Birthday

So, yesterday I realized that today is my birthday. That's two years in a row that I've managed to forget about my birthday. Last year I didn't realize it until after it had passed, so I guess I'm better off this year. We're gearing up for a big frog tracking experiment so I've been a bit pre-occupied. We'll start 48 hours of continual monitoring of the frogs with transmitters tomorrow afternoon, so I've been pretty well busy getting ready for that. The frogs are not cooperating very well - most have crawled up into tall trees (about 15-20m up), so we're looking into various ways to climb trees. We might have to use some serious climbing equipment to figure out where these little frogs went.

Today, I tried to avoid work as much as possible. I had to accumulate some gear for the tracking experiment, then went to a movie, Cars. A funny thing happened at the ticket counter. Let me back up a bit. I've talked here about the Deckchair cinema here in Darwin. They are associated with a group here called the Darwin Film Society, who chooses the films, puts together a series of films in the wet, etc. If you're a member, you get discounts on most movies in Darwin, and free admission to some special screenings of films, as well as 4 tickets to get into movies at the Deckchair. So I joined this year, and flashed my card at the counter today. Apparently the girl working there was relatively new and hadn't seen one before. So she gave me a ticket for movie critics, which are free. Happy birthday to me, I guess. Because of that, I feel compelled to write some sort of review of the movie, so here goes. It's about cars. They're funny. Some good voices, a lot of good jokes (both visual, spoken, and in the casting), overall a good time. Certainly worth seeing. And there's a bit at the end of the credits that's worth waiting around for. Look for the Cadillac Ranch imagery.

One advantage to working with nocturnal animals has been that I'm still awake when the World Cup games are on. So, I've gotten completely hooked on them. I'm still saying it will be Argentina over Brazil in the final, and I've got Australia over Ecuador in the runner up match. I think Australia has a good chance to get that far - they're route looks beatable - but I'm a bit worried about Ecuador - they'll have to beat England and probably the Netherlands to get there, but I'll still be cheering for them.

Right. I'm going to wrap up my birthday celebrations by reading a novel and going to bed early.

abstract

abstract
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

Right, so I didn't like the way this one turned out at first, but I did some cropping and decided it was actually okay. Can you guess what it is?

Wave Hill trees

Wave Hill trees
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

I went on a field trip out near Wave Hill station last weekend. These flowers were all over the place, and were pretty striking, though they bounced around an awful lot in the wind. Made for a lot of very blurry photos. This is nearby one of the sites where we placed dataloggers to track the temperature under translucent rocks. It's really a pretty area, and the night sky is amazing. The nearest town of any real size was Katherine - about 5 hours away - so the sky was very dark. And we were out there when the moon was still pretty small, so it was very dark. Great for stargazing. We were a bit worried before the trip because the weather records for the area showed that it had been quite cold there the previous week - down to about 5°C overnight (41°F), which is very cold for someone used to Darwin weather. Fortunately, it only got down to a comfortable 14°C, which is not much cooler than Darwin right now, and really beautiful weather for camping. And, since it's the dry season now, no chance of rain at all. Great stuff!

We had planned to cook using a camp stove, but there was a bit of a fire ring there, so we gathered up a bit of wood and dried grass and stared a camp fire. We were amazed at how quickly it went from a pile of kindling to a very hot fire. One match and the thing was blazing. Really gave me respect for how easy it is to get a grass fire going in this region. With all the extra rain we got late in the season this year, there seems to be a lot of fuel farther south than normal, so I wonder if there will be even more buring than usual this year, if that's possible. About 95% of the region gets burned each year as it is, so there isn't much room for more than that.

Agate field site

Agate field site
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

This is one of our rock slime field sites - the one where we find agates with slime under them. Turns out that this is a pretty well-known site. While we were there, a group of rock-hounds from somewhere in Victoria showed up. They seemed pretty amused when we said we were looking for rocks with green slime under them, but they said that they'd found a bunch of them. They offered to give us some from their stash, and went to get them, but they never came back. It would have been nice to see what they had found.

Victoria River causeway

VR causeway
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

The causeway across the Victoria River, along the Buchanan highway (yes, that dirt road coming out of the river is the highway). If you look closely, you can see evidence of just how high the water was earlier this year during the wet season (and occasional cyclone). Last year, Keith and I had lunch along the far bank of this river, but this year the path was blocked by piles of mud from the floods.

Shell on rock

shell on rock
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

I found this shell along the Victoria River, and there were a lot of interesting rocks there as well. Most of the rocks were sedimentary of some sort, but were cracked into strange square shapes. Some we found were perfect bricks, others more like pavers. But all were very dense - Robert and I decided we really wouldn't want to be the ones to haul these rocks to make a house, although it would have been a very nice look for a house.

Robert walks on water

rob walks on water
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

Robert and I both thought this place along the Victoria River was pretty special, but who would have believed you could walk on water there!

June stuff

I began this month on the road again. I finally managed to get out to the field site for our rock slime project. I don't remember if I've described this project before or not, but basically, we're looking at the communities of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that grow under translucent rocks (quartz, agate, etc.). It has a funny history - Keith is a bit of a rock hound, so periodically goes out to gather rocks to put in his tumbler. Well, I went with him one time to collect agates. When we got back, Keith washed off some rocks and noticed that some had a green slime on the bottom. Purely by chance, I'd read an article in an Ecology journal about a week beforehand that talked about algae communities under quartz rocks in the Mojave desert. They did several things, including measuring temperatures and light intensity under the rocks, photosynthesis rates of the aglae at different light intensities, and a molecular phylogeny of the algae. Unfortunately, I thought that they did some parts badly, especially the temperature measures and the conclusions from them, and had actually flagged the article as something that Keith and I could do better.

Thus started the rock slime project. We got together with Keith's wife Karen, who is a molecular biologist, Lindsey, a plant physiological ecologist, and Robert, a cyanobacteria ecologist. Once we'd all read the paper, we all thought that the authors had done something badly, and that we could do it better, so we started. So far, the molecular biologists have found that there is a huge diversity under those rocks, and that everything we've found is a new "species" (hard to call something a species when it is a single, asexual cell), all 40 or so of them.

This trip had two goals, first to put out dataloggers to measure the microclimate under the rocks, and second to measure the photosynthesis rates at different temperatures over the course of the day. Well, of course with field work, things don't always go as planned. I should mention that the field site is a 10 hour drive away from Darwin, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, right at the transition between the wet/dry tropical savannah of the Top End, and the Tanami desert. So, Robert and I drove out there on the first of the month, and set up to do our day of field work. Unfortunately, the actual field site we have seems to have missed out on the late season rains that came to the region. So it was a lot drier than we'd hoped - dry enough that that the algae were already dormant for the year. Bummer. Fortunately, that didn't make any difference for the setting of the dataloggers, so they're out there collecting data (we hope) as I type this. We also were able to collect enough rocks that we can make the photosynthesis rate measurements in the lab, and Robert has been busily doing that this week.

The trip itself was nice - the country out there is really beautiful (I'll post photos soon), and there were still a number of flowers around. We also got to see the aftermath of some of the flooding in this region during the wet season. There were some impressive high-water marks on the stream beds. And, since it's the dry season, we saw plenty of grass fires. One was impressive in extent - I figure it must have followed the road for about 100km or so.

In other news, looks like I've finally rounded up a roommate. There is a new postdoc coming here in July to work on systematics of aquatic things, mostly crayfish, I think. Her background is in lizard (skink) systematics, though, so we'll have scaly things to talk about.