Nocturnal Noodlings

Right then, here are some night-related shots. Here's a picture of a nocturnal bat that Jess, one of my professors, caught in a bat trap. We measured its forearm length, fed it some honey water, and then set it free. I got to keep one in my shirt (in its bag, of course) to keep it warm. They loose body heat really quickly when they aren't flying.

For this one, I saw the light coming from the moon coming through this tree and decided to take a long exposure. For some reason this picture looks great on my computer but really bad on the CRS's lab computer... really dark. Basically, if it looks bad to you, I'm sorry, but I really like this picture.
Same deal. This is a picture of the stars, but it looks completely black on my screen in the lab. Oh well. You can see MILLIONS of stars out here on a clear night. It's exactly like when I went out to the Canyonlands a couple of years back... really incredible. When you're away from light pollution, you really can see how ancient people found pictures and characters in the stars... there was just so much more to work with before the electric light came into play! Anyway, sorry if you can't see them. I tried.

More to come! Next: My adventures in Chillagoe!

Good times

The good times are still a-rollin' down in Queensland, that's fo-sho. We went to lake Barrine a while ago on an excellently beautiful day, and I got a pretty nice picture of a spiderweb (left). These things are absolutely everywhere... it's not uncommon for me to walk through six or seven each morning to get to the center from my cabin. It used to bother me a little, but now I just think "hey, it's just silk anyway". I got a pretty good panorama at the lake, but it was too large to upload (21 images... it's a monster).
Here's a palm with fruit that we saw at the lake. I like how one side has no fruit and the other side is just fruiting. It looks like a set of lungs.
Here's a nice picture of a cane toad. This one was about 8-10 inches long. They're everywhere.
Long exposure of me doodling around with some fire on a stick.
We decided to have a campfire, which was really nice. We played games and sang Beatles songs and had a great time. I like this one with people's feet in it... it's a long exposure, so Colin's feet look sort of crazy.


MORE TO COME!!

An oasis in a vast dry country.

Well, it's been a fruitful couple of days. I've had a lot of oppertunites to take some pretty good pictures, and I'm happy with the ones I've posted below. Enjoy them... I'm going to go take more.



Not sure what kind of butterfly this is, and it's sort of overexposed in areas, but I like the contrast.



Larvae of a Ulysses Butterfly.



A dragonfly. There are lots here... again, they don't like to sit still for photographers, so I got lucky this time.



A neat-looking flower... very weird.



Cathedral fig. This is the largest strangler fig in the area, and it's beautiful. Doug and Syb, two aboriginal people I've met here, told us that this used to be a courthouse and a place of punishment forbidden to children. They used to climb up to the top with picnics when they were young despite the rule.



A male Australian (Cairns) Birdwing. The females aren't very brightly colored. This is my first decent photo of a butterfly here. They regularly flutter around everywhere, but they never ever sit still for long. This one was flirting with me though, it kept flying away and then coming back to me; maybe it liked the colors I was wearing. By the way, this is another one of those insects here that's as big as your face... it's Australia's largest endemic species of butterfly.




A fungal reproductive body. It attracts flies, which spread spores to other areas that (hopefully) become another fungus somewhere else. I was lucky to find this one, these things tend to emerge and disappear within a couple of hours.




Ants herding aphids on the underside of leaves. For those of you who don't know, ants regularly herd aphids like humans herd cattle. They drink sugary sap from plants and then extrude droplets of honeydew for the ants to drink. In return, the ants give them protection from beetles, who love eating them. It's kind of like the mafia. This is a mutualism that has existed for millions of years.



Two very picturesque trees.



Very bright green lichen/moss stuff. I was a big fan.




Some funny little fruits. They look like miniature pumpkins. They were powdery and hard.






Me in the ping pong tournament. I won two rounds and made it to the finals, but Bonnie finally defeated me and I went down in a blaze of glory to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go". It was awesome.




Curtain fig. This is a big ass tree.



Spectacled flying foxes. There were literally hundreds of them in this narrow patch of Mabi 5b forest we went to visit. They make quite a racket, and it was a hot day (as always) so they were flapping their wings a little to cool themselves down. These things are about half a meter tall.




A Rainbow Skink. It was playing dead in the middle of the path. I don't know if you can see the iridescence, but this thing was absolutely beautiful and amazingly good-natured.




An Australian King Parrot. Just showed up outside of the center while I was cooking my eggs for breakfast. There were actually a few of them, but my zoom lens isn't quite good enough for me to have any better shots than this. Pity. Looks like I'll need to drop some cash on a better lens in the future.






Panorama taken near the Yungaburra Market. Every fourth Saturday, there is a farmers market and crafts fair sort of thing.. I went to it yesterday and I got a bottle of delicious Davidson Plum wine (it's a sweet dessert wine... a proper gift for my host family). I also got a small jar of local honey, and a new hat. It's sort of like the Indiana Jones hat my dad likes to wear, only the top part is made of mesh so it doesn't fill up with sweat. I like it.. it works well (i.e. protects me from the sun and keeps me cool), and it's collapsable. It was a good day for market shopping.





Here's a panorama from some high point... we had a field lecture here about the different types of forest. If you look closely, you can see a lighter-colored forest in the foreground and a darker one in the background. The reason for this is that the mountains are causing orographic rainfall (moisture hits the mountain, rises, cools, condenses, and it rains) on the darker areas, so rainforest can grow there. It's really dense, so it's darker. The lighter areas don't get as much rain, so they're dry schlerical (sp?) forest.




My friend Nate getting ready for the ping pong tournament. Just look at that grin.




A very large carnivorous water beetle. Found in the grass outside of the center.




Self portrait. I still look the same.

My day

Dear everyone,

I had a good day today. Today I had three hours of lectures. The first was a socioeconomics lecture about agriculture and tourism in the Tablelands. The second was about plate techtonics and Australia's geological history. The third was a socioeconomics lecture about agriculture and tourism in the Tablelands. See a pattern? I do. I see a waste of two out of three hours. As you can probably tell, I don't think socioeconomics is all that interesting, but I guess it's important. I'd rather let other people worry about it though.

After a delicious lunch, we hopped into the SFS vans and went to Curtain Fig, which is a gigantic strangler fig (everyone says it's about 500 years old, but I think it's older). I got some pretty good pictures which will be posted later. For anyone who doesn't know, a strangler fig is a little tree that starts growing on the branch of another tree when a bird poops out a seed onto it. It's cute and cuddly, and lives for a little while that way on the tree limb, minding its own business and not really causing many problems. After a while, its roots begin to grow longer and longer until they reach the ground. At this point, the strangler fig starts growing much much faster and its limbs and roots begin to swarm the tree on which it lives. Eventually, the original tree is completely covered and eventually dies. Because the fig doesn't withdraw any nutrients from its host tree, it can't technically be called anything but a structural parasite. In any event, after around 500 years of these shenanigans, these things can get pretty impressive. Curtain fig actually overtook a tree which then fell over onto another tree, which the fig also eventually overtook. The result is a large, triangular structure with roots hanging down in the middle, forming a curtain. It's really beautiful. I also managed to get a pretty nice picture of a bird who evidently lives inside the fig.

The other day one of my friends found a three inch carnivorous water beetle on our lawn. It's a pretty fearsome looking thing.. I got a picture or two, which I will post later. I walk on that lawn barefoot all the time; I hope I don't get pinched by one of those things. We let it go into a small pool where there were hundreds of cane toad tadpoles. I've been watching them grow, and I'm hopefully going to be able to catch and photograph some toadlets.

How could I forget! Later in the day (today), we went to another area where there were flying foxes hanging from the trees. I took MANY pictures, so you'll eventually see at least one. These things are really big! Their wingspan is about a meter! While walking on the path, someone spotted a Rainbow Skink, which I also photographed (it's a small, iridescant lizard... the iridescance was impossible to capture though... it has to be seen directly). Then I had some ice cream. Yay.

GRR I have to go and write a cane toad paper now. And maybe I'll eat a bagel. Ok bye!

More pictures

This just happens to be my classroom. A view of the Atherton Tablelands.

A nice little plant.

Another nice plant. Very powdery leaves.

Pink leaves after a storm. They're pink to warn animals not to eat them yet... when they turn green they aren't poisonous anymore.

Here's the center. Just a teensy little ranch in the middle of the forest.

Some pictures... finally!

Some pretty leaves with droplets just after a rainstorm.

I was walking by a field and these cows literally charged me. They got so close I had to take a couple of pictures.

Rainforest tree with extremely large butresses. These things are really tall. They think they're for supporting the tree in the shallow soil, and also for trapping nutrients and water.

Big spider. Huge. Absolutly the biggest one I've ever seen. Literally the size of my face. And notice that the patch of white on the front part of its body looks exactly like a skull.

Cane toads, leeches and giant spiders

I'm still here! I've decided I'm going to upload pictures or die trying. I've had to scale them down to 50%, but they'll still look ok (I think). It's true what they say... there are a ton of cane toads in Queensland. Like a lot. I'm writing a paper about them right now based on a very poorly organized experiment, and it's not going so well. Right now I'm trying to correlate (poorly) cane toad size and where they've been caught... I guess we'll see how it turns out in the end. On the plus side of things, the food here is great. I've only just realized that if I had gone to another university, I wouldn't have the home cooked meals that Iris lovingly prepares for us daily. So good.

So. Leeches. Where do I begin? There are a ton. They are little black monsters that move like inchworms along the ground until they reach your shoe. They have sensors on their butt that they use to find you by tasting the carbon dioxide, pheromones and body heat you put out. They crawl up you until they can find a bare patch of skin. Often that'll be your foot or your leg, but you can get unlucky. Some of my friends have found them in underwear. My friend Caroline found one in her buttcrack today, and another girl had one attach to her EYE the other day. Not only was it ridiculously difficult to remove, it left a pool of blood in her eye, and she now doesn't go outside without putting on goggles. Freaky, eh? I actually haven't been bit by one in a few days... I'm lucky (knock on wood). Anyway, when they attach to you, they don't like to let go until they're full of blood, at which point they just drop off. Creepy.