Directed Research... part 1

So, directed research has started. Essentially a month long research project under the direction of one of my professors. In this case, it's my favorite one, this really funny and friendly guy named Tim. I'm in a group of six kids, and we work pretty well together; I'm happy with the one I've chosen. We're working on a couple of different things, and one of those is investigating plant functional traits and how they correlate to frost tollerance. To the left is a group of harlequin beetles we found as we were collecting samples. There were hundreds of them on a single tree. Curious.












We then took a camping trip out to 40 Mile Scrub, which is a section of endangered dry rainforest that is heavily infested with Lantana. Lantana is what biologists call a "garden escape"... originally brought over to Australia as a decorative plant, it quickly invaded rainforest areas, growing quickly and forming vast thickets that choke native vegetation. A lot of effort is now being put into controling this invasive weed, and part of our project is to investigate the effectiveness of those methods. Essentially, 40 Mile Scrub is almost completely full of the stuff.

To the left, the first morning at 40 Mile Scrub, I walked outside of my tent to find two kangaroos, one was a mother with a joey in her pouch, and this was the little guy that was with her. After much difficulty trying to photograph them through bushes and trees, I eventually followed them onto an empty campsite, where they continued to graze, unbothered by my presence. It was pretty cool... if I hadn't filled my memory card, I would have stayed and taken many more pictures of them. The morning light was perfect, casting long, dramatic shadows behind them.
I saw this parrot the next morning. These things were everywhere, along with black cockatoos, flaming gallas, etc. etc. Oh, and also...

Kookaburras! Here's one that sat outside of our bungalow as we were preparing breakfast. I managed to get pretty close up.
Here we are doing research. That is a lantana thicket. It's been sprayed with an herbacidal spray, so it's all dead, but when it's alive it's way over our heads and green and thorny. We have the cube there so we can cut up and weigh a cubic meter of the stuff. we had to do that for 16 5x5 meter plots. We then counted the plants within those plots by pulling them out by hand. Backbreaking work, and it was incredibly hot.
Here we are after a job well done, posing in front of some giant termite mounds. Huzzah!
Here's a spider we saw while taking leaf and stem samples for our frost research.
And here's the elusive platypus. This is the best picture I could get... they're really small and you can't get very close to them.

After a day of hard work, a swim at lake Barrine. This is what is called a Maars, a crater formed by a volcanic explosion. It's just a random water filled crater in the middle of the Tablelands with no rivers flowing to it or away from it.