March trips
It's been quite crazy around here lately. I've been working on a project looking at crocodile digestion. Actually, it is quite similar to the experiments I did in Israel, only with crocodiles. We're working with little guys (about 80cm or a bit over 2 ft), so not too much danger of losing limbs, though they do have sharp teeth and very strong jaws. Anyway, I've been doing lots of sampling from them over the last 3 weeks, so I've been a bit busy. For the first week, it was twice a day, at 8am and 8pm for a bit over an hour, plus the hour and a half beforehand getting ready, and the 2 hours after processing the samples. It made for some very long days. During the second week, it went down to one sample per day, but then I had to start analyzing the samples. That involved driving them over to another part of town, and putting them in a liquid scintillation counter. The guys there have a flash new machine, which they haven't yet figured out how to use. So I've spent a good part of the last few weeks helping them figure that out, and calibrating the thing. It's finally giving numbers I can believe, and the data look quite good. For the next couple weeks, the crocs are having a break, and then I'll do the second round.
Immediately after I finished the first set of samples for the crocodile experiment, I went on another trip to Wave Hill to check on the dataloggers for our rock slime study. That trip was pretty uneventful, but nice. Steve and I went and had a bit of a look around that area, including stopping in to Kalkarindji, a community near the field site. That's where I took the photos along the Victoria River, where we had lunch and a bit of a swim. On the way back, we stayed in Katherine. We had run into a bit of rain along the road between Top Springs and Katherine, but thought nothing of it until the next morning when we saw the headlines of the NT News. Apparently, a couple hours after we left Darwin on Friday, it started raining. A lot. By Sunday, there had been over 30cm of rain (a foot), and the highway had flooded in 4 places. By the time we'd heard about it, the water had receded a bit, but it was still very high. You can get a bit of a sense of what it was like by the photos of the Adelaide River bridge below. All that bamboo was washed there when the river overflowed the bridge. There was even one section of the highway that looked like it had been picked up and placed parallel to the highway. It was a bit eerie actually, because it was about a 50 meter section that was just over to the side of the road. Weird. Since that weekend, we've had another 20 cm or so. needless to say, everything here is pretty wet. One nearby community, Oenpelli, had over a meter of rain in a week, which is a lot of rain, even for someplace like this. They were pretty well under water for a few days. At least we have missed the two cyclones that have been spinning over in Western Australia. Well, sort of. It was the precursor to cyclone George that dumped all that rain on us last weekend.
So, below there are some photos from the Wave Hill trip, and the deluge.
Immediately after I finished the first set of samples for the crocodile experiment, I went on another trip to Wave Hill to check on the dataloggers for our rock slime study. That trip was pretty uneventful, but nice. Steve and I went and had a bit of a look around that area, including stopping in to Kalkarindji, a community near the field site. That's where I took the photos along the Victoria River, where we had lunch and a bit of a swim. On the way back, we stayed in Katherine. We had run into a bit of rain along the road between Top Springs and Katherine, but thought nothing of it until the next morning when we saw the headlines of the NT News. Apparently, a couple hours after we left Darwin on Friday, it started raining. A lot. By Sunday, there had been over 30cm of rain (a foot), and the highway had flooded in 4 places. By the time we'd heard about it, the water had receded a bit, but it was still very high. You can get a bit of a sense of what it was like by the photos of the Adelaide River bridge below. All that bamboo was washed there when the river overflowed the bridge. There was even one section of the highway that looked like it had been picked up and placed parallel to the highway. It was a bit eerie actually, because it was about a 50 meter section that was just over to the side of the road. Weird. Since that weekend, we've had another 20 cm or so. needless to say, everything here is pretty wet. One nearby community, Oenpelli, had over a meter of rain in a week, which is a lot of rain, even for someplace like this. They were pretty well under water for a few days. At least we have missed the two cyclones that have been spinning over in Western Australia. Well, sort of. It was the precursor to cyclone George that dumped all that rain on us last weekend.
So, below there are some photos from the Wave Hill trip, and the deluge.
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