Shark Bay Day One: Fish Traps and Transects

Started the day with a short walk around on the red sandy trails with Cindy, the down to the beach where we saw dolphins. There is a huge dolphin population here. Monkey Mia (prounounced like "Maya") is known for its daily dolphin feedings. 3 times a day the dolphins come in and 5 are fed by selected guests. The water is very clear and since the whole bay is shallow (30 ft max) is is a light blue color.

We spent the whole day out on the boat yesterday. The boat's name is Cuvier, the specis name for tiger shark. Greg from Chicago and Sean from Toronto have been here for months working as research assistants in exchange for room and board. It is extremely remote here. If something breaks down, you have to figure out how to fix it on your own. We started out the day with about a 90 minute delays since the boat's GPS system would not power up. Without ever getting outwardly frustrated, Cindy and Greg trouble shot the wiring until we were up and running again.

The weather looked a bit iffy and the wind report look questionable, but we decided to give it a go and it turned into a beautiful day.

We started the day by dropping fish traps. Cindy's research is on the feeding habits of the striped trumpeter, and this was the last day of fish trapping for the winter season. Her goal was to catch 13. We dropped 9 traps total in 3 different habitats: deep, edge (of the seagrass bed) and interior (seagrass). The traps were baited with fish heads (which proved to be excellent bait fo Cindy's beloved trumpeters. When we dropped the traps, we recorded the depth, salinity and temp of the water (brrrr it was as cold as 11 C).



After the traps were dropped, we ran transect lines. This entailed driving along designated lines and recording all of the tiger shark prey we observed. We were looking for: turtles, dugongs, sea snakes, shags (pied cormorants) and dolphins within certain distances of the boat. When we spotted them we recorded GPS location of the boat, distance from the boat of the critter, number of critters, depth of water. We all took turns observing from different positions on the boat, recording the data and driving the boat. Keeping the boat on a straight line along the transect proved to be much more challenging than I expected.

After transects, we picked up the traps! My favorite fish of the day was the Weeping Toado. They puff up but are soft and o so cute.

One of the traps had about 20 striped trumpeters in it. Cindy has a permit to catch (and kill) 100 of them. The fish were dumped from the trap into a bucket.

Then Cindy used a syringe to draw blood samples from the fish. This proved to be challenging work. She succeeded about 60% of the time. If she could not get a sample, the fish was released. If blood was collected, the fish was killed, bagged and put in the “eskie” to be it could be studied later (stomach contents and tissue analysis).

In addition to trumpeters and weeping toado, we caught butter fish, and lined dotty back, a crab and spiny polychete.

There were many, many dolphins. It was so quiet out on the bay you could hear them breathing before you saw them many times. A few of them were bow riding while I was standing up at the front of the boay. One of them kept looking up at me with a wonderful dolphiny smile.