Shore Day

Started Wednesday morning with a short run. After brekky Cindy set me to the task of renaming photo files of fish pictures. For each striped trumpeter in the study there was a picture of the deceased fish with its stomach contents and a separate pic of the contents. Each pic needed to be renamed with a specific format. It sounds tedious, but it was actually pretty interesting to see what these fish had been eating.

The striped trumpeter is omnivorous, but eats mostly sea grass. Among the pictures I went through today, there was one that was particularly interesting. This tiny fish had eaten a healthy(?) amount of snake, or at least snake skin.

Greg and Sean were working on the specimens that we collected yesterday.

They were removing liver and muscle tissue.

They were also collecting and labeling the otoliths (tiny ear bones).

The fish bodies are then given to a local fellow to use as bait.

In the morning G&S had been grinding up fins from last week's catches.

In the evening we drove over to Denham for a barbeque. A variety of fish and meat on the barbie and lots of salads. And music! Guitars, digeridoo,drums, egg shakers and tambourine. It was tons of fun. There were some people with talent, among them Greg on drums, Shannon's voice and Matt's song writing. He played guitar and sang a beautiful song called Butterfly and another remarkable song about being proud to be an Aussie. My meager musical contribution was egg shaker accompaniment. Too much fun!

A hearty amount of wine and beer was consumed. Aussies seem a lot more committed to the designated driver concept than we do in the US, and we had a safe ride back to a friend's house in Denham where Cindy, Greg and I spent the night and drove home in the morning.

Thursday was another shore day due to wind. But it was sunny and lovely. I went over data for Cindy, double checking that the data that was recorded in the field was entered accurately into the spread sheet. Also making sure abbreviations and common names and other fields are standardized. It's fun being part of real science!

Went out to dinner in Denham. The restaurant is called the Old Pearler. The bricks to build the restaurant were carved from the shores of shell beach. The bricks are totally made of small white shells which have been naturally cemented together. I had rock lobster for dinner. Also known as crayfish. It was super yummy.

During our shore days I saw my first live kangaroo, an emu crossing the road and two echidnas!