I guess the best way for me to describe Heron is that it has a pretty active night life. Well, not like you would think. At night two things happen: obnoxious, squawking, birds come out in force. The birds have a couple habits worth mention. They poop absolutely everywhere, what I like to call the bombing strategy and they dig long narrow holes to lay their eggs. Our tutors told us people break their legs stepping in these holes every year. Unfortunately, the island is protected so the thousands of birds that migrate to the island are relatively untouchable. Our arms were tied against their bombs and land mines... I remember one student attempted to test them, shaking trees to see what the reaction was. There was no reaction. This scared me even more than if they had squawked or pooped on him. In the dark of night, they were planning to destroy Douglas Merkert...
The other memorable feature of Heron at night was its incredible night sky. I think it was Dan who put it best, "those stars really do twinkle." And they do. Every night it was worth the time to head down, past the carefully defended woods of the birds and take a peak. The stars roll over you, are bright, unending, and glisten. We tried to figure out why - whether it was quasars spinning, just atmospheric fluctuations, or excessive drunkenness I'm not sure.
The island was beautiful - maybe a kilometre in diameter and all white sand beaches. Protected as a national park (and by the birds) it is a relatively untouched paradise. You can see the incredible sunset or sunrise just by taking a ten minute walk to the other side of the island. Of course, it is on a barrier reef, so we couldn't surf, but the water was warm and blue like a glassy lake. The island actually formed from the Great Barrier Reef. The reef caused a refraction of the water - kind of like two ripples in a pond - where the ripples meet, the island formed from transported calcium carbonate from the reef. The island is surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef and the weather during our week there was absolutely perfect - no rain, not too hot, clear nights, blue skies.
Almost everyday was spent doing horrible, tortuous field work. Not really. We had wet suits and our own snorkel gear and snorkeled around the reef everyday. I don't have photos yet, but as soon as I get my camera developed I will upload pictures. We saw a little bit of everything - giant turtles the size of small cars, turtles swimming along bright blue and red corals, dolphins, wales... Yeah, our lab work was in a pretty rough environment.
Most Australians will never get the chance to see and do what we did. The resort fee was at a minimum $200 or $300 per night and I don't think that included the ferry or helicopter ride to the island. You would have to be pretty jet-set to get a helicopter ride to the island...
My group laboratory work investigated how invertebrates respond to threats. So...an invertebrate is something without a backbone - we looked at worms and clams - and the threat in this case was me poking at the clam or worm with a long wooden stick. The worms we looked at were Christmas Tree Worms and when you poke at them they pop back into a hole and the clams shut themselves into a hole. We would poke them and time how long it takes for them to show their faces again (usually within a couple minutes). We then would poke them again. We were looking to see if they would hide longer and longer or shorter and shorter with each poke. Liz did the same thing with shrimp gobies - an effeminate fish who hides away in a hole for long periods at a time.
Our research, or part of it. Refractory time is the amount of time it spends hiding. With each poke it hides longer and longer - it is learning to avoid us
Our research showed, amazingly, that the worms hide away for longer and longer periods of time every time we poked them. This is called habituation - the most primitive kind of learning. Worms learn! The clams weren't as quick, but we did find a correlation between size and hiding time, which has enough biological implications for us to make a half way decent lab write up. I probably speak for myself when I say that I really liked these projects - we chose the topic, decided how to do the research, and did our best at writing an objective scientific paper at the end. When I'd get bored during writing this up (long 12 - 15 page reports) I would google the scientist grandfather I never met and look at some of his papers. It reminded me of that old saying - something about how science is standing on the shoulders of giants. Even if it was just for a class, the research was cool, pertinent, and was built off the work of many others.
Heron was an amazing experience that, alone, made this term abroad worthwhile.
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