Visit to Lizard Island Research Station
24 June 2012 | Lizard Island QLD Australia
John
We had a reasonably comfortable night last night. The wind blew hard at times with gusts over 30 kts but we are well protected from the seas in this anchorage so were comfortable. The holding is very good here in Watson bay so by morning we were confident enough of the set of our anchor to do some exploring.
This morning we launched the dingy. That is always an adventure in winds over 20 kts but we managed to get it into the water without any damage to the dingy or the paint on the topside wood work.
Monday is the day when the Marine Research Station here on the Island offers free tours of the facility for visiting yachties. We decided to go.
There were two ways to get there. One involved a dingy ride of about 1.5 kilometers but required that we go outside the sheltered anchorage area. Since we still don't have 100% confidence in our outboard we decided to take option B which was a 2.5 kilometer walk along the dirt roads on the island. Having the outboard quit in 25 knots of wind would have been inconvenient, to say the least.
We took the dingy to shore by our anchorage and tied it to a picnic bench on the beach and then hiked over to the research station. The tour started at 11AM.
The tour was enjoyable and informative.
The research station is operated by the Australia Museum in Sydney and is the northernmost research facility on the Great Barrier Reef. The station is available to visiting scientists and also educational institutions to use for training. The scientists and educational institutions pay for the use of the facility which is one of the ways the place is funded. There are also a few enduring fellowships for scientists and students and funding provided by the Lizard Island Research Foundation. Tee shirts were $39 so we took a pass.
This week the Research Station were hosts of a college group of Geelong (near Melbourne). Judging by the syllabus on the table in front of us in the seminar room I would guess they were 14-15 year old kids. They had all learned to snorkel in a pool and had never looked below the surface of the ocean. They had to meet certain snorkeling proficiency criteria before they were allowed to participate in this adventure. As we were getting in our dingy to head to the tour there were several boats of kids being discharged into the water along the side of the bay we are anchored in. I can only imagine the thrill these kids must have gotten from seeing undersea life for the first time. I'm sure all their practice sessions in the pool felt like they were worth it in the first 10 seconds of their real snorkel experience.
The Great Barrier Reef impresses me every time we go snorkeling and I grew up snorkeling in Florida.
Later we saw the kids running around the research station shivering from their snorkeling experience.
We were shown a very well produced video about the Research Station and its history. The present day station has reasonable living quarters, a modern kitchen and extensive laboratory facilities including the obligatory running sea water to the tanks they need to keep their study specimens alive and healthy.
We had a chance to hear a graduate student describe her research project that involved studying how a common species of fish adapted to many different environments ranging from the strong surge of the windward side of reefs to the relatively calm environment on the leeward side. She had several tanks set up to raise populations of fish that were collected from both environments as juveniles. In some tanks the surge of the windward side was simulated and in the others the waters were more placid. She studies things like the different fin development in the fish in different environments. She started with juveniles from all environments. labeled them with fluorescent dots of different colors and then put them together in the same tank (surgey or calm) and is watching their development differences based on the environmental conditions.
She was on her way back to the University in Canberra shortly after she spoke to us and was careful to point out that only those parts of her research project that must be done at the Research station were done here. Other aspects of her research can be done it University Laboratories that are much less expensive to maintain.
After our visit with the scientist we had some time with our guide, Tanya, looking at the various critters in the demonstration tanks.
We learned a lot of interesting things. For example, I remember seeing a TV show in the 80 about how the crown of thorn starfish were increasing in numbers and destroying habitat on the Great Barrier Reef. There was a major panic at the time but it was eventually learned that there is a 14 year cycle when the populations of crown of thorn starfish get very large and then they die out. Now they look at this animal as "the bush fire of the reef" and its multi year cycle of population grown is a natural part of the reef forming process.
There is concern that some human activity is impacting the population levels of these animals. Snapper are one of their natural predators but the people are eating snapper and over fishing is an issue. There is concern about agricultural runoff rich in fertilizers aiding the survival of juvenile crown of thorn starfish, too. The species has adapted to deal with certain levels of attrition of the young and if something happens to change the percentage surviving to adulthood.
We also learned a bit about mantis shrimp. They had one in a plastic dish pan that hid in rocks in the pan. If you put a pencil down in front of the rocks the shrimp would give it punch with its powerful foreleg. you could heard the cracking sound several feet away. Tanya told us that the velocity of this shrimp's strike is the same as that of a 22 bullet.
The US navy had just finished sponsoring a research project at the facility that was studying these strange shrimp's trinocular vision. They apparent have three pupils on each eye and are able to move their eyes in more directions than most creatures. Tanya fed the one we saw and he (or she) came out of the rocks to grab a piece of boiled shrimp that Tanya placed at the edge of the tank.
Another myth I have been carrying around since childhood was destroyed today. When I was really young I remember seeing an episode of the Buster Brown show with Andy Devine where there was a black and white short movie that involved a diver being held on the bottom of the ocean by a giant clam. He was, of course rescued by the hero of the movie. Well it turns out that you probably not hold your breath long enough to get caught by a giant clam. It takes them quite a while to discharge all the sea water they keep in their bodies and they have to do that before the can close. So they dont snap shut.
I just realized that the movie I saw was in black in white because I saw it before there was color TV. In retrospect I hope they did not waste color film making it.
There is a giant clam garden within swimming distance of where we are anchored. We plan to go see that tomorrow when the weather is supposed to be sunnier and more conducive to good visibility under the water. These giant clams can survive, grow and reproduce in filtered sea water where particulate matter has been removed. Their mantels are full of channels with photosynthetic bacteria that can keep the clam fed in the absence of plankton in the water. They live to be around 80 years old.
We also saw lots of other critters in the demonstration tank including sea urchins, star fish (bright blue) and quite a few reef fishes. It was interesting that when Tanya, our guide, offered to let one of the little kids touch the sea urchin the kids mom, by way of encouragement, said "Its like an echidna" Echidnas are the marsupial equivalent of porcupines. An Australian kid would probably no know what a porcupine is.
Our last stop on the tour was the library which was appropriately small and had mostly old books. Modern scientist don't wait for information that is important to their field to hit paper. There is internet access at the research station which gives researchers in this remote location the same quality of access to scientific publications as someone at Harvard, MIT, or Cal Tech.
If the Buster Brown show had a move predicting that sort of access to literature within my lifetime I probably would not remember it. I just remember the misinformation about giant clams.
This has turned out to be a long blog post. If it encourages anyone to come here and do the research station tour it will be worth it.