Cape Tribulation Almost.
I just went to the Cape, almost. Actually we fell a few kilometres short at the Canopy Crane, a huge construction crane in the middle of the rainforest.
The purpose of the trip was to show a visiting prof. from Cornell Uni, USA around. Neo (no joke) is an expert in food webs (and food web marticies) and their properties (ie. length of food chains etc…) and is essentially looking for patterns of properties that hold true accross all food webs in all environments (much newton’s laws of relativity etc…).
Tony, the PhD student who organised Neo’s visit from Zion, also came along and added to the peppering of questions that Neo received.
Anyway, the Canopy Crane was pretty amazing. They put you in a ‘basket thingy’ (my technical engineering term for it) and hoist you up and around the tree tops. They can lower you down and about and so on… to do research on particular insects or animals. One of the girls there is doing her masters on the forest mammals and has some with sonic tags which she then chases using the crane and traps in cages etc…
Following our visit we made our way back to Cairns… Wait I’m getting ahead of myself… On the way up on the Wednesday we stopped in at Wallaman Falls, Australia’s highest single fall waterfall. We walked/ran all the way down to the bottom and then hiked back up, I thought I was going to spew!
Now, back to Cairns… We went out that night. All I can say is that what goes on tours stays on tour.
And then on Friday we went out on a uni-paid diving trip with TUSA dive. I took my own gear, which was cool. The reefs that we went to were a bit trashed but still wonderful, particuarly the giant clam, which was, as the name would suggest, GIANT. In fact, I would have called it the Fucking MASSIVE clam. Tony expressed his wonderment by trying to get his arm in it, and later riding a turtle… “It’s o.k. we’re ecologists” he said later when the Captain busted him.
All in all a sweet trip to be repeated a.s.a.p. (Also got to visit my study sites in good weather which was nice).
I’ve posted some photos here. When you’re checking them out, please don’t click on the Back to Albums link. Thank you come again.