This morning I went to the Yungaburra Market, which they have in the park every 4th Saturday of the month. It was a good time, and I've certainly never seen Yungaburra so crowded before. I actually had to wait to cross the street! Anyway, I got some mangoes and avocados (am I predictable, or what?), and passed up lots of other nice produce, as I'm going back to Cairns on Monday.

I'm pretty much done with data collection now, although I still go down to see the platypuses. I wouldn't want them to think that I've abandoned them.

Thanksgiving Pizza

Well, as much as I'm enjoying Australia, their Thanksgivings leave something to be desired. But perhaps they may be excused, because they don't actually celebrate Thanksgiving here. Since there's no oven in the hostel (excepting a toaster oven in which I recently, foolishly decided to make scones), I obviously couldn't roast a bird. And the butcher was out of fish. Which pretty much exhausted my feasting options. Feeling that it was a bit too pathetic to eat a baked potato on Thanksgiving, I ordered a pizza.

The pizza man, some poor landless Italian, was delighted with my pizza, saying it was by far the most edible pizza he had made since coming to Australia (he was rather horrified with the idea of putting chicken and pineapple on pizzas). So I talked with him for awhile. He had a girlfriend in Guam, but he couldn't immigrate there. He didn't seem like a very happy fellow.

I got back to the hostel, and ate my pizza with a glass of marginally nicer than usual Australian wine. My dinner companions consisted of a bunch of drunk Danes, a plumber from Cairns with "I Heart Beer" tattooed on his arm, and an existential German chimney sweep. I kid you not. I don't think I could make that up if I tried. Feeling rather like a character from a Sartre play myself, I went to bed around eight.

I have a new favorite German word. And it is...

Schnabeltier!

Which means platypus, if you couldn't have guessed. Ray, one of the blokes who works at On the Wallaby, has started to call me Schnabeltier. Which is very clever, you see, because it could be spelled Schnabelteer, as in one who Schnabelts, or goes platypussing! I am very excited about it.

Here I am with Nico, one of my German buddies, on the giant platypus pillow at On the Wallaby.

Beware of Attack Platypus!

Mr. Kitty! Looks a bit like Mr. Stray, doesn't he?

This is Itchy the Platypus. I always see her (I'm pretty sure it's a her) scratching her head with her hind foot. They steer with their back feet, and scratching messes up her steering, so she swims in circles. Very cute. I also caught her sliding down a little waterfall.

Here's a skink. He's kind of friendly, no?

Cute Tablelands cattle.

Odds and Ends

Today I thought I'd give a little lecture on the anemone fish (a.k.a. clownfish, or Nemo). As I'm sure you know, Finding Nemo is an extremely popular Pixar film about fish on the Great Barrier Reef. As a result, tourists on the Reef have an obsession with finding anemone fish (I have seen many of them, and they're pretty cute). Finding Nemo is one of the greatest advertising ploys for ecotourism out there. But I digress. In the movie, Marlin's wife, Coral, dies or gets eaten or something, so Marlin is left to raise Nemo alone. How sad. Well, Pixar really didn't do their research on this one. Here's what would actually have happened, biologically speaking… Coral, the large, female fish, would die. Sad, but it happens. What Pixar didn't account for is that anemone fish are protandrous. In laymen's terms, this means that they are hermaphrodites whose male sex organs mature before their female organs. In clownfish, this maturation occurs only after the large, dominant female fish dies and needs to be replaced by the smaller male. Basically, when Coral died Marlin would have become a girl, and Nemo would have become the new breeding male. Sort of a raunchy tale of incestuous fish, if you ask me. Is this really appropriate for children?

I must also address the issue of Foster's Lager, as people continue to mention it to me. I have seen neither hide nor hair of Foster's during my time in Australia. I'm sure it's around somewhere, but it's certainly not ubiquitous. There is a Queensland beer called XXXX (Four X), however, that's quite common around here. The big joke is that Queenslanders are too dumb to spell beer, so they just put XXXX on the can instead. XXXX Bitter has an ad campaign claiming that it's a "Man in a Can." Oy.

I was in Cairns for over a week this time. We got there around noon on Sunday, and spent the day being relatively unproductive and generally decompressing. On Monday evening our fish papers were due, so we spent Sunday night and Monday working on those. Tuesday we started writing our big papers for Thursday evening, so those three days were pretty hectic as well. My paper was on the evolutionary advantages of the mating practices of echidnas.

Friday was a marginally less stressful day. I got up at five in the morning to go to Rusty's Market, which is amazing and has unbelievable produce, and Mara came with me. We got tons of fruit, and I had a glass of fresh-squeezed sugarcane juice (with lime, which gave it a very nice flavor). Mara had coconut milk. They lopped the top off of the coconut (a whole coconut, still in the green hull) with a meat cleaver, and put a straw in it for her. It was a bit violent, really. When we got back to the Greenhouse, we made crêpes with fresh fruit. It was a nice time. Then we had class for about an hour, just to go over some business about our research projects and our exam. Hannah and I went to a lovely little bakery/café for lunch, and I had a mini quiche and some pumpkin soup with a salad, which was very nice. I also got a beautiful gingerbread cookie to take with me. I spent the rest of the day studying for the exam, which we took on Saturday morning. And so ended stage one of our semester.

I still hadn't heard anything promising from the echidna people, so I decided to stay in Cairns until Wednesday morning, in hopes that I'd hear from them (I had a few loose ends dangling). But alas, I had no luck. Most people left for their ISPs on Sunday, with a few stragglers on Monday and Tuesday. Mara and Natasha are doing their ISPs in Cairns, so they stuck around the Greenhouse for a little while, too. But on Wednesday morning I took a bus to Atherton. It was pouring rain and I had all of my luggage, which was a bit of a pain. But the bus stop in Atherton was covered, so it was all right. Tony lives in Yungaburra, so he offered to come and pick me up at the bus station (there is no bus to Yungaburra, and Atherton is about as close as you can get with public transportation). We stopped on the way back to give extra tent stakes and a spotlight to some poor, wet bloke from the SIT program in Byron Bay, who was camping near Mareeba looking for possums or something. And then we got to On the Wallaby again.

I've been here a week now, and I've started doing my research. To quote from my project proposal, "I will be attempting to determine how creek vegetation and invertebrate composition affect platypus foraging behavior in Peterson Creek (Yungaburra, QLD)." Which basically means that I get up very early and look for platypuses (this is the correct plural of platypus, by the way, although you sometimes see people use platypus as the plural as well as the singular). And then I look for platypuses again at dusk, because they are mostly nocturnal. I'm timing how long they spend diving as opposed to cruising around on the surface, for one thing. Platypuses can't chew underwater (they don't have teeth, but they have plates of keratin in their bills that they sort of squish their prey against), so the idea is that if there are lots of invertebrates, the platypus makes a short dive and comes up to the surface to chew. If there aren't so many invertebrates, the platypus is forced to look harder for prey, and remains under the surface for longer periods. I'll also be measuring the invertebrate populations in other ways, but I won't bore you. You can read my study if you're interested.

Yungaburra is a sleepy little town, considerably smaller than Emmaus, but it's a pretty nice place. The creek and its high numbers of platypuses attract tourists, and there are a number of little places to stay. On the Wallaby runs "eco adventure tours" out of Cairns, so every day or two there's a group that comes to stay over. People come in and out here quickly, for the most part, but there's usually someone interesting to eat dinner with. There have been tons of French people and Brits here this week, for some reason. I have been sorry to discover that I have very little French left, after three years of not speaking it. The grammar is still in my brain but my vocabulary is tiny now. There was one young French woman who stayed here for a couple of nights who liked to come down and watch the platypuses with me in the early morning. And there was a cute French couple who gave me some of their mangoes.

Tony has been extraordinarily helpful to me, especially setting up some of my blocks to measure invertebrate populations. He's a very nice man. I met his kids briefly the other day, Ellie and Em (Eliana and Emmigen, but I'm not sure of the correct spelling), and they are bright and funny.

There's not a lot to do here during the day, since I don't have a car or even a bicycle, but I usually work on the non platypus-dependent parts of my study, and read, and walk around. Yesterday I got the insane notion to walk to the local cheese factory and dairy, which is about 8.5k (about 5.5 miles) from On the Wallaby. I wasn't really sure where it was, so I took the, er, scenic route there and back. But there wasn't too much traffic most of the way, and the Tablelands are very pretty. It will always be strange to me, though, to see the cattle and pastures surrounded by patches of rainforest. The Gallo Dairy has a little window where you can watch them making the cheese, and a nice cheese and chocolate shop where you can taste anything you like. I got two little pieces of cheese, a gorgonzola and one called Seven Sisters (named after seven bumpy hills on the Tablelands), which is sort of like a softer version of Gruyére. And a handful of chocolate with mango and berries. On my way out, I stopped to see the cows and found that they had a few other animals as well, including some grouchy geese, a sheep, a goat, various chickens and doves, and a pig. Trust me to travel halfway across the world to find a pig. He was a cute little barrow, black and white, and they had given him a pumpkin earlier in the day, so his snout was orange. On the walk back, I saw a confused platypus swimming in a culvert at three o'clock in the afternoon. Apparently someone forgot to tell it that it's a nocturnal animal. On the other hand, platypuses don't seem to know that they shouldn't be laying eggs, either, so maybe they're just arbitrary by nature.

Last night a couple of crazy German guys, Alex and Nico, came in with the tour group, and they were extremely amused by my fascination with platypuses. So I ate dinner with them and their tour group, and had a pleasant evening. This morning, instead of walking on my usual transect, I went on a dawn canoeing trip with the tour (they couldn't do night canoeing for the tour last night, so they offered to do an early morning one, and invited me along). We saw six platypuses (an excellent run, as I've never seen more than four in a two-hour data collection period), some wallabies and water dragons, a sleepy possum, and two tree kangaroos. The first tree kangaroo we saw was still very much awake, and we had a great view of her, so we watched her do her tree kangaroo thing until she disappeared. The German blokes were very excited. Everything they liked, they called a "great success," over and over again. They kept asking me if I had seen this animal or that animal (I'd seen everything but a wombat), and they were very jealous that I had seen echidnas. We didn't see any wombats, unfortunately, but we had a lovely time canoeing (except for Jed, the resident dog here at OTW, who insisted on coming in the boats and perching uncomfortably on the bow, howling the entire time).

And now I'm sitting on the couch upstairs, writing this and thinking about what to do today.

Saturday we went to Watson's Bay again in the morning, and looked for more fish. Becca, my snorkel buddy, and I decided on the chocolate-dip damselfish and the sergeant-major scissortail for our fish study. In the afternoon, after our lecture, we went to another reef on the exposed side of the island, called (charmingly) Washing Machine. It felt rather like being in a washing machine, actually, because it was quite a windy day. We almost went to a calmer reef, but decided that it was all right. Washing Machine was a really cool reef. It wasn't very deep until it dropped off of a coral shelf to around 15 metres. You could swim down and peer at all of the little critters hanging on the edge, which was pretty neat. I really like the yellow boxfish, which looks sort of like a bright yellow origami paper ball with fins, a snout, and brown spots. They tend to hang out in little crevices and swim around being friendly. But the current was strong, and there were some biggish waves coming back on the boats, so we got a bit cold and wet on the ride home.

Saturday night is barbeque night on Lizard Island. I was on cooking duty, so we made some potato salad with yams and a bunch of other stuff.

Sunday morning was Watson's Bay again. Beginning to notice a pattern? We went to Watson's Bay every morning until Saturday. But I get ahead of myself. Sunday afternoon we went to a beautiful reef called Horseshoe. Horseshoe is a special reef, because circumstances conspired to make it one of the most pristine reefs in the world. It's quite sheltered by the island, and so it hasn't had much damage from wave energy or big storms or anything. And, during the crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks in the past, Lyle and his wife Ann swam around and pulled all of the starfish off of the reef. Crown-of-thorns starfish are extremely spiny (it's really bad to get stuck by one, as they tend to cause infections and lost limbs), large echinoderms that eat coral. There are lots of things on the reef that eat coral, like butterfly fish, but crown-of-thorns are particularly efficient at killing coral. One starfish can easily take out several large colonies in a relatively short time. While crown-of-thorns are naturally occurring, something (probably that dastardly global warming) has been causing outbreaks of them along the reef, which is seriously damaging coral structure.

I could continue to give a day-by-day account of the rest of the Lizard Island trip, but it might grow a bit tedious. I don't mean to imply that the trip was in any way tedious. On the contrary, it was extremely enjoyable and fascinating. But it is impossible for me to describe with words how different each of the reefs was, and how incredibly vast the diversity and beauty of the reef was in each location. Suffice to say that we visited a new reef each afternoon, except Thursday, when we returned to Horseshoe.

I saw all sorts of incredible critters over the course of the week. On the second Thursday, I swam with a hawk-billed sea turtle, and touched its shell. They are amazing animals. They look like they're flying through the water. I also saw a quickly vanishing octopus, a few cuttlefish, and many squids. Squids are adorable. There was a little submarine (probably not the term for a group of squids, but it seems appropriate) of squids that I often saw in Watson's Bay, composed of three small, pink ones. But one day I saw eleven squids!

There are quite a lot of giant clams in Watson's Bay. They come in all sizes, but the giant ones (which are not at all uncommon) are about a metre long, if not a little larger. Clams are also very colorful critters. Although their shells are clam-colored, the clam part of the clam comes in all sorts of colors and patterns. Sometimes they have Maori-looking line patterns on them, or polka dots, or stripes. Sometimes they are fluorescent, and almost look like that dichroic glass that my mom likes. They can be pink, purple, green, blue, yellow, and all sorts of colors in between, although they aren't usually red or orange (red disappears after 3 metres in depth, by the way, because there's not enough light). They're really not very clammy at all.

The reason that I am going to great pains to describe giant clams has to do with my research on Wednesday morning. Becca and I were minding our own business, swimming along and laying out a measuring tape across a 25 metre transect of the coral and rubble zone. We were collecting data on the benthic composition of the reef, to use for our fish project, so every 50 centimetres we recorded what was under the measuring tape. Relatively straightforward. So we finished with our transect, and started to reel up the tape, when we realized that it was stuck on something. Something that seemed to have a bit more of a hold on it than the piece of coral we had attached the end to. Hmmm. We swam along the tape until we came to… a giant clam. Not just any giant clam, but a giant clam who had decided to close around our measuring tape. A giant clam which didn't particularly wish to relinquish its hold on our measuring tape, either. We were afraid to pull the loose end through the clam, because there was a pointy metal clip at the end of the tape, which would have torn up the poor clam. We waited half an hour. And it didn't open. Finally, we had to call Darren and have him come and scoot the metal end out, but it took some doing. The insolent clam seemed fine, although it refused to apologize, and we had rather an amusing excuse for failing to finish our data collection.

Other reefs that we visited included the reefs off of Pelfry and South islands, Mermaid Cove, and Vicky's (a.k.a. "Big Bikkies," which means lots of money in Australian). I always looked forward to the afternoon snorkel as a break from data collection and a nice swim, as well as a slightly longer boat ride. I loved being in boats all the time. Would have been fun to have a sailboat, though (although totally impractical for the research station, of course).

Both Tony and Shannon had birthdays during the trip, so I got on cake duty twice, which was nice. Tony's was chocolate with crushed Tim Tams, and Shannon's was carrot cake with ginger and raisins (she's one of those strange people who doesn't like chocolate). Had to use boxed cakes, unfortunately, but they came out all right. Shannon turned twenty-one, and was rather eager to celebrate, so someone got the bright idea to walk to the only bar on the island (that is, the only bar we're allowed to go to––I'm sure the resort has several). As it turns out, the only bar on the island is the Marlin Bar, which is for the workers at the resort. So we all set out on the sand roads, and walked about three kilometres until we got to the Marlin Bar. There was one other woman in the place. But, the intrepid SIT students were not cowed, and in we went. Karen and I were both pretty tired at this point, so we just had a gin and tonic and chatted for a bit, before making our excuses and heading off home, in the dark and pouring rain. Never before (and never again) have I walked six kilometres for a gin and tonic. They didn't even have any limes.

Saturday morning we got up and, atypically, didn't go to Watson's Bay. Well, that's not entirely a true statement. We got in the boats, drove to Watson's Bay, and then got off at the beach instead of snorkeling. We got on the path up to Cook's Look, the highest point on the island and a bit of a climb. The story goes that, after Captain Cook landed (he crashed on the reef coming in and had to get the ship fixed), he had rather a tough time finding a way back into open ocean again, because of the uncharted reef. So, he landed on Lizard Island and climbed the peak. It was too foggy for him to see anything, so he stayed up there for a few days until it was clear enough to see a gap in the reef. It's actually quite believable. The view from the top is absolutely incredible (I didn't take my camera because it was pouring rain on and off, but I'll try to get a photo from someone), and you can see all of Lizard, Pelfry, and South Islands (Pelfry and South are tiny islands right next to Lizard), as well as a few miles of reef.

When we got down from the climb we went snorkeling in the Clam Gardens, which is basically right in the middle of all the fancy boats from the resort. We had another Saturday evening barbeque (I was on dinner duty again), and went to bed. And Sunday morning we caught our planes and flew out, back to Cairns, our lab reports, papers, and exam.