Rainforest Ecosystems Field Trip

April 3-5th

This weekend was our course field trip to the Paluma Rainforest. Honestly I wasn't excited about it but it turned out to be a lot better than I thought. Though still nothing compared to a weekend on the ocean : )

Friday we drove to the top of Mt. Spec about an hour and a half away from Townsville, in which direction I still don't know. The teacher who drove us was a terrible driver. We were all pretty much scared out of our minds. It was manual drive, and I'm pretty sure this woman had never driven that way before. As you can only imagine, driving up a mountain over 1,000 meters in elevation around crazy twists and turns with other cars coming at you on a street only wide enough for a single (small) car--was an accident waiting to happen. Luckily the accident did wait to happen and we made it up alive. The night didn't get much more eventful than that. We arrived too late to do any rainforest exploring, as the canopy of the rainforest blocks out a lot of light so even though it was 4 PM it was as dark as 7PM (in winter). Basically we IDed plants all night, which turned out to be pretty successful after our teacher showed us how to use this computer key rather than our textbooks (which was utter failure).

Saturday we began the day with 730AM breakfast. By the way, we all had to take turns helping the solitary cook clean up after each meal. It is also important to note, here in Australia you have five meals a day. Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. Its wonderful really : ) After breakfast the group of us who had arrived late afternoon the day before went out with our teacher to learn about open tall forests (I think?). It was cool because it wasn't the rainforest, so it was something new than what we had seen the last field trip we took to the rainforest. Highlights were: morning tea (water and 3 delicious brownies (probably only I had 3 of them)), the "fart" plant -which smelled surprisingly like a fart, the ecotone-where rainforest meets tall open forests, and a tree that had gotten struck by lightening.

It has escaped me as to what went on Saturday afternoon, but I'm sure it was more plant IDing and project planning. Oh yeah, we did go out into the rainforest and began our project work, managing to get through one quadrat in an hour. Saturday night I drank a lot of tea, discovering that milk+tea+sugar=very good. We also had to give mini group presentations on our projects, even though we really didn't know much to say.

So my group project is about these things called lenticels, which are basically part of tree "skin" that help the tree "breathe" when its in water logged areas. It is our hypothesis that buttresses (you know those groovy exposed roots on those huge trees) also serve as a breathing mechanism for the tree. We basically wanted to set up a survey to try and figure out if our assumptions were true or not, hence we set up transects near a stream and those atop a slope to see if lenticel distribution changed between quadrat types.

Anyway, Sunday we got up early again and spent the majority of the day (3-4 hours) finishing our quadrats, eating scones and swinging from vine epiphytes in the trees.

I should also tell you the toilets were pretty sweet. They don't flush..simply everything drops to the ground. But they have a fan system that like blows up delicious smelling smell (honestly delicious-like flowery) to keep things from stinking up. (I know you wanted to know all that)

On our way home Sunday we stopped at this infamous place called the Fruity Mango or something like that (I guess it wasn't that famous I can't even remember the name). They have all sorts of yummy non-dairy icecream, slushy-type things. Yummm yumm. In the back of this place they have their own orchard where they grow the fruits that they put into their icecreams. I went back there to check it out, there were these really big ugly fruits called...Jack something, and the coolest part was--these ants had made a nest in the plant's leaves! My teacher wripped it open and all these ants started pooring out! SO cool, until you get too close, then its disgusting. The odd part about these ants is that you can eat their butts, I guess it tastes pretty good, but being a vego (Australian for vegetarian) I'll never find out!