Heron Island Field Trip: Extreme Research

This past week, I went on a pretty long journey up the coast for a field trip for my marine science class. We left at midnight on a Wednesday, drove for 7.5 hours, got to Gladstone (a random port city, there is a port there and not much else), waited 3.5 hours at the park there near the jetty for the ferry to come, took the ferry for another 2 hours, and finally arrived at Heron Island. At this point, everyone was really tired, but just pulling up onto the dock to this place got us all excited. (Most people were really happy to get off the boat as well, it was a bit of a rough ride and some people got sick). Coming onto the island was great, it was a beautiful day and Heron itself is amazing. It’s about a kilometer long and a kilometer wide, so it’s a very small place. My school has a research station there, and there is a resort on the other side. There are a few trails in the middle, but that’s about it. We had an orientation talk and got a quick lunch from the most hardcore Nazi cafeteria woman ever, she was seriously the angriest, most hateful Australian I have met. I don’t know how you could be so pissed off about working on an amazing island, and cooking for adults even, it’s not like you are in a middle school full of jackass kids. Meal times were 30 minutes each, and she had all the food put away within the first 10 minutes, just so she could yell at you about being late to the meal. Anyways, she was crazy, but we finished eating and went out snorkeling right away. This session was mostly to make sure people could swim allright. It was relatively low tide, so the water was quite shallow, but I got to see some cool fish and coral.

When we had free time, I would either walk around and just explore the area or find someone that wanted to go snorkel or swim and go do that. Those were probably the best times to go out, because it was only a few people in the water and we ended up seeing a lot more (probably because the animals didn’t notice you as much as when there were 50 people in the water). I went with this one guy Tyler from Vanderbilt a couple times, he was pretty stoked on being in the water all the time so it was easy to just go find him and snorkel around. We went out at dawn on the last day and ended up seeing 4 turtles (green turtles and loggerheads), an 8 foot wide ray, and a wobbegong shark. On another trip with him we saw 15 huge rays in the sand all in the same area (and a shovelnose ray/shark – its like a shark with a flat ray-like head), and they all got up and ‘flew’ away right in front of us, it was awesome. I also saw a reef shark, he was about 7 or 8 feet long, and that was really cool. They don’t attack people, which is always good. There were also tons of really colorful reef fish. We also got to go out at night and snorkel with flashlights in the water. We had to tie glowsticks to our snorkels too, it was sweet. We saw a turtle and a shark and some other fish, but it was mostly just awesome swimming around in the dark looking for things. The stars there were amazing too. There was no light pollution or anything else to block your view, and you could see the Milky Way very clearly. We were out stargazing at the beach one night, and saw the Southern Cross, and that lead to a conversation that made me very ashamed of one of my fellow Americans. This girl did not know that the seasons were reversed from the north and south sides of the globe, nor did she know what the equator was. She was looking for the North Star, and was shocked to find that it does not appear in the southern hemisphere. It was impressive.

This island was the most lively place I have probably ever been to in terms of animals. It was just crazy to me how this little piece of land so far out in the water had so much life on it. Not only is the ocean just packed with marine animals; there are birds all over too. There are about 4 species of birds that live on the island, and they totally take over the area. There are 80,000 of one of the species alone (I can’t remember the name) that live there, and they have wild orgies all night. It was so weird falling asleep, because it would be semi-quiet for a few minutes, then the birds would erupt making all these weird noises. They sounded like dogs howling and babies crying and just strange noises all around our tent. There are also these black birds that live there called mutton birds (they have another name too but I can’t remember it right now), and they have apparently evolved without having landing skills. They seriously just fall out of the sky and crash into buildings. I was sitting at a picnic table one night, and one of them fell on the roof of the building next to me, rolled off to the ground, and was just lying there dazed for a bit until it collected itself enough to move on. It is bizarre. We were even warned about them in the orientation speech, and they were not joking. This girl I was walking next to randomly screamed and ducked, and one of these birds shot past right where her head had been and crashed into a wall. I don’t know how these birds are still a species.

This whole trip was pretty much snorkeling. We had a half day of research projects (my group counted clam populations in different areas. In case you were wondering, there is a higher density of clams in the outer reef than the inner one. Crucial scientific information.), but most of the rest of the time was just spent in the water checking out the Barrier Reef. The lack of work might have been because the tutors did not know what to do with us because our course coordinator did not show up until the last day, but I am not complaining. It was really cool, and a great opportunity to see a place that most people would never get to visit because it is a research station and you can’t just decide to go there. Probably the best field trip ever, it definitely tops going to the top of Parking Structure A and looking through the haze at the stars in the Los Angeles sky for my Astronomy GE.


Pictures are: a massive ray hanging out in the sand, shot of the island at dawn from the water, one of the retarded birds, a black tip reef shark, and a green turtle.