Foreign invasion

Yikes, we're being innundated with visitors here. So, we've had the 5 fish physiologists around for 2 weeks (from British Columbia, New Zealand, Adelaide (2), and Melbourne). Today, two other colleagues arrives suddenly from Denmark and Sydney. The one from Denmark wasn't supposed to be here for 3 weeks, and the one from Sydney wasn't supposed to be here until sometime in August. Needless to say, there wasn't much space in the lab today. The fish guys have a water flume set up and are measuring all sorts of things with very sophisticated equipment that goes ping. Actually, one of their machines goes woosh - it uses doppler radar to measure the blood flow in the aorta of an air-breathing fish. They also have a nearly invisible (small) gizmo that measures oxygen concentration in the air bladder of these fish. The guy from Denmark has anther gadget that measures the oxygen consumption of ants that live in hollow mangrove sticks, and that get submerged twice a day. This thing can actually measure respiration in an individual ant. The guy from Sydney has every snake marked in an extremely dense population found about an hour from Darwin that he's been tracking for about 20 years. It's certainly been interesting having all these guys around, but it would have been nice to space them out a bit.

Also this week, we've been meeting with the crocodile guys about getting that project going. We're still trying to figure out how to put an oxygen mask on an animal that is 4.5m long and weighs 600kg (and has a mouth big enough to swallow us whole). We meet tomorrow to work out mroe details on this.

Yesterday, I was informed that as of today, there will be someone else sharing my office. Turns out the guy in charge of space has known about this for "a few months" but didn't bother to tell me until today because he "didn't know exactly when she'd be here." I had almost bought that (not really that close though) until I realize that this person was coming all the way from... Darwin. Yup, she's been filling in for lectures in the trades part of the university for the last several years. I should also mention that my office is a comfortable size for one person, but quite cramped for two, particularly if either has any stuff to go in the office (I had it comfortably filled until yesterday). It will be interesting to see how this works. (I should point out that I have nothing inherently against sharing, or the new person, but the process by which I was (not) informed has be a bit steamed, particularly since I've been in my own office for all of the nearly 4 years I've been here.)