Travels of a Fish Nut

I can’t remember the first time I heard about the Lord Howe Island stick insect, and I can’t say my interest has been much more than in passing. They would pique my interest when I saw them in the news, only to fade back into the vast and ever growing pile of ‘oh, interesting’. Then, at the beginning of November, I actually got to come face to face with one of these creatures and it was so incredible I decided to find out more. This is what I’ve learned… Lord Howe Island stick insects are - I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn - found on Lord Howe Island. This is a small crescent-shaped island in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. I didn’t realise until researching this piece that the island is actually inhabited. It has a population of 382 people according to the 2011 census . The Lord Howe Island stick insect ( Dryococelus australis ), or LHISI as it’s known to friends, was first described by Xavier Montrouzier in 1855 from specimens collected by the HMS Hera...

I was perusing the news over lunch today when this article caught my eye (I can't imagine why!), I had a read and my eyes began to involuntarily roll. This was another of those terrible evo-psych papers I've written about in the past , wasn’t it? After having read the paper the article is based on, and after rescuing my eyes after they fell out of my head and onto the floor from rolling so much, I regret to inform you that yes, it is. The basic set up for the research is that they have a series of photos of men and they ask people to judge the strength of the man in the photo based on the physique of his torso and rate his attractiveness. (I'll get to the 'why' later). The first thing to note is that it's all a bit of a mess. I will try and be brief with the explanation of the method as I know it's incredibly tedious to read, but it really has to be seen to be believed. They have two separate sets of photos, both taken from prior research. The f...

Oh look, it's time for another 'let's spread awareness of breast cancer by not saying anything about breast cancer' Facebook meme. Normally I ignore them but after spending the last year and a bit being hyper-aware of breast cancer and its consequences I've had enough and now I'm striking back...

I was inspired by the film crew on board to try my hand at producing a couple of videos of the trip. I've never used iMovie before but it's been a fun learning curve. The first shows how the water sampling was done, The second is a more scenic tour showing some of the sights we saw,

As one of my friends said, academia doesn’t have many perks, but the fieldwork is definitely one of them. I don’t really know where to start... The Kimberley is amazing. Just amazing. Every sunrise, every sunset, and all the hours in between have been one incredible experience after another. I’ve only been back a couple of weeks and already it feels like some unbelievable dream. Being at sea is a bit surreal anyway. Add on being in the Kimberley and you’ve got yourself an once-in-a-lifetime experience. The trip was focused around the islands in the north of Camden Sound, Our stops The Islands The geology of the Kimberley is fascinating. Unfortunately I don’t know enough geology to explain it to you so I’m just going to show some pretty pictures. One thing that really struck me was how skewed my perspective was. The lack of anything manmade to give a sense of scale meant that islands which looked really flat and unimpressive from not that far away…  Pyren...

The invitation to go to Camden Sound came only a few short weeks before the trip was due to take place, so I had no time to waste. After I got the ok from my supervisors I had to work out what I was going to do. I wanted to sample oxygen and strontium isotopes, and trace elements. Oxygen and strontium are both measures of salinity but oxygen can also vary due to things like latitude, depth and temperature. We have had some interesting results from our comparison of oxygen and strontium in the otoliths so trying to understand their relationship in the water itself will be a great help. Trace elements are supposed to vary geographically and are used as ‘tags’ to locate fish to specific sites, but this can only be done when you know the trace element composition at each site. I emailed around to find labs that could analyse the samples and that could tell me how to collect them. Oxygen isotopes were sorted fairly quickly – I only needed 20ml water filtered through a 0.45 𝜇m filter an...