Lady Elliot Island Field Trip

(Photo courtesy of Melissa G.)


Well, I put off writing an entry for my Lady Elliot Island field trip until I could steal a sufficient amount of pictures from other people. (My camera ran out of batteries before I even got to the island and I forgot my charger. More specifically, I forgot the adaptor that allowed me to plug my charger into an Australian wall.) Thanks to some Wash U folk and the class website, I now have a collection of pictures that are way better than any I could have taken.
The field trip was four days of absolute bliss with some occasional moments of education sprinkled in. Originally, my Marine Biology class was supposed to go to Heron Island, a research station owned by the university, for our Great Barrier Reef field trip. Unfortunately, two weeks before we were supposed to leave, the entire research station burned down! We all assumed the trip would be cancelled, but amazingly they booked us at Lady Elliot Island instead. Lady Elliot Island is a resort island at the very Southern end of the Great Barrier Reef surrounded by reef and only accessible by small plane. Hello four days of tropical vacation.
We spent most of the time on the island snorkeling on the reef. It was by far the best snorkeling I’ve ever done. We saw manta rays, black-tip reef sharks, tiger sharks, and lots of pretty fishies and corals. I also saw a bunch of turtles. One was twice my size and swam right by me! It was great snorkeling with the experts (my teachers) who could point out the different animals. We also went walking on the shallow reef flat in low tide where we could look at the corals up close when we weren’t busy avoiding stepping on sea cucumbers.
Part of our trip involved conducting a “field study.” My group chose to do a project on Linckia laevigata, a blue sea star. It was chosen primarily for the fact that it didn’t move. Sea cucumbers also fit this criterion, but the sea stars were prettier and didn’t squirt you in the face when you picked them up. The project involved finding sea stars and measuring them in two areas: the reef flat and the reef rim. We waited for the tide to go down. Then armed only with a clear ruler and a notebook, we went in search for the elusive Linckia laevigata. As it turns out, the clear ruler was the fatal flaw in our experimental design- we only had one and we kept losing it in the water when we tried to throw it to each other across the reef. Luckily, we managed to overcome this challenge (after a fair bit of searching and cursing), and found that the sea stars were, on average, bigger in the reef flat. Why this occurs or even if this matters were, of course, beyond the scope of our study. Still, I feel proud to have added this invaluable piece of knowledge to the field of marine biology.
All in all, it was a successful trip! I can’t believe this is school…


Our plane. (Photo courtesy of Melissa G.)




Lady Elliot Island. (Note how the runway is the entire length of the island. Glad we didn't overshoot...)
(Photo courtesy of Melissa G.)




Begin tropical (educational) vacation. (Photo courtesy of Melissa G.)




(Photo courtesy of Mike G.)




Coral sand beach. Owie.
























Black tip reef shark.




Turtle! We really were that close!




Reef flat at low tide. (Photo courtesy of Melissa G.)




Educational reef walk.




The elusive Linckia laevigata.




Clam. (Photo courtesy of Melissa G.)




Lady Elliot was a nesting site for many turtles. They were hatching while we were there! Unfortunately, some of them got confused by the lights on the island, and started wandering towards the land instead of into the sea. This is one of the saved wandering turtles.




The turtles have to run down the sand into the water themselves in order to imprint the beach they were born on into their brains. So, we gave all the confused turtles a second chance to run to the ocean, and helped them by lining up with flashlights. They were so cute!




I actually missed the sunset by 5 minutes, but I'm glad Mike was there for photo-documentation. (Photo courtesy of Mike G.)




Another excellent sunset pic. Bye bye Lady Elliot! (Photo courtesy of Alex G.)