Oysters!

In addition to lobsters, I've been trying to learn how to cook a few other things while I'm out here. 

Today I tried oysters!

The species we tried were Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) - and they were pretty huge! I used a shucking knife to open them up down the side (only stabbing myself a few times) and to cut through the muscle attaching the top of the oyster to the shell.

We decided to make Oysters Kilpatrick - mainly because I didn't feel completely ready to try nude, uncooked oysters just yet (maybe next time?). 

So after shucking the oysters, and also cutting the muscle connecting the oyster to the other side of the shell, we tipped out the excess juice and placed some thin slices of uncooked bacon on top of the raw oysters. Then we added a little Worcester sauce onto each of them (ok, it was rather a lot of Worcester sauce - I LOVE Lea & Perrins.. on EVERYTHING). Then we chucked them under the grill for a bit until the bacon bits were all crispy.

The finished product!

I tried them... and they were nice! I feel slightly more confident about trying them raw now (I think). At least now I know the taste of the beasties I'm doing experiments on!

Removing barnacles from oysters at the
Fisheries Institute. That's Brandt
in the background - hard
at work 

I also cooked this fish yesterday! Stuffed with
bits of butter and lemon

BIRDS

The wildlife here is very different to the wildlife back home. It seems to generally just be significantly larger, louder, and more strange.

I thought I'd better take some pictures of a few of the feathered friends here (since I know there is someone reading this who is a little bird-crazy). These were all taken from Brian and Bev's balcony in Hawks Nest - which is just over the bay from where I've been staying in Nelson Bay. I woke up, got a cup of tea (obviously), and went out onto the balcony, where I was greeted by all of this lot (and a whole heap of bird noise).. 

I have seen many many other birds out here - but I haven't always got my camera handy. For instance I saw some swans yesterday (they have black swans over here instead of white ones - and they aren't all owned by the Queen either).

An Australian Magpie (Cracticus tibicen) - these are very large - and they
don't "caw" like our crows, they actually have quite a nice bird song

A Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) - these guys can
also mimic other species and even humans!

Very happy to be fed - apparently the same ones come back
every day

I think this is a Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus)
SO MUCH COLOUR

On the right there is a Blue-faced Honeyeater (Entomyzon
cyanotis), on the left - a Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala)

These are Galah (Eolophus roseicapillus), and they have
very pink bellies

.. not amused by my picture-taking..

Ayla, if you spy any mistakes with my bird names please let me know... quietly

I spent the weekend over at Hawks Nest with Brian & Bev and we had a lovely lunch/drinks/dinner with some of their friends on Saturday. On Sunday we drove around Newcastle (we would've walked but it was SUPER WINDY), and I was given a tour of the different areas - including the huge coal processing machinery, a number of lovely beaches, and a disused railway station. I hope to be able to get back to Newcastle and explore it a bit more thoroughly at some point.

On Friday afternoon Brian took some photos of me doing science at the fisheries institute - to show to his rotary club that I am indeed hard at work.

This is actually how I spend the
majority of my time

Me & Laura being
fascinated by oysters

My hundreds of neatly labelled pots,
 ready for my experiment

Another interesting thing: in some areas here over the main roads they are trialling these animal walkways - long rope ladders for small beasties (such as koalas and possums) to crawl through in order to cross busy roads! Studies have found that it takes animals a couple of years to be brave enough to start trying out these structures, but after that the use of these rope bridges increases lots! All over the world more and more culverts, tunnels, and land-bridges are being build to help all kinds of animals cross roads - but these initiatives need to be tested to see if they work and if any improvements can be made.

Possum tunnel over the Karuah Bypass that we drove along on the way
from Hawks Nest to Newcastle

These are not my photos (pretty obviously), they are taken by
motion-triggered cameras set up as part of a project to evaluate the success
of these structures aiding endangered animals to cross the roads (Kylie Soanes).
The little guy on the left is a brush-tailed phascogale (Phascogale tapoatafa),
 and the one on the right is a goanna (an Australian monitor lizard). 

Picture of Brushtail possum using a rope ladder crossing
taken from the 'Karuah Bypass Fauna Crossing Report"
(which can be found at: http://www.rainforest-crc.jcu.
edu.au/publications/karuah_bypass.pdf if anyone is interested)

Other examples of animal crossings around the world (I took none of these pictures - I just thought they were all awesome ideas):

Fallow deer using a bridge to cross
 the M25 in England (it's estimated that
 there are over 70,000 deer-vehicle
collisions per year in the uk
- a good reason to put in a few more
crossings? Photo: Jamie Hall)

Christmas Island Crabs crossing

Black bear using an underpass in
Montana, US

A green wildlife bridge over
an autobahn in Germany

Elephant underpass in Kenya

Wildlife crossing in Banff

Working with algae

Algae culture room / magic bubbly colour bottles

Laminar flow cabinet

I've been learning a lot of things while I'm working at the Fisheries Institute here. Today I got to practise using a haemocytometer  to work out the algal concentration of a solution - very important to get this right for the experiments that we are about to begin here!



To retrieve the algae from the stock cultures, we work in the laminar flow cabinet - this is similar to a fume hood (which protects the person working with it by drawing air in from the front so that any nasty chemicals inside the hood don't get drawn out into the air where the person is working), but it works the opposite way round (so instead of protecting the user from what is inside the cabinet, it protects what's inside by drawing air in through the top and out through the front - so nothing from the users side can enter the cabinet and contaminate whatever is being worked on).

Haemocytometer grid
(as the name suggests these
can also be used to count blood
cells)

If the algae that you want to count is motile then a small amount of formalin solution has to be added to kill them (or counting them would be a complete nightmare). Formalin is a solution of formaldehyde in water, and it's pretty nasty stuff - stronger solutions of the stuff are used for the embalming of human remains! The algal culture must be shaken to suspend any cells that have settled on the bottom - and then a small amount is pipetted onto a haemocytometer (this is a microscope slide with a teeny tiny grid of very exact measurements etched into it) with a cover slide placed on top of it.



Then comes the counting! You can count the amount of cells in different sized boxes - dependent on just how many cells are in the solution (so if there are thousands you might want to count in a very small box and just scale up the count at the end).

And then some maths to work out the overall concentration in CELLS/ML.

Now with harmless algae - for example some of the algae they use at the Fisheries Institute to feed the oysters - any waste algae can just be thrown down the sink....

..BUT WE ARE USING DANGEROUS ALGAE!! dun dun DUUUUUN..

The terrible algae in question - Alexandrium

This algae can cause PSP (paralytic shellfish poisoning) - which can concentrate in shellfish and, when eaten, can cause illness in humans. PSP can affect the nervous system and cause paralysis - severe PSP can even cause severe illness and death!

Example of an Alexandrium sp. bloom

Because the Fisheries Institute does a lot of work on shellfish we have to be exceedingly careful with the Alexandrium culture so as to ensure that we don't contaminate any of the feed algae or any of the water that could get into the shellfish. We also have to be careful not to put any Alexandrium down the drain in case it makes it's way into the bay at all - the Fisheries Institute (and especially me) don't really want to be responsible for mass ruining of thousands of oysters in the Bay! So all excess Alexandrium is carefully soaked up into tissue and binned - and the equipment we use will be double washed in alcohol solution. We will be SUPER CAREFUL.

When we counted the Alexandrium yesterday it was 70,000 cells/ml, and today it was 110,000 cells/ml! It's growing fast! And it's nearly ready for the experiment!!

More about work

An update on how things are progressing at the Fisheries Institute: We are still waiting on the Alexandrium (dangerous algae) to grow enough to begin our major project. In the meantime I have been busy learning to use different equipment, helping with some other projects, and trialling a method for a different experiment. 

This bit of kit is a SensorDish Reader which is a very clever bit of kit that measures the oxygen or pH levels inside the tiny chambers (around 4ml) that sit on the reader.

The SensorDish is photosensitive so I first had to create a dark box to perform the experiments in - with an airtight hole in the side to allow the cables that connect the equipment to the computer.

The lucky candidates

I went down to the pier and collected some trial beasties (some teeny tiny snails) and popped them into the chambers. Then sealed them up and watched the computer create little graphs of the oxygen readings - which showed the rates of respiration in each chamber.

We did a few experiments with different beasties (and one with algae) to practise using the equipment and to see what kind of readings we would get - looking at response rate and variability etc.

Example readings

All very interesting stuff - critical thinking and experimental design. It can sometimes be easy to forget about the logistics of an experiment - exactly how much seawater you might need (at the fisheries institute this is often measured in tonnes!), where that water is going to come from, how it will get there, what size containers, how many times a day to take readings, will measurements need taking at 3am, who will do that, etc. All things that will take up maybe a sentence in a final research paper - but in reality might take days or weeks to think about and organise!

Different concentrations
of algae

In slightly different news, Australia is experiencing some very cold (for Australia) weather at the moment.

"A strong surge of sub-Antarctic air is travelling across Australia and is expected to affect two-thirds of the country, in the southern and eastern regions. Nicknamed the 'Antarctic vortex', the cold weather is forecast to be the worst in six decades, bringing with it icy conditions and natural snowfalls"

Seems to be that wherever I go I bring unusually cold weather..


..and my parents expected me to come back with a tan..

Dive time!

Today I went for a short scuba dive with the 'Feet First' dive centre in Nelson Bay. Got up at 6.30(am) and trundled on down to the shop - where we donned suits and prepared our gear, before heading off to Fly Point.

Fly Point is an aquatic reserve - strictly no fishing or collecting from the area. It is TEEMING with interesting fish and little beasties to have a look at and is very easy to access. The only thing that you really have to think about is tide times - because the bay has a very narrow opening into the open ocean, the currents created by the tidal water rushing in and out of the bay can be very strong.

It had been a little while since I have been scuba diving and my buoyancy control was a little iffy to begin with, so I was a little ridiculous and bobbing up and down for a few minutes - but I think I regained control fairly fast without too much embarrassment (hopefully). I am considering starting my next dive qualification while i'm out here. There's not much chance of me doing that at home over the winter for sure! The water temperature was around 17-18ºC here today so not too cold (although my feet did get a little chilly - I might invest in some decent neoprene socks!).

Some pictures from the dive:

Not the best picture in the world, but this was one of the
many nudibranchs we saw

 

These crazy-looking things are Gulf wobbegong (Orectolobus
halei) which is a species of carpet shark. The individual
in the top picture must have been nearly 2m long!

Awesome fish and giant sponge (not their official names)

I think this tiny cuboid fish is a Yellow boxfish (Ostracion
cubicus).. but I could be very wrong about that..

CUTTLEFISH!!!!!! I love them. They're adorable. This
species is the Mourning cuttlefish (Sepia plangon)

Some kind of eel

I believe this is a South australian catfish (Cnidoglanis
macrocephalus)

I believe this is an Eastern blue groper (Achoerodus viridis)

There were just so many fish everywhere!

Lobster Update

Promised an update on the lobsters - here it is!

I was in charge of the lobsters - which worried me because i'm not a big chef person.. let alone a seafood chef person... We cut them in half and smothered them in garlic butter (so much garlic butter). Then we chucked them on the barbecue for about 15mins (whilst adding more garlic butter), and then turned them over for a minute or so, and then they were done! Turns out cooking lobsters is easier than I thought it would be!

Master of the lobster cooking

Really tasty!

Extras

I'm pretty determined to get the most that I can out of my stay over here in Oz. In aid of this, this week I have been out kayaking in Shoal Bay with Doug (my first time kayaking in a long time - it's harder work than it looks!).. 

Doug, Jenny, and I took a drive out to Boat Harbour to watch the whales go by..

And today in the lunch break at work Kyle decided it might be nice conditions for a bit of free diving and I was invited along! So we quickly headed off to grab our stuff and actually went back to Boat Harbour (where we were watching whales a few days before) and jumped straight in from the rocks! (I've not really jumped in from rocks when there's been a fair bit of swell before so this was a new experience - a little daunting at first, but it was fine really, not nearly as scary as it looked). Kyle did a bit of free diving and found some critters, and I snorkelled and had a look around. The water temperature here at the moment is on the colder side for this area (around 18ºC), which I found really pretty comfortable after diving in Plymouth in February (about 9ºC). The sea temperature in Plymouth at the moment after the 'heatwave' is 15ºC. I think they have it pretty good here really for messing about in the water - although they do have a multitude of sharks frequenting the coastline I suppose.. I try not to think about them..

Obligatory selfie

Its pretty scary watching someone
disappear down into the
depths, and stay there for minutes!

Everything that we caught was actually caught by Kyle. My aim by the end of my time here is to be able to free-dive
for long enough to catch some beasties!

I think this is an Eastern rock lobster (Jasus verreauxi) - there is a catch limit and so we brought back 2 individuals.
They also have to be a certain size (so that the babies don't get caught). Kyle was generous enough to donate the 2 he
caught today to me! (Although I'm determined to catch my own before leaving). And I am planning on trying to
cook them tomorrow! I have been given instructions and I am feeling confident that I probably won't ruin them
 (Results to follow soon...)

Also there were lots of little fish everywhere

Lots and lots!