout. After about a 45 minute ferry ride we reached North Stradbroke, loaded back onto the bus, and drove off onto land. About a 5 minute bus ride took us to the research station and we piled into the big lecture hall. We went over the itinerary for the weekend, some housekeeping issues (room selection, bedding, etc), and then they proceeded to bring up a slide on the computer outlining everything we may encounter which can kill us. The one in particular they mentioned which could have us 6 feet under in about 30 minutes was the blue ringed octopus. This thing was tiny, but nasty. They also talked about stone fish, sting rays (not so much kill us as severely injure), scorpion fish, etc. “Not to worry,” the research lady said, “we don’t have any salt water crocodiles here.” Really comforting after she went over everything else which could kill us. She also told us to make sure we shuffled our feet so the animals get

Ferry

A view from the car ferry

out of the way when we were in the water, except she happily added that stonefish don’t move. Again, comforting. After our pleasant introduction into the things which were going to kill us, the tutors we’d be working with introduced themselves, and then we moved on to picking our rooms. We had 10 Dickinson students on the trip, and we all decided it would be best if we roomed together so nothing would go missing. The one problem was that rooms were divided into 4 person rooms and 8 person rooms. There were only 3 guys on the trip and 7 girls. Dave and Matt thought it would be funny to stick me with the girls, so before I could say anything they both volunteered to live with these 2 other kids. So our room ended up 7 girls and me. It was actually pretty funny minus the fact I was one of the last ones in the room so I ended up with a top bunk. This top bunk naturally was one of the tallest bunk beds I’ve ever seen. Not only that but it had metal stairs which were straight up and down which made standing on them

Ferry

A view from the car ferry

extremely uncomfortable. I suck at making beds as it is, imagine how making my bed went for me 7 feet in the air with nothing to stand on. After we got settled into our rooms, we headed into the kitchen for some “morning tea”, essentially a biscuit with jelly, and then back into the lecture rooms. Following a quick briefing, we headed out armed with sunscreen, water shoes, a bathing suit, sunglasses, and a hat. With Professor Tibbetts and the other lady professor who works at the research station (I can’t remember her name to save my life, but I didn’t really hear her when she said it the first time because I was transfixed on the slide of 3 inch creatures which could kill me), we went down to the small beach in front of the research station. When we got to the beach, Professor Tibbetts introduced us to seine fishing, this involves fishing with a 50m long 6mm thick nylon net. I’ll explain the procedure for this later on, it ends up being important. Anyway, the group doing the seine fishing ended up catching a decent number of fish, including a couple big stingrays and a pretty big

Photo 5

variety of fish. Tibbetts went through the different fish which was fun, and then the LP (lady professor) talked about the land. It was funny, while the seine net was being pulled in the Pelicans in the area made a beeline for the net. Then they parked themselves about 15 yards away from where we were unloading it. They knew lunch was a freebee. Unfortunately there was an oil spill this past week not very far off the shore somewhere along Stradbroke, so the Pelicans had oil on them. It was definitely sad to see. They seemed to be doing ok at the time but if they’re still alive now is anyone’s guess. Back to the weather, as we were finishing up to head to lunch the sky decided to open up on us, drenching everyone. Luckily it was the last we’d see of clouds or rain for the rest of the weekend. After lunch we headed back into the lecture hall. This would end up being the pivotal moment of the weekend. This was when we would pick our tutors to work with on a project. I had remembered from the introduction that Adrian was the fish guy so

Moreton Bay

Here they are, before they realized the seine net was out

when we were dismissed to find one I immediately headed for him. Each tutor group had about 10 kids in it, and we were to think of 2 different hypotheses to test which we would then break down into teams of 5 to present to the rest of the class. Until then, the entire group along with the tutors and professors headed down to a rock bed to walk through during low tide to explore. We walked through a rock bed, a grass bed, and a sand bed, and we observed some of the different animals that were there, exposed, or caught in small tidal pools until the high tide came back in. We saw some neat things. We saw some coral, some sponges (one of which is highly poisonous-go figure), a bunch of crabs, worms, hermit crabs, and to take the cake, 3 of those blue ringed octopi. Not only did we find them, but Adrian took a stick in an attempt to agitate it. When it’s agitated it flashes these blue rings around its body to warn whatever is around it. It was really neat, but they were tiny, so it was a little disconcerting to the casual

Moreton Bay

Sea birds

biology student. We had on our water shoes but the water shoes aren’t full proof if we accidently stepped on one. The last thing we saw was thousands of soldier crabs, which all march together during low tide across the sand. They were broken up into regiments (or so it seemed). I felt like I was watching the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. At this point we headed back in, had a chance to shower, and met for dinner. After dinner we sat down with our tutor groups and it was time to brainstorm. I had been thinking about it all day, and because we were with the fish guy, I figured the best thing to do would be seine fishing. It was something different which none of us had ever done before, and I wanted to do something we’d remember. So my suggestion was to test the theory that we’d catch more predatory fish at night than during the day. The rest of the group really liked the idea, and the second hypothesis was there would be more diversity of fish during the night than during the day. The one wrinkle in these approaches: we had to catch the

Moreton Bay

Here comes the march of the Pelicans towards the seine net

fish at night, which means we’d have to be seine netting in pitch black, which means we’d be chest high in water causing commotion in the water i.e. fish struggling, commotion leads to big sharks investigating, big sharks lead to dead humans. Everyone thought it was a cool idea at first, but then we had about an hour and a half to think about it. I was personally dead set on going, but the rest of the group started to waver. I just kept telling them we were going out to face our destiny. At about 9pm Adrian let us know the tide was good, so it was time, Us vs. Poseidon. We had to do three pulls, each pull including set up, drag in, and fish sorting takes about an hour. Seine netting goes like this: 6 people take out this big net in a bin, along with the tutor (in our case 2 tutors because it was dark and no one knew what the heck we were doing). The net has a side with floats, and a side with lead to keep it weighed down. There are 3 loops on each side of the net connected to string,

Moreton Bay

This was my attempt to squeeze through and take a picture of what we were catching during the first day. It was tough to get through and I wasn't going to fight for a picture of a fish, so this was my one and only attempt.

and 3 loops at the top. The loops on the bottom go around your foot, and you take the top loops in your hand. Then everyone has to move in unison, pulling the net along with their feet and hands. It’s really hard work. The net weighs a couple hundred pounds, and when you start catching fish, it gets heavier. Add that with the drag from the water and by the time you get to shore you’re pretty tired. Because we had 10 people, each person had to go out on 2 pulls. I was on the net team for pulls 2 and 3. There were some extra people from the research station down on the beach to help us with flashlights, but overall it was pretty much us doing everything. On the first pull Adrian IDed the fish for us and taught us how to do it. He also taught people how to grab the fish. I knew how to do it so once I knew what each fish was I jumped right in. I grabbed the predators with the teeth (especially these aggressive ones called LongToms, they weren’t very big, but they were nasty. After Tibbetts tried to

Point Lookout

One of the first views as we started to head towards the gorge walk

let one go in the afternoon it tried to attack him) behind the head, and made sure I kept the fish with the pointy fins slicked back so the fins wouldn’t pop out and poke me. We caught all sorts of things, Garfish, LongToms, Bream, Whiting, a couple different rays, including a couple really big ones, Hardyheads, Pufferfish (or Toadfish), Cuttlefish, Silver Biddys, and a few others. We caught over 860 fish in the 3 pulls, including 59 predators. We finally finished up around 1230. I will say this, it was extremely eerie being out in the water at night, but it was an experience. I’m not sure I’d be so willing to do it again, but it was definitely worth doing once.

Sat March 14th- My group woke up at 9am to go out and finish our research. We had to keep the tides consistent so we were on the beach by 930 to do the 3 day time pulls. For some reason the day time pulls were a lot more physically draining, probably because we weren’t going off adrenaline trying not to be attacked by a shark. We caught just over 100 fish and only 7 predators.

Point Lookout

A view of one of the beaches

We figured out the explanation, which was just a happy little The Lion King circle of life moment. Plankton surface during the evening, which brings the little fish out to eat the plankton. The little fish are then eaten by the bigger fish, ladies and gentleman, the circle of life. After our research was finished we had to prepare the presentation. It wasn’t graded, so it was pretty low key. I will say this, after seeing other groups counting hermit crabs and sponges; we definitely had the coolest presentation and project. We did something which actually required work. After it was over we asked Adrian what the real risks were of something big being in the bay and where they would be. He told us about 150 yards away from where we were was the channel, which if something big was around it would probably be there. He also told us that he purposely had us do the seining about 50 yards from where we had in the afternoon for that reason because the big animals aren’t as skittish, and would have been more than willing to check out what was going on. I’m not entirely convinced the 50m distance

Point Lookout

A view from one of the beaches

really helped us, but sharks don’t just attack to attack, so I’m sure it would have been fine either way. It was pretty cool to hear him talk about it after though. We finished the night by going to the local pub. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take any pictures because I was physically doing the field work and didn't want to ruin my camera.

Sun March 15th- We woke up at 7 for breakfast and then cleaned and packed up the rooms. We loaded up the bus and it drove us to Point Lookout, a rocky gorge area further up the island. We were told to bring sunscreen, a beach towel, a water bottle, and good walking shoes. I decided to go with my tennis shoes which later on I found out would be a good idea. What we saw was nothing short of spectacular. We did the gorge walk which started around a high, rocky cliff around and wound around the rocks and beach. We were able to walk on the rocks themselves, but you definitely had to be careful. There was no ledge, nor were there specific walking places on the rocks themselves. It was a

Point Lookout

Same beach

long way down to the ocean if you were stupid, got too close, and took a bad step. It wasn’t as dangerous as I just made it sound, but you had to be careful. I have pictures of it, and I feel like those do it more justice than I ever could explaining. We saw a few sea turtles, manta rays (which were huge) and dolphins from above. The one interesting tidbit, the shark defense at these beaches was to place a bunch of meat on lines far off the coast to attract the sharks to that area instead. I had heard of shark nets, but never shark feed. After we made our way around the gorge we stopped at a gelati shop (not like gelatis in the US, they’re similar but not the same). After the gelati shop we made our way down to a beach, and then proceeded to mountain goat our way to the next beach. By mountain goat I mean we literally did a rocky shore walk, but we had to make our way over, across, and down large rocks and literally small cliffs. It was pretty hairy at times, and how no one fell is

Point Lookout

Me at one of the first stops we had. Below me was the Manta Rays.

beyond me. No one would have died mind you, but definitely been cut up. The tallest thing we climbed up and down was about 15 feet, but it was relatively treacherous. I was glad I had went with my tennis shoes, and I had actually managed to keep them dry until about the last 10 minutes of the walk, where a rogue wave washed over our feet before we could jump out of the way. It was a bummer but, win some, lose some. By the time we left the beach they were just about dry anyway. We finished the rocky shore walk and had lunch. The walk had lead us to a guarded beach, and we were given about 2 hours to spend the afternoon on the beach. The surf was pretty rough, but while everyone jumped in I decided to take a different approach. I went for a walk instead and took some time to myself. I walked probably about ¼ of a mile down the beach to a place that was really interesting. There was a protruding rock peninsula (it’s the best way I can describe it) so what was happening at that end of the beach

Point Lookout

A view of the ocean

the waves were deflecting back towards the water. It created its own little tide pool area which was a lot calmer than the rest of the surf. The water was clear, and there were a lot of fish swimming around. It was more tranquil, and a good place to take a little time. After about 20 minutes Dave decided to do the same thing I did, so he showed up and we talked. I noticed somewhere throughout the conversation that the water was perfect for skipping shells and stones. I figured since Pap never quite made it to Australia, while I was there I should skip a few for him. I told Dave the story of how the old man, Pap, and I would skip rocks in the morning during vacations in Nag’s Head. He told me some stories of his family, and we actually spent about an hour down at the other end of the beach by ourselves until a few girls from the class came down and we talked to them. It was nice to step away for awhile. We made our way back down the beach, relaxed, went in the surf, and then headed home. We got

Point Lookout

Ocean and rocky shore/gorge

back to school around 530pm our time. I will say this much, in Australia, it doesn’t matter how many times or how much you put sunscreen on, you are going to get burnt. The question is not if, but the degree of severity. I did pretty well, but I didn’t escape unscathed. Ask my legs and around my collar how they feel. I will say this, I am tanning up nicely.

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