Bank Holiday Weekend

Came down to London for the weekend after finishing unpacking (I had to move back into my college rooms which I had fully vacated during field season), mainly to see whether I had left vital items -- chequebook, office keys -- in my sister's house. Thankfully I had, along with mountains of other crap I had to shed on the way to Oz, and I will not have to do some embarrassed foot shuffling in front of our facilities manager (who is actually very nice, but probably still wouldn't be pleased if I had actually lost my keys). Speaking of embarrassed foot shuffling I did however have to do this in e-mail form to the (again, very nice) directors of Lizard Island Research Station to explain that, of all the things to inadvertently leave behind, such as important pieces of scientific equipment or diving gear, I had left my teddy bear. It took me days to build up the confidence to write this embarrassing email. Why I am now publishing this on the world wide web I do not know.

Time in London really quite nice despite being quite disappointed that my sister and her husband had gone off for a Bank Holiday Weekend jaunt in Lisbon and so I had to spend it by myself (no dog to play with either as it's gone off to the dog sitter's!). I have managed to avoid too much couch potato-ing (the temptation is always very strong when I stay here at my sister's because I don't watch telly otherwise, the common room always seeming far too far away) by means of going for a jazz class at a nearby dance studio that I've always meant to try (a fantastic workout, loads of fun and it just felt so good to be dancing again after two months of exile), wandering through the National Gallery's Manet to Picasso exhibition (all paintings in the permanent collection which I have seen before, but I do still enjoy looking at them and the exhibition audio guides were full of quirky little art history details), and hitting the Chinatown grocery stores! Well I also hit a clothes store -- not in Chinatown -- and they gave me a pair of dungarees for free. It would never cross my mind to buy a pair of dungarees. Perhaps I am not alone in this, hence being given them for free. What to do with them? I feel that I need to paint some walls.

In Leicester Square tube a rather nice looking Indian bloke came up to me whilst I was debating with myself the relative benefits of the Northern or Piccadilly lines and started up a rather flattering conversation. This does not happen to me often. When it does it usually comes from drunken and extremely unattractive hairy men. I couldn't stop myself being quite happy, really, that I can actually be hit on by a normal person -- although I must be terribly naive to think that someone who tries to pick up girls in tube stations could be normal at all -- but he did seem it, anyway, so I will allow myself the delusion. I almost wished I'd stayed to chat instead of rushing off with my two gigantic bags of Chinese groceries, but of course I didn't...

Up Close and Personal

I write this in Cairns airport, with a latte and a wireless connection for breakfast. Funny how easily one settles back into it, when yesterday I was soaking in the great blue sea on my last swim, nothing but coral reef and horizon as far as you could see. (Unfortunately it turned out to be my last wade as the tide had gone out; I plonked myself down in the knee deep water and watched a juvenile damsel use me for shelter.) I got into Cairns last night and at first it was fairly unsurprising, but then as I walked down the esplanade towards the town centre and the number of people went up and I hit my first restaurants, buzzing with neon lights and chattering customers and enticing menus, it all seemed so very, well, novel. It's only after two months on a tropical island I suppose that I would actively choose to walk the restaurant and souvenir store strip of road, rather than through the grassy parkland flanking the sea. I am glad to be back in civilisation, I do like my lattes and I have always really been a city girl, but I also already miss the peace and beauty and solitude (when you want) of Lizard. Although most researchers on the island work their butts off and barely ever see the scenery, there is still a calm to it. When you are bumpily driving along in your boat getting soaked with cold spray at 7 in the morning, not quite awake, having just dropped a tank on your toe, with three dives ahead of you and recalcitrant fish, you generally still manage to recognise that it is a beautiful drive, the best commute in the world. So I am glad to be done with field season one, but I'm also already looking forward to number two.

We stopped fieldwork a few days before leaving the island to allow plenty of time to pack and clean (I never did get eggs again successfully, which is a real shame, but I still hope to make it work more reliably next trip). The directors of the station, Anne and Lyle, decided to spend their day off on the outer Barrier Reef and very kindly invited us along, and so after well over a hundred dives in my two rather nondescript study sites in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, we finally got to experience what it was all meant to be about.

On this particular day what it was all about was this:


Cod Hole! Where the visibility is close to 30 metres (in the Coral Sea, just beyond the outer barrier, it regularly exceeds this -- after some 6 metre vis dives on an island where there is a known crocodile this sounds like paradise) and the coral is kaleidoscopic and the huge potato cod are extremely friendly. A couple of them took an especial shine to me and would swim right at me then just sort of stay there, bumping my knee in a friendly fashion every so often for a good half an hour, the perfect fish face models. I couldn't actually get far enough away from them to take anything but fish face photos. We have a theory that they thought the blue coil lanyard on my camera housing was a pilchard, which the big dive operators feed to the cod in a bit of a circus act -- 20 divers with cameras sitting in a large circle with a lady with a large box of dead pilchards in the middle, moving round it with the cod following her and feeding it in front of each diver so that they could get a good shot. Well away from the mayhem of the circle we had our own much more personal experiences with the fish. They were wonderful individuals and their trust and heft and personality put me in mind of a slightly more taciturn version of the Florida manatees. But then again, they would never be so friendly if they didn't hope that I'd produce food from somewhere. We also did a quick snorkel on close by reef called No Name (!), which looked like a gorgeous dive, a wall that dropped off vertically to maybe 30m, deep blue water beyond it, schools of unicornfish and anthias everywhere, the occasional shark patrolling -- that sense of excitement, what will I see next, was palpable and rather different from the tens of dives I had done counting foraging bites (sometimes in Chinese and Malay to keep myself awake).

Edit 4/5/07: Back in Cambridge! Woo. As promised here are a few more photos. I write this at 6:45 am -- jetlag always makes me feel virtuous coming this way.

The wall on the outside edge of the north tip of No. 10 Ribbon Reef:

A couple of fish faces.

Um, and a fish eye...

Goodbye Lizard!

Caviar in Bags

Less than a week left to go here on Lizard. I've started to enjoy myself a lot more these past few weeks, partly because we simply stopped exhausting ourselves with work (cutting down from an average of 4 to 3 sessions in the water each day), and partly because I have reached that happy state of existence where I am very philosophic about my research: getting data is good, not getting data is not so good but not a good enough reason to fret myself awake at stupid times in the middle of the night. So anyway I hope to finish up with fieldwork in the next few days, leaving a few days for gear to dry out and be packed up, and all sorts of other exciting end-of-season work like taking our boat out of the water to waterblast all the slimy green stuff off it (we actually do this every few weeks, it's amazing how much difference it makes to the speed, no wonder all those boat guys in Malaysia are constantly hopping off the side and cleaning their boat from underwater while we're diving), and lots and lots of cleaning.

A week and a half ago had a Happy Scientific Moment. We were trying out this method which sometimes sounded to me totally implausible. Basically you wait for your fish to spawn with bated breath (well not really because one must Never Stop Breathing while on scuba, for fear of a very painful condition known as a burst lung or two). If they are being cooperative, which is only about 50% of the time currently, the male and the female will swim upwards together then simultaneously release eggs and sperm in a little cloud in the water column. You then rush towards the area where they have spawned with this gigantic plastic bag and you surround the entire gamete cloud with your bag. Then you bring it to the boat and try to figure out how on earth you are meant to lift 33 litres of water in a plastic bag onto your boat; then you subsample your bag; then back in the lab you filter your subsample several times and count eggs and sperm. I couldn't get any sperm, possibly because my methods weren't quite correct and also I had no clue what fish sperm actually look like (I had never before seen this done in my life and was simply following the descriptions in papers); but I did unbelievably get some eggs despite the total mess we'd made of the whole thing, and staring down the microscope I found that they were mostly actually fertilized. It really makes very simple logical sense but for a while it gobsmacked me that you could do this at all; that you could take a big plastic bag and collect gametes with it and subsample and filter and stain and stick in a petri dish and look at under a microscope and COUNT fertilised egg ratios. I suppose it is only because I am a whole animal biologist that I find it amazing, because most of the time I do things that any child could do, counting the number of bites a fish takes or following it around, so anything that involves a slightly more complicated procedure (and things that require a microscope!) seems incredibly sophisticated. But anyway, it worked. Once. We've only been able to do it again once more, due to the fish being uncooperative, and that time it failed utterly with no eggs at all. I'm hoping to repeat it successfully just once more before the season is out, just to prove it wasn't some kind of weird fluke, as the aim really was just to pilot the method for use in the next season. But it might require underwater Barry White broadcasts, as one of the other researchers suggested.

When we are not waiting for fish to get it on we somethimes find time to go on little excursions.

On the way up to Cook's Look, the highest point on the island:



Finally made it!



Another trip to Coconut Beach round the other side of the island, totally deserted with no sign of human habitation...



...except for the fact that the seagulls will come and sit next to you when you are having lunch.

Island Food

Work progresses as usual, we are well into the slog it out and try desperately to collect enough data (I only have 3.5 weeks left) phase of this field season. We are hampered every so often by exciting events like a tsunami warning due to the Solomon Islands earthquake, that prompted us all to go sit on a rock on high ground with a good view of the sea and eat an apple each whilst listening to the radio. It was quite a bizarre event, all the research station staff and volunteers and researchers (at the time, a grand total of eight) suspending normal activities to go sit on a rock. At any rate there wasn't even a ripple in our area and we went out as usual in the afternoon having been told that the threat had passed.

So in answer to "am I sick of maggi mee yet", the answer is actually no because I only brought four packets of Maggi Mee with me from Cairns and I've only eaten three of them. We order in food from a supermarket in Cairns (barge day -- every second Wednesday -- is rather like a fortnightly Christmas), and cook all our meals in very well appointed kitchens in our houses. I am vaguely sick of spaghetti aglio olio e pepperoncino which is what I always make for a quick lunch (or sometimes when I am very hungry I have a ham sandwich instead, which is even quicker); but we have also had both red and green curry, once I made a rather improvised hainan chicken rice, every Thursday (our day off) we have pancakes for breakfast, every Saturday evening which is the weekly barbecue night we have a gigantic steak each, and it is truly amazing what one will find in the "free food" cupboards (food left over from other groups which have left). Free food had provided us with pizza bases, popping corn (for our movie nights in the library), huge bottles of supermarket home brand bright green lime flavoured cordial that I have discovered is actually made of apples and lots of chemicals and which we have fondly christened our "detergent" drink, more bread than one could ever eat, proper Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce, a whole array of spices, and etc. As is usual when one is diving a lot we eat like pigs, the Tim Tams (Aussie chocolate biscuits with a chocolate filling and chocolate covering, hmm why does this make me think of certain college folks...) get wolfed down as soon as they appear on barge day. But the sheer amount of physical work this whole marine biology thing is turning out to be means that I think I am actually burning it all off as fast as I can eat it.

Which all means that I feel no guilt in baking up the Cadbury's chocolate cake mix that I impulsively ordered on the latest barge cycle, it is Easter this weekend after all!

P/S Fish in the last post was a female, also fondly known in my books as individual A8_3... (I don't give them names, firstly I am looking at close to 50 fish and I'm not that creative, secondly I don't really think you are supposed to according to some points of view -- not anthropomorphising them and all that). Don't worry, they always recover pretty quickly from the stress of being caught and in five or ten minutes they are usually swimming about and eating happily again -- though they do get very paranoid about divers which is a bit of a pain when you are trying to watch them still!

Tricky Little Blighters

...are fish when you are trying to catch them, according to highly reputable scientific sources (such as my supervisor). A good two weeks after starting on the whole fish catching mission I have managed to catch a grand total of 9 of the things. They swim a heck of a lot faster than you. They maneuvre faster. They can go down little holes in rocks and don't come out. They find the one tiny hole you have left when surrounding their shelter with fence nets and zoom out of it at warp speed. This is not, by any means, a piece of (fish) cake. (Sorry.) After a brief spate of beginner's luck (midway through the first week), we hit a total dry spell, days and days and hours underwater with nothing to show for it, but most recently we have had some minor success again, so it's no telling what will come next! It is kind of fun trying to outwit them. Whether or not the effort (on average so far probably something like three hours to catch one fish, which we keep in a plastic bag and admire for all of about two minutes to take measurements and squeeze their bellies and also to tag them, followed by immediate release) is proportional to the results is something I am not thinking about quite too hard...

Otherwise, research is chugging along. I'm at about the halfway point, and am finally sort of getting on with data collection (it seems a bit odd that it took a whole month just to set things up, but I hope/think I didn't just waste it all), or at least as much data collection as I can manage given the fact that the Tricky Little Blighters are so good at not being caught and also for well over a week now they have not been spawning at all, despite singing of suggestive songs at them underwater.

Life here has become very much the norm, my three or four dives/snorkels a day (this is a punishing physical regime, I think it's been a very long time since I was so fit -- lugging dive gear around and pulling up the boat anchor is bloody hard work), as much sleep as I can get at night, and our very much needed one day off a week where we sleep in till 9 and have pancakes for breakfast! I imagine after the next month when I re-emerge into the world of civilisation there will be something of a culture shock. I haven't actually touched any cash for a whole month, excepting one evening when we went to the staff bar of the resort, which is the only bit us scruffy researchers are allowed into.

Here is a picture of a Tricky Little Blighter that we managed to outwit, hurrah.

Fishy trials and tribulations

Have fairly rapidly discovered that one of the difficulties of being on field season is that you think about your fish literally all day every day, and often dream about them in the night or wake up at 5am finding yourself trying to plan the next day's research activities. Hence today we are taking an Entire Day Off, what a luxury, not really one which I feel I totally deserve but I think it will prove good for my sanity, I not only see bicolor angels everywhere now but they are always buzzing around the back (and often the forefront) of my mind in their exasperating cute little fishy way. The Entire Day Off consists really of just staying on dry land and allowing all these little cuts and scratches (I am a walking feast for the mozzies here and I am very bad at not scratching, so I have many!) to dry out a little, and letting me catch up a little with land-type work; so in reality I am not totally avoiding the bicolor-related thoughts, but I do intend to spend some of the afternoon mooching in a way that totally belies the fact that every hour I spend at the research station is very Expensive and Valuable Fieldwork Time that should never be wasted on pain of producing a crap PhD. I also woke up at 9am today, the luxury (we normally wake around 7 and are at the dive shed to leave for morning dives/snorkels at 8:30). We may climb Cook's Look which is the highest point on the island (a reasonable height I think, it takes about 3-4 hours round trip) later in the afternoon if the weather holds.

The past week has been a bit of a rollercoaster, things looking totally grim and prompting thoughts of quitting and becoming an investment banker one day, then bright and sunny with research for life beckoning the next day, and then the cycle repeats. The main issue has been study sites, which I had thought I had settled on by the end of my first week (according to plan) but which then proved to be a problem in terms of diving regulations, as I need to dive at dusk at my sites to watch my fish spawn, and a couple of the sites were too far away for the station's directors to be happy for us to do that without a third person to sit in the boat as an extra safety precaution. So halfway through my second week I found myself starting the search for study sites all over again. Having thought I'd found a wonderful one closer to the station, I then discovered that once the south-east tradewinds start blowing (which happens any day NOW) that site would be too exposed and rough to dive. And so on and so on -- if it wasn't one obstacle it was another putting a big black cross against site after site. Finally I think I may be back on track (though I am now very wary of being overly optimistic and am totally mentally prepared for it to all collapse tomorrow) as I've found yet another site, still exposed to the tradewinds but marginally more sheltered, and the station directors have very very kindly allowed us to dusk dive at one of my further away sites. Phew. You didn't need to know that, but it makes me feel better to have complained about it all one more time!

In happier thoughts, next week I am going to try to catch some fish (to measure and tag them, and also to squeeze their bellies to see what if anything comes out...!) which sounds like most frustrating fun, everybody has warned me how much of a total nightmare it can be, so we will see. Er, maybe that's not a happy thought after all. Anyway I am glad to be starting on something new instead of searching for yet more study sites -- in plan anyway.

Home sweet home:



Wet season means I've been taken out of or not been able to get into the water countless times due to the weather, but when it's nice, this is the view from the dive shed of our beach and weekly BBQ area:




Looking the other way down the beach towards Palfrey and South Islands at low tide:

Research station boats -- mine is No. VII with a 25hp motor in the front and behind it is Kirsty K, used for longer trips to reefs outside of the Lizard Island Group.

Lizard Island Life

End of my first week on Lizard Island -- it has been a good week in that we have more or less achieved what we wanted to for the first week, which I must keep in mind is far more than can be expected for most fledgling projects of this kind! In celebration we are taking the afternoon off, actually just time out of the water to catch our breaths and sort out various mundanities of island life like laundry and collecting the next fornight's worth of food from today's barge and thinking about some science...

This place really is the most luxurious field station one could possibly want to work on. Perhaps the pinnacle of this luxury is the (solar) hot water showers that are available not just up at the houses that we live in but even round the corner of the dive shed. I think this is the first time I've ever had a hot water dive shed shower in my life, including visits to fairly swanky resorts. (I wonder if the Voyages resort a few beaches down, the only other development on the island, can boast as much.) More totally unexpected amenities include spacious kitchens far better than my own (and a free food supply from research groups who have left!); washing machines; satellite phone and Internet connections at reasonable rates; a well stocked library with all the theses ever written about Lizard as well as other science and fiction; lovely composting toilets; and I could certainly go on. Normally, the privations of tropical coral reef island life (in the past this has included tent living and unsavoury loos 200m from camp) one tries not to mind because of the beauty of the area and the simple fact that you get to dive gorgeous reefs every day; but here we are totally well supplied with creature comforts in addition to experiencing views like the following (this picture taken on the way home after a particularly exhilirating dusk snorkel in which I observed my fish spawning for the first time; fish sex and romantic sunsets complete one's day very satisfactorily):

So yes, it is an extremely nice life. The Research Station is fairly empty at the moment with only one other small group of researchers here other than myself and my field assistant, so I can certainly see how one would go a little stir crazy after a while (as is this time typical of tropical island life, one's world revolves around a very small triangle of house, lab and dive shed; with all other forays outwards always by boat with scuba gear), but I hope to put that off for a while at least. I am too busy now dealing with my visions of my little Centropyge bicolor -- I have started to catch sight of them everywhere out of the corner of my eye, including whilst on dry land walking through a field... hmm.

The Yellow Brick Road

Am on my way to Lizard Island, Queensland, Australia! I will be there for the next two months watching my little fishies (Centropyge bicolor or the bicolor dwarf angelfish for anyone who wants to know). Am meandering over very gradually via London, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore (current location) and Cairns -- so it is taking a little while. I'll try to post on this blog when I can about the trials and tribulations of being an intrepid field researcher on a resort island on the Great Barrier Reef...

:)

In a paper about some fish:

"During courtship the male approaches a female, swims parallel and slightly behind her, then the pair swim side-by-side and, wriggling frenetically, rise slowly for 2-3 m into the water column, release eggs and milt in a visible small cloud, and move back immediately to the bottom."
- Marconato et al (1995) The mating system of Xyrichthys novacula: sperm economy and fertilization success. J. Fish Biol. 47:292-301

Am I alone in thinking that if I ever watch these fish court and mate I will laugh so hard at the thought of their frenetic wriggling that I'll spit my regulator out by accident (either that or somebody will think I am suffering CNS oxygen toxicity and convulsing much like that man in the PADI video...)

What I Did This Morning

Just a little taller than me thanks to the rather chic hat the other Trinity people who gamely joined us in building our snowman put on him! I donated my scarf for purposes of picture taking...

I also built him a baby brother on the Trinity Bridge, looking out onto the Cam towards John's.


And this was my view out the window when I got up.


Finally, my favourite snowman (of many seen over the day as I trekked all through the backs on my way to the University Library). This little guy was guarding a doorway in Clare's Memorial Court.

A Long and Rambling Post

Right then, to it. Mainly because I am so disgustingly full from my chicken curry dinner that I can't even be bothered right now to move myself downstairs to shower, and that is a disgusting level of fullness indeed. Reminds me of our Florida holiday meals, wherein somewhere after the main course we would be at a happy level of fullness, considering whether to get dessert (usually Key Lime Pie, yum) to achieve an unhappy (=disgusting) level of fullness... and of course we always did. Oh yes, also just earlier this week some friends and I went to La Tasca, pleasantly surprised to discover the happy phenomenon of their Monday "Tapas for a Tenner", where of course you feel obligated to order more after the first very robust round just because of the whole all-you-can-eat mentality. Oh, the gluttony. I convinced myself during the dance show that I must be bouncing up and down on stage so much (literally - the techies took to calling me anti-gravity Tzo, not sure if this is a pleasing nickname really) that any backstage consumption of bananas and Quality Street and one evening actually two entire dinners (pre- and post-show) was fully justified. Alas, no such excuses anymore. Still, gluttony is such a very wonderful vice.

My field season looms ever and ever nearer. I am not panicking. Yet. I shall save panicking for when I get to Lizard Island and find all the dwarf angelfish have emigrated to Antarctica. Meanwhile I am employed in still remarkably little science and quite a lot of last minute equipment and logistics sorting. For instance sometime next week I have to submit my first food order -- you order food from a supermarket in Cairns, which delivers it to the barge yard, and then the barge chugs its way over the Lizard Island every fortnight, and so food must be ordered about three weeks before you even get a sight of a single blessed carrot. I've had to ask my field assistant whether she has favourite cereals or whatnot. Apparently the only thing she won't eat is spinach... so I imagine we'll just go without, I do quite like spinach but not to Popeye levels.

I've also been engaged in a bit of a dive bag saga, having decided that my beloved bright yellow duffel/mesh bag simply wasn't practical enough (you can only carry it in one hand or on a shoulder, hardly the most ergonomic of things). So having spent literally days browsing through dozens of dive gear and regular luggage shops and half settled on about 8 different bags in turn, I made the discovery that the place to go is.... Argos. So today I went and bought the most humongous rolling holdall they have, still "cheap as chips" as somebody on a dive forum very astutely recommended it as. It's even got lots of pockets inside to organise stuff in, and I am very hopeful for it -- if only it doesn't fall apart as Argos stuff is rather prone to do. I do realise this must be one of the most boring paragraphs I've written in this blog (maybe not, you can make me eat my words if you can find one about statistics in the archives), but after all you read this at your own peril.

What else... oh yes, the dance show! It was our annual thing, become a bit of a tradition over the years as we occupy the same five night slot at the ADC (oldest student theatre in the country, its venerable-ness not quite compensating for the dilapidated dressing rooms, do I really care so much that Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry might have preened in front of the same mirrors -- though they are meant to be renovated soon) each year. I was fairly heavily involved this year artistically, though I'd handed on my previous producer's role. It seemed like the show was longer in the gestation this year than previously, what with more pieces than ever in it (25!) and many of the most active dancers in up to 5 or 6 dances and so having a very hectic rehearsal schedule. Nevertheless by dint of running it umpteen times in the few days running up to the show it came together, and I think by opening night we were as solid and beautiful as we have ever been. There was a unique diversity of styles this year, the show having evolved quite a lot from its what I think were quite purely contemporary (of the "be a tree" school of dance) roots -- the first half in particular being populated with everything from bellydancing to Irish to flamenco to hiphop to tap to breaking to a piece that was Baroque court dance inspired! The second half was far more contemporary in feel and I think it worked out fairly well, as the more serious contemporary pieces do take some settling for the audience and perhaps they were more ready for it by then. Commercially we did our best ever -- three of the five nights utterly sold out and the other two certainly not to be blinked at. Bizarrely, neither of the student newspaper reviewers liked it much -- but ah well, what do the critics know? ;)

I was most exceedingly pleased by our contemporary teacher's very kind remarks that I should really choreograph, seriously. I would indeed like to never really abandon the dance that has become a "full-time hobby" as my college friends put it -- I will never make a dancer (that hallowed creature), simply not got the body or skill for it, but it would be so much fun and so satisfying (in a very intellectually exciting way) to be able to continue making dances if people want to see them, in between fish watching seasons. Of course there is the whole temptation of taking it even further than that, of getting myself some real training and exposure, but other than parental horror, I'm not confident enough -- raw blinding talent in the arts being something still seen by me as a prerequisite for any sort of success and certainly not something I would ever dream of claiming for myself. But then I don't really need to succeed, do I, if I do it for fun? Full-time hobby is probably the best way to do it. At the other end of the scale sometimes I wonder if I should allow myself any space at all to hold on to dance, single-minded determination another one of those things I sometimes think of as neccessary for success in anything, but then again, I would like to remain sane and balanced, thank you very much.

Pictures of the show linked in the post below and backstage on facebook -- not so much fun if you've not actually seen the show, particularly as we are not professionals and when photographed have a very bad tendency to be caught very inelegantly between positions, but there are some lovely ones if you would like to have a look!

Elemental!

Five night dance show run ended last night -- I haven't the time to write now as I am off to a rehearsal (no, it never ends), but here are some links to some initial photographs:

Duncan Grisby: http://www.grisby.org/Photos/397/index.html
Claude Schneider: http://www.cantabphotos.com/view_genre.php?genre=genre_performance

Woot.

31/1: Edited the link for Claude's photos -- more up now on his main cantabphotos website.

Jumbo polythene bags, anyone?

For the past couple of days I have been engaged in ordering various bits and pieces of equipment for my impending field season. The essential equipment of a marine biologist seems to consist of the most bizarre things, leading to my faintly bemused perusal of websites selling all manner of what can most accurately and precisely be described as "bits and bobs", ranging from Simply Scuba, gps4less, Millipore filters and Net Manufacturers UK (perhaps understandable) to Food Safety Direct, cheap-rope.uk, Lakeland Limited - The Home of Creative Kitchenware, Tooled-up and Forsport UK (?!?). Yesterday I spent something like an entire hour trying to find giant ziplock polythene bags (to collect pelagically spawned eggs and sperm in, in case anyone is wondering). Nobody makes them except for ZipLoc itself, which sells them for an exorbitant price. So I resort to regular jumbo polythene bags (from a packaging website) and then I spend another hour trying to figure out the best way to clip these shut in some sort of secure waterproof fashion. Options range from bits of string and clothes pegs to NASA quality Clip'n'Seal (sold only in the US of A) to some kind of miraculous one-handed plastic clip made in Sweden called Twixit that is mysteriously difficult to track down (in the end the home of creative kitchenware comes to the rescue).

Oh and of course not to forget the snazzy Durarite underwater paper and all-weather pens (writes underwater and upside down!). Expensive, but I couldn't resist and it is probably actually quite useful as unless I carry a giant plastic slate down (which is what we normally use underwater, with a pencil) I'll never get an hour's worth of observations down.

You know sometimes I think I ought to be spending a little more time thinking about Science. But then, intrepid and resourceful field biologists surely must know the ins and outs of standard UK polythene bag sizes. It's all part of the training, I'm sure...

New Year's Eve

Passed very quietly indeed; I didn't much feel like going out to a friend's party in the evening, so stayed in, watched the countdown and the very impressive looking South Bank fireworks on telly, had a Sex and the City marathon, and felt rather pleased and not at all sorry for myself -- more proof, if I needed any, that I have definitely arrived out the other end of that social insecurity that seems to hit all who move overseas for university. Woo, 2007, and all that. I've never been much of a one for New Year's, probably because my family never really "did" New Year, and also after last year's Times Square insanity I almost feel like I've been there etc.! Nevertheless, wouldn't want to rain on anybody's parade, any excuse to have a party and such -- I even had a celebratory glass of Pimm's while watching the countdown ;)

Earlier in the day I took myself to the V&A, had a bit of a wander and went to the da Vinci exhibition they currently have on. It was interesting enough -- not of his art, but rather about how he 'thought' on paper, so lots of sheets of his notes and diagrams were on display, carefully exhibited by theme. I came away without having gained much knowledge other than that he was a genius and a damned good artist, but somehow I think these are not new conclusions. Still the notebooks were interesting, full of his 'mirror' writing (apparently because he was too lazy to train his dominant left hand to write left to right) and gorgeously sketched doodles of craggy Roman face profiles. Some of his anatomical drawings in particular were wonderful (he'd even noted the optic chiasma), and the exhibition was careful to point out examples of his highly lateral thinking with constant almost seamless drawing of analogies between nature and machine, microcosm and macrocosm. He seemed to think that natural design was the ultimate perfection; a very worthy philosophy, I suppose, although now I think we would hesitate to design a machine with an eye that has a retina wired in backwards like ours does.

Elsewhere in the V&A I also enjoyed:

This 1955 Givenchy dress which I fell in love with,


A light installation in the central courtyard,


and a rather jolly sculpture of the quack doctor Joshua Ward.


Afterwards I wandered next door to the Natural History Museum to have a look at the ice rink:

Christmas Cheer

But first a link to photos of the pre-Christmas holiday in Florida where we dived the Keys, ate far too much (hardly a new thing) and best of all, met the manatees! I'm afraid I'm not going to write much about it. But it was a really lovely if brief holiday -- I really liked the chilled-out Keys atmosphere, and the manatees were really something special. There are probably very few other wild animals you can just go and meet and they will come up and play with you. I made friends with one in particular who kept holding my hand (really!). Aww. It is sobering to know they are severely endangered though, mainly by habitat destruction and boat-related accidents.

After America I came back to ostensibly work for a week, a difficult task when Christmas holidays were very palpably in the air. Christmas itself I spent at my friend's house in Oxford, as she'd very kindly invited me when she found out I wouldn't have any family in the country over Christmas! It has been a really long time since I'd spent Christmas in the way that I did as a child and I had a lovely time re-living it. A 7lb turkey and compulsory Brussels sprouts, presents under the tree and even a stocking full of goodies from my friend's grandma! It was such a shame that some of the family came down with some sort of nasty stomach bug/food poisoning over Christmas Day -- so it wasn't quite as full a party as originally expected, but the rest of us soldiered on and I discovered that I am not bad at all at Absolute Balderdash (useful skills for a PhD student).

Since Boxing Day I have been in London meeting up with friends, hitting the sales (oof) and today I watched both the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker and Guys and Dolls. Dr Johnson knew what he was talking about. It has been a most pleasant day indeed wandering around Covent Garden and the West End between shows. I'd not originally thought of going to see the Nutcracker -- I had already seen this production twice -- but I am so glad I did really. The costumes and sets and production design in the Royal Ballet's version are simply gorgeous and there is so much going on it sometimes doesn't matter there is little drama and virtuoso dancing in it. Who needs pyrotechnics and tragedy when you have a giant growing Christmas tree? Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares danced a lovely grand pas de deux, she was so happy and had such a stage presence I almost didn't mind the very slightly off-sync allegro section at the end of the pas de deux. And I enjoyed Ricardo Cervera's Hans Peter/Nutcracker very much -- I'm hoping to see him promoted to principal sometime soon! The Snowflakes were also simply beautiful and so effective -- all kudos to Peter Wright of course, who apparently choreographed all that based on original notes that went something like "waltz for 4 minutes". Guys and Dolls was less breathtaking, I'm not sure if it's the musical itself (weakish story) or this production of it (minimalistic sets but without the razzle-dazzle of Chicago to compensate), but it did have its (few) high points especially in some of the big dance numbers.

Walking home from Piccadilly after the show I plugged myself into my iPod. Is it just me or does walking with music make other people also feel like they are in a music video/tv show/film? Suddenly life has a soundtrack (in this case the Grateful Dead followed by Robert Plant and the Strange Sensations). It was also nice to be out in the cool night air (autumnal rather than wintry weather these few days) after the too-hot theatre, and enjoying the sights of the Christmas light up along shopping streets no longer insanely thronged with crowds -- now just the odd party, couples, singles like me wandering along party-wards or home-wards. I was just heading up pedestrianised South Molton Street, lit up with gorgeous blue and yellow fairy lit columns on either side, Robert Plant still loudly singing away, when I thought I'd perhaps stop and take a photo. So I did almost stop, turned to look around myself, and then somehow segued into realising that the young man walking down the street the other way had similarly turned to look behind him -- that in turning myself we had both turned to catch each other's eyes. We shared a smile. I turned back, took two photos up the street. Put my camera away, was about to continue up the street, but on impulse turned again -- he was still at the bottom of the street, watching, smiling. And as I turned back again, continued to walk home, Robert Plant made the encounter seem like, well, something out a film. I smiled all the way home.

So merry Christmas everyone and have a very happy new year.

Fish, dance, the usual.

Apologies for the long absence. Not all that much exciting seems to have happened really... weekdays I do my 9-5 (more typically 9:30 to 6, actually) in department, ostensibly reading papers but really just blanking out most of the time, and weekends I mooch. It's a good life. Occasional twinges of guilt, but I figure the first year of PhD must be something of a grace period, so I'm enjoying it mostly.

I haven't been totally unproductive (although it probably comes close!) as I've finally figured out where I will be watching my fishies -- on the Great Barrier Reef! A picture of where I will be working follows... Yes, you may now turn as green as you like.



I'm also dancing far too much, as usual. Three-quarters of the way through term I foolishly decided to take on far more choreography than I'd originally intended. I currently have six dances (ranging in length from 1:15 to 13 minutes) bouncing around in my head, three of which are my own choreography, which one would think makes it easier but doesn't really... nevertheless, I am enjoying it. I seem to have experienced something of a shift in style, my body and brain now want to do contemporary movement rather than the old ballet that I used to stick some flexed feet into so I could call it contemporary. I like to think that it's all producing far more interesting stuff to watch. I haven't done a ballet class for months and while I used to miss it so much, now I think if I went into one I'd probably find the forcing of my body into turnout and square alignment and holding everything permanently (you never let go of a single muscle in ballet, I think!) very restrictive. It's discipline that I still value tremendously of course and I really should go back into ballet class, and you want dancers to be able to produce perfect arabesques and pirouettes so that they know exactly how to let go of that, but I suppose I knew I was never built for ballet. It's nice to finally stop feeling a bit of an imposter in the whole "I dance contemporary" thing, at least!

It is absolutely brilliant though. In the finale piece of this year's show I get to be a fish for about 5 seconds, doing breast stroke (okay, so maybe more a frog) in mid air. Everybody thinks it is hilariously apt and that I should probably do it in full scuba gear.

Only another week of work before I rather cheekily take off for slightly over a week's holiday in the States. We are going to Florida to dive and meet the manatees! I can't wait.

What Nemo Did Next

Recent conversations with a banker and a lawyer (to be) have reminded me that the little fishy world I inhabit is in fact unutterably cool and interesting, and that most people don't know that much about it, and therefore it is bloggable! Ha. You spend your days in the office reading paper after paper after paper, and occasionally you get excited by something stupidly esoteric that only your supervisor would also get excited by (you hope), and you forget that the basic facts of the system are really pretty fascinating in themselves.

What Nemo Did Next, if he had a long and happy life, is that he turned into a woman. Quite a lot of marine fish are sequentially hermaphroditic, changing sex either from female to male or from male to female at some point in their lives. Nemos (or more accurately the clown anemonefish Amphiprion percula) are a particularly well-studied system due to some funky guy who figured it all out whilst living in Madang Bay in Papua New Guinea, isn't the marine biologist's life a tough one? These clownfish live in anemones, as you know, and in each anemone lives a little social group -- the largest fish is female, the second largest male, and all the rest don't actually breed. There is a really strict linear hierarchy based on the relative sizes of the fish in the social group, so the female is Top Fish, followed by the male (clownfish have got it right!), followed by the rest in decreasing size. When the female dies, everybody else grows quickly and moves up a rank: no. 2 changes sex from male to female, no. 3 becomes the breeding male, and every one else is one step closer to the Top Fish Position. So if you think about it, Marlin (Nemo's dad) should really have turned into his Mum within a few weeks of his Mum being eaten by the big scary barracuda. Not that his Mum was his real Mum anyway, he was adopted, because when the eggs hatch (after being very very carefully tended for 2-4 days by the father and not the mother -- did I say something about clownfish getting it right?) the larvae just get swept away by the current and eventually when the baby fish get big enough they pick a random anemone to join -- hardly likely to be the one they came from originally.

But you know, I love the film, and they got the coral looking quite realistic, so I don't really mind that they didn't try to explain to all these kids that what Nemo really wanted to be when he grew up was, well, a girl.

P/S Lots of other fish do it the other way round, with females turning into males, especially when the males need to be big and powerful in order to maintain harems of females. So when you are small, you might as well be female so you can reproduce a little bit; when you get bigger you change sex into male so you can reproduce a lot (by mating with lots of females in your harem). Currently I'm hoping to study some fish which do this. It's very cool because some females, instead of patiently waiting to move up the hiearchy step by step towards big male-ness, try to employ alternative strategies like changing sex earlier and hanging around as a small bachelor male, growing quickly (not using any energy on producing eggs as a female) to a size where they are big enough to compete for harems; or changing sex and trying to sequester some of the harem's females for themselves so splitting the harem, etc. etc. And it's even cooler because more and more such fish are turning out to be able to reverse their initial sex change, which brings up all kinds of other questions about whether a small male might give up and change back to female.

So anyway really my PhD is about how fish try to have as much sex as possible. If you think about it. Hmm.

Happy Stomachs

The boyfriend is visiting, which always prompts eating a lot of good food. Highlights from the past week include:

- Sunday roast at the Eagle, a lovely (if touristy) pub in central Cambridge, where Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA. It also has a ceiling with graffiti by RAF and US Air Force bombers during WWI and II. But all that pales in comparison to the Yorkshire puds.

- Buttered scones and apple pie washed down with good old quality English Breakfast tea at the Orchard. Down in the village of Grantchester a few miles south of Cambridge, the Orchard has been serving "morning coffee, light luncheons and afternoon tea" to Cambridge students since 1897 under its apple trees. It was home to Rupert Brooke who was often visited there by his pals "The Granchester Group", including Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and Maynard Keynes. But still, you know, what would it be without the scones?

- Lovely Vietnamese food at tiny little Thanh Binh on Bridge Street. Had an exceedingly yummy duck hotpot with vermicelli.

- Unagi bento set and salmon sashimi at Teri-Aki. Felt thirsty afterwards, but the lure of Japanese food and MSG filled miso soup is simply too much.

- Dinner at the Vaults on Trinity Street, an underground restaurant/bar. Very stylish stuff and such brilliant food. All dishes are starter size, much like tapas, but food is a diverse mixture of European, Middle Eastern, Oriental. My favourites were pigeon breast with chorizo in a red cabbage sauce, roasted aubergines stuffed with tomatoes and spicy rice, and butternut squash mash.

- My very own culinary work. College has taken my gas ring away by command of that paranoia incarnate known as The Fire Safety Officer, but I am surreptitiously cooking on a very serviceable electric cooker I own. And thus managed to produce:

1. The classic melon and parma ham (and some salami for good measure)


2. Tapenade spaghetti -- so yummy I was quite impressed, but the ingredients make so much sense really. And so unbelievably easy to make as it is a no cook sauce! Will definitely add this to my list of everyday things to make for dinner.


3. Cod poached in a tarragon broth -- again surprisingly yummy, I was quite sceptical about having to pour loads of orange juice into the broth, but it was great and went wonderfully with the fish.

Life between tea breaks

The first week of real PhD-ing is just over and it hasn't been bad at all, really. As far as I can tell academic life is really just one long glorified tea break interspersed with occasional bouts of work. The tea room serves tea (20p), coffee (35p) and various unhealthy tempting munchies everyday at 10:15 and 3:15 for about an hour. So you get into the office somewhere between nine and ten, and then you contemplate tea at about ten or eleven, and then you have lunch about twelve or one, and then you contemplate tea again at three or four, and then you go home about five or six.

It is incredible how anybody gets any work done (something my sister was also amazed at when she rejoined academia after years in finance -- the culture shock!), particularly as throughout the week there are also lots of exciting talks and seminars about ants and moths and cuckoos and whatnot (ain't zoology great). Somehow we manage it, though, I think I have learnt a significant amount about humbug damselfish over the past few days following the great paper trail through Web of Science, albeit probably less than I would have if I didn't have so much tea. (I only actually go to tea once a day, three breaks in a working day seems very slightly excessive...) In my bid to do a proper literature search on these little fishies I have properly availed myself of Cambridge's impressive library facilities, even making an early evening trip to the University Library in search of this 1977 paper in a journal called, deep breath now, Helgoländer wissenschaftliche Meeresuntersuchungen. It took me 20 minutes to even find the journal in the stacks on the top floor in the furthest corner of the South Front, and then I had to walk to the other corner of the library (please understand this is a library which stocks every single published book in the UK and then some) to photocopy it. Now that is what I call dedication. But I do love the UL, it makes me feel like the human species does know a little bit about the world and it is so nice to know that I can read about it all. Um, theoretically.

There is a lot to be said for tea and lunch breaks though. It is lovely to be in an environment where everybody is honestly excited about their work -- and what work it is. Up on the third floor where I have lunch with members of the Large Animal Research Group (mostly meerkats, to be honest, although also deer and sheep) and my own Evolutionary Ecology Group (bit of a random name, Behavioural Ecology and Conservation Mostly Underwater is slightly more accurate but a mouthful), the conversations veer back and forth between the next Nature paper somebody's got coming out, sightings of the rare Giant Crested Newt, anonymous papers involving beard clipping mass as related to testosterone levels as related to the next time the hirsute Anon. would see his girlfriend, Pratchett and Dawkins (in that order; we have our priorities right), and feeding discarded kittens to pet snakes, I kid you not.

Outside of the working day life continues much as before, although much improved by the fact that because I spend all day in department I feel no pressure to work after I get home, leaving me time to do too much dancing as well as a happy level of socialising. The lack of essay crises is novel and a wonderful thing indeed.

Gallivanting

I write this ensconced very familiarly at my old desk in my somewhat palatial college room which I am lucky enough to be inhabiting for the second year in a row. Unfortunately it remains very bare and sad looking because the porters are holding hostage all my boxes which I left over the summer till tomorrow. I am living like a refugee and this morning had to shower with two hand towels. In a bid to make it temporarily seem a little more like a home I have put up some of my old posters which I rather cheekily hid in a high cupboard over the summer; and also went shopping at the trusty beginning of year poster of sale. My room is newly beautified by this little series of posters: penguins, snoopy, and a close up of a cow. Must keep up the zoologist face, you know.

September passed very pleasantly indeed in a whole series of trips around South-east Asia:

SINGAPORE
Was lovely for all the usual reasons of seeing the boyfriend, old friends etc. Went to watch E's dance performance at NUS; supper at Holland Village very convivial. Even went to Sentosa and spent a very happy day cycling, kayaking through the muck that passes for sea there, trying to get the boyfriend to sit on the beach; dinner at the lovely and very tasty Capella at CHIJMES. Such idyll.

BALI


Having just gained a professional diving qualification I naturally just had to get into the water again. Bali was a fantastic holiday all round -- far too much to see and do, charming, quiet, tremendously value for money into the bargain. The tourist tackiness we had expected was actually the exception to the norm, and despite the obvious tourist orientation of the entire island, we thought that the development had been done with lashings of taste and care to preserve the famous Balinese charm. The architecture is so lovely, everything done in dark wood and stone and completely open to the environment, melding seamlessly into the gorgeous plants and gardens everywhere.

Diving was amazing! There was amazing macro (little critters) at Tulamben in the north east of the island. I've never been muck diving before but could spend ages and ages peering amongst the sloping seabed of fine black volcanic sand looking for brightly coloured nudibranchs, crazy shrimps and crabs of all shapes and sizes, and various other denizens of the watery world. Saw so much that I'd never seen before in my life and couldn't identify at all. Highlights of the macro were probably the boxer crabs, tiny little 1cm crabs which stick anemones on their claws and wave them around kungfu-style to ward off danger, gorgeously coloured harlequin shrimp, and squat lobsters (AKA hairy blue crabs). I also spent probably something like 10 minutes watching this one cuttlefish. They are the coolest creatures ever, the way they change colours is phenomenal. It would flick from a smooth white with pulsating black, blue and silver spots, to mottled brown with spikes all over its body, and back again through a hundred incarnations within seconds. Despite the display being visual its speed and variety puts you in mind immediately of speech, and I did feel as I swam along with it that it might be talking to me. At one point it spread out its two side tentacles, stretched forward the rest in a tight triangle, pulsating strips of black and white at tremendous speed down them, and glooped a little fish or something (I couldn't see) from the water. It made me want to squeal into my regulator, it was so exciting.

And then, and then, and then there were the MOLA MOLA!! Also known as oceanic sunfish, these are the most massive bony fish in the world and we were tremendously lucky to see two of them as they came into the reef at Nusa Penida (an island off the east coast of Bali) to get cleaned. Both were about my size from fin tip to fin tip and these were small for the species. The Mola mola made the entire trip worth it even if everything else had been a disaster. It was so surreal swimming along with these unbelievably bizarre fish. I shall leave a picture to do the talking:


There was so much cultural stuff to do and of course we had no time to do it because we were underwater all the time. A second trip is definitely called for. We did, however, make it to Jimbaran to have seafood on the beach where a local band played at our request Rasa Sayang (Mum) and Hotel California (my sister and I); they could do Japanese and Spanish songs too! And we also watched a stunningly beautiful sunset from the temple at Uluwatu on the south west corner of the island. Finally, the females of the party had of course to try one of the Balinese spas -- we hadn't much time, but the little local one we went to for an hour long massage delivered quite the goods for USD25!

HONG KONG
Went back to Kuala Lumpur after Bali just in time to leave for yet another jaunt, this time in Hong Kong. I'd never been before and actually really liked the city, it has that sense of bustle and life that makes you want to explore and get carried along with the thousand and one events happening all the time. We stayed right next to the financial district which was certainly impressive.. the view almost everywhere you turn is quite phenomenal, particularly from Victoria Peak at night. Tower after tower, it is such a vertical city! It feels so different from Singapore; more like a Chinese version of New York I think -- less sterility, more life. There was a strange mixture of feeling more familiar than Western cities because of the Chinese culture and food, and more remote because I don't speak Cantonese. But it is perhaps similar to Singapore that there doesn't seem to be much to do! We largely went shopping and I was surprised at the sheer number of high fashion brand names -- I had to console myself with Espirit and Mango. I have such a lovely polka dotted... but you don't want to know about that, so I shall leave you instead with a picture of the Fragrant Harbour (as my sister calls it).



CAMBRIDGE
And now, alas, the Exciting Pre-PhD Summer is most definitely over. Real life beckons, or rather the PhD beckons as it can hardly be called real life. For the next three years I shall hopefully regale you with the trials and tribulations of how to figure out what little fish are doing underwater. See, now I just have to figure out which fish (possibly humbug damselfish so far) and where to do it! Piece of fishy cake. If only!