Recently in Australia 2002 Category

It began with a midnight rendezvous at Uni, the beginning of a seven-hour coach ride up the coast from Brisbane to Gladstone. The initial chatterment as we all shared stories of our week’s holidays soon died down as we fell into various stages of unconsciousness. I sat in the very front seat, and watched the nighttime scenery fly past, dazed by the surreality of it all, fingers of white fog laying low across the road.

We arrived at Gladstone hours before the ferry for our final destination, Heron Island, was due to leave. It was here that I began an occupation that was to keep us all amused for the duration of the trip--skin illustration, or pen tattoos. It began when I told David I saw an echidna in Tassie, and he actually didn’t know what an echidna was.

So, lacking paper, I drew an echidna on him. I then drew a nudibranch on the back of Diana’s leg, at her request. On the ferry ride, I did a weedy sea dragon on Lelia’s back, which I am still proud of and of which I hope someone has a good photograph. I went on to illustrate all manner of sea creatures during the ensuing ten days, including a great white shark and a lionfish, and generally received chocolate in payment for my services.

I’ve decided I really need to get my hands on some henna.

And so we arrived at Heron Island. Our welcoming party consisted of Ian, all our tutors, and some 60,000 white-capped noddies (birds). Over the next few days, as it is the season of twitterpation down under, this number began to increase to what would be an eventual count of 60,000 breeding pairs of noddies.

Lacking Hobbes' olfactory language, I can only leave you to imagine the scent of the island.

The noddies were also joined by a large population of shearwaters, or muttonbirds, which are oceanic birds that rest in flocks of thousands out on the waves, but visited our island every night. The muttonbird has a truly frightening call that reminds one of a zombie’s moan, or perhaps the whining of young children. After the first few hours, though, it ceases to be frightening and becomes really, really annoying. Especially along about 3-4 in the morning, which is when they all take off for the open ocean again and leave us mercifully with about an hour to sleep in silence.

Of course, we didn’t have to get up at five o’clock. But the rewards for doing so were so spectacular that by the end of the trip at least half of us made this our regular rising time. There are two reasons for this.

First, Heron Island is very small. At high tide you can walk around it in about 15 minutes. There are two facilities on Heron, the research station (where we stayed) and the resort (where we did not stay). Whatever space left is “revegetation area,” as Heron Island is part of a national marine park, and that’s it. This means that in the morning, you can walk around to the island’s east side, and watch the sun rise over the ocean. In the evening, you walk back around to the west side, and watch the sun set over the ocean. The colors are pure, soft, delicate; the peace in the air is indescribable. I wrote most of my most recent poem while watching sunrises and sunsets on Heron.

The second reason has to do with turtles. Heron Island and surrounding waters are a national park because it is a fairly large breeding and laying ground for green and loggerhead turtles. Early morning is the best time to catch sight of them mating in shallow water, or even up on the beach laying eggs. From the beach, I saw over the course of our stay several breeding pairs and two turtles up on the sand.

From the outrigger canoe that I got to take a trip on one morning, I passed almost close enough to touch another breeding pair (or triplet, as there’s usually an extra male or two trying to get in on the act). The trip was a lucky break, as Ted, the man who owns the canoe, only took it out once or twice a day, and there were seats for but a few of us. I didn’t get on the list initially, but determined not to miss the opportunity, I simply showed up at the canoe early one morning, and Ted allowed me to sit on the back of the canoe and come out with them. At first I was a bit disappointed not to be able to paddle with the others, but on the way back Ida, one of the tutors, switched with me, and the work was so exhausting that I was grateful for my earlier free ride.

When I say we went “out” I mean we paddled to another reef, Wistari, and snorkeled there for a little while before paddling back. Of course we brought our snorkeling gear. For ten days we all lived in bathers, mask, snorkel, and fins. Besides allowing for a consistent tan, this also permitted us to jump into the water at the slightest provocation, whether it was research needs, heat, boredom, or the presence of sharks, rays, turtles, or any other remarkable sea creature (which, in the end, was simply inevitable).

And even when I saw no individual animal of particular noteworthiness, I was always surrounded with scenes of such incomparable beauty and wonder that I never counted a moment in the water poorly spent. The colors of the corals and the fish living in and around them led me to feel I was swimming in a huge tropical fish tank, and the reality of the place was difficult to grasp. One of my most treasured memories is of an entire school of tiny cuttlefish, only an inch or two in length, that fled past us just as we were ready to board the boat.

I mentioned research needs, didn’t I? Let it here be recorded that this was far from a mere pleasure trip, and in fact we did a whole lot of work. Some did more than others, but our group probably worked harder than most due to numerous frustrations. We wanted to do a project on cuttlefish (yay cephalopods! It wasn’t even my idea!) but time constraints led us to a more sessile and predictable organism, the starfish.

We proposed both field and laboratory components, to discover their preferred substrates and feeding habits. The field bit worked out very well, just as we’d planned, and involved lots of walking out over the reef at low tide, hunting for starfish. Pretty nifty. The reef surrounding Heron, incidentally, is quite large, and at low tide the water is usually knee high all the way out to the edge of the reef, where the coral drops off sharply. This area is called the reef flat, and is much, much bigger than the island itself, giving quite a lot of roaming area.

At high tide, of course, the water is several meters deep, ideal for snorkeling, and at the aptly named Shark Bay we could and regularly did swim mere feet away from innumerable stingrays and reef sharks.

Anyway, the field bit was lovely. The laboratory bit was extremely frustrating, not least due to our tutor’s “help.” He meant well, he really did, but it was his first time as a tutor and he tried to take control of what was essentially not his project, but ours. And in addition, we made the important discovery that when you put sea stars in tanks in the laboratory, escape is far more important to them than eating. I bet you never thought of an escaping starfish, did you? Well, believe you me, they can be pretty troublesome. They’re like Houdini in slow motion. You put it back in the tank, come back in half an hour, and it’s trying to get out again.

In addition I was trying desperately to finish up a proposal for a research project on octopuses that I want to do when I get back to Santa Barbara, which did not decrease my stress level. However, when it got too much, I would just take a few deep breaths, realize I was living in a tropical paradise, and relax again.

It really was like a dream. Everything was too bright to be real: the sky, the sand, the water. We were all salty and sandy from the first day on. I stopped bothering to towel off after showers, once my towel reached the point where it was more salty and damp than me. But none of it mattered; in fact it was part of the fun.

On the last night we went over to the resort’s lounge/bar area, where there was a life-size chess set and a live entertainer. At the request of one of our girls, he started off with “Hotel California,” and it only got better from there. We even got Ian and Jeff to dance with us. After the guitarist left, though, people were just drinking, and so I went back to the research station, where I collected a sleeping bag and opened it up to sleep at the beach.

I opened it up because I was going to be sharing it with Cara and Annie, who woke me an hour later when they crawled in on either side of me. You see, we were provided with beds and bedding, but we all wanted to sleep on the beach. Those of us who brought sleeping bags slept happily on the beach for the whole trip, but the rest of us (including Cara, Annie, and me) were not so lucky. However, on the last night Craig opted to sleep indoors, so we borrowed his sleeping bag. It was not a particularly restful night, lying sandwiched between the two girls on the sand, but I was certainly warm enough. And it was pretty spectacular to just wake up and walk a few meters down the beach for the sunrise.

And so we packed, and left, dragging our heels and longing for more.

Being the octopophile I am, I subscribe to a mailing list known as the ceph-list. My trip to Tasmania was initiated thus: I e-mailed the ceph-list some time ago with an inquiry into the state of cephalopods in the region immediately surrounding Australia. Specifically, I wanted a destination for my mid-semester holidays. I received a number of helpful replies. (And not so helpful ones, such as the plea from an envious someone in the States, begging me to fly back, pick him up, and take him with me to see exotic cephalopods.) Most exciting were the invitations of a few researchers in Tasmania, suggesting that I might be able to help them with some field work. Too excited for words, I booked my tickets.

Well, the field work didn’t quite happen, but it was just as well, as I had an extremely pleasant, mellow week wandering around Australia’s island state. I did still get to meet these cephalopod researchers, one of whom actually had the privilege of dissecting a giant squid that had washed up recently in Tasmania. They were very friendly, and gave me articles, and took me out on a boat on Hobart’s river while they played around with some underwater cameras. And then, they asked if I was going to be at the conference in Thailand. “What conference in Thailand?” I asked.

Apparently, the international cephalopod conference, which takes place every three years, is occurring in 2003 in Phuket, Thailand. But get the dates: February 17-21st. Are you amazed yet? (For any of my readers who may not be aware, my birthday is February 19th.)

So I’ve decided I want to go to Thailand for my birthday. It is actually a possibility: last year, my friend Morgana got CCS (the College of Creative Studies, at UCSB) to pay for her to go to an infectious disease conference in New England. Admittedly Thailand is a bit further than New England, but I’m fairly sure I can talk CCS into paying for some of it, and for the rest, well, who knows? I can work, I can borrow, I can beg, and I can write proposals.

But I get ahead of myself. To start at the beginning, I got on a plane to Tasmania the day after I turned in four long papers. Needless to say I was a bit giddy. On the plane, I sat next to a very sweet girl from Thailand (note the foreshadowing) who was going to visit her father and sister, who live in Hobart (Tassie’s capital city). When we got off the plane, and she found out that I had no particular plans other than hunting down a bus and then a hostel, she and her sister insisted on driving me to the city, taking me to a backpackers, and giving me their phone number in case I needed anything later. The episode was vaguely reminiscent of “Two Penniless Boys in Bridaban,” a chapter of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi wherein the author and his friend, as young boys, find themselves entirely provided for by God’s generosity—and sense of humor.

It was the first backpackers I had ever stayed at, and a very pleasant one indeed. The beds seemed to me extraordinarily cheap, at eighteen Aussie dollars a night—especially as I spent a couple of nights as the only one in the room. Full kitchen facilities were available and the company was excellent. I met two American girls on the first day, with whom I wandered around the city for a while, as well as two very sweet Mexican sisters, some amusing Irishmen, one of whom ate boiled potatoes for dinner every single night, and a PhD student from Perth, Western Australia. She was quite a character, extremely fond of zooplankton, and had a really delightful way of talking. She was in Hobart to learn a particular lab technique from the folks at CSIRO, a technique which she described as being “an employable feather in my cap.”

CSIRO is the “Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization,” an Australian research institute with a branch in Hobart. This is the place I ended up visiting in order to meet none other than my Santa Barbara advisor, Armand Kuris, who happened to be in town for a parasitology conference.

Cue It’s a small world after all . . .

One notable quality of Tasmania was the temperature. I hitchhiked up to the top of Mt. Wellington, just outside Hobart, with friends Cara and Yoav, and we were actually snowed on. Pelted, in fact. This was an extremely welcome change from Brisbane, where the temperature is now pushing 40.

Most of the week I spent alone, wandering from place to place in no particular hurry and with no particular plans, taking each day as it came. It was really wonderful. After a few days in Hobart I hopped on a bus up to Launceston, a city in northern Tasmania. There I met more lovely people in a backpackers, including a girl from the Midwest who reminded me shockingly of some of my friends from the States. She wanted someone to share her pizza with, and we chatted all evening.

I hiked a nice park called the Gorge, saw an echidna for the first time, and went to Seahorse World! Seahorse World is a place where seahorses are bred commercially, for the aquarium trade (good! They live much longer than animals caught from the wild, and wild populations no longer suffer from aquarist collection) and for Chinese herbal medicine (not so good. Don’t like killing seahorses).

I saw a weedy sea dragon (like a leafy, but more pigmented and less elaborate) for the first time, as well as tanks and tanks full of more standard species. The number of young being produced was simply mind-boggling. I missed my suitemate Jeanine. She would have loved it.

My flight was out of Hobart, so I had to take a bus back down. I saw Cara and Yoav again, and ended my trip with a climb up a blue gum tree. Yoav happens to be a professional tree climber, in a sense, as he studies, well, trees, and he has all the gear: ropes, harnesses, caribeaners, etc. It was quite rigorous but quite fun.

Yoav, incidentally, is a chap that Cara (who’s from UCSB, and on the program with me) met in her travels. He’s from the States himself, but studying in Hobart. And we found out he is actually featured on the website of my beloved tree octopus--look under “sightings.”

Cue song again . . .

It’s officially hot now. Only a month into spring, and the temperature is crawling up to 30. Well, I just have two more days of it left, then I’m off to Tassie for a week, where it should get down to 7 degrees at night.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve been sweltering here in Brisbane, doing little more than moving from home to class to library to home, and back through the circuit again. It’s midterm season, but we only had one midterm, and four papers, all due on the same day. So I haven’t been getting out much.

Except on the weekend. My weekends have been spectacular. Beck and Paul took me up to Hervey Bay with them a couple of weeks ago, where they were going to visit some friends. Their friends have some lovely little cottages behind their house where we stayed—there were three beds in my room, and I somehow managed to select the one with the thinnest mattress. Go figure.

On the way up to Hervey Bay, we drove by the Big Pineapple. The Big Pineapple is a big pineapple, in the middle of a whole lot of pineapple plantations. That’s it. However, I did learn how pineapples grow! It was an amusing experience. Beck had warned me in advance that when she (who is from Adelaide, down south, and had never seen pineapples growing) first drove by the fields with Paul, she didn’t believe him when he told her they were pineapples. She was sure they grew on trees. He hasn’t stopped making fun of her since then.

I, for my part, would certainly have believed that they grow on trees. Paul said maybe it’s a gender thing. So I called my boyfriend, and asked him if he knew how pineapples grow. I believe his response was something like, “Oh sure, haven’t you ever tried to grow one?”

No, I’m afraid I haven’t.

At any rate, Hervey Bay was beautiful. We stayed right next to the beach, and I walked on the sand, tried to snorkel (but the visibility was nil, from a recent storm), and went whale watching. Hervey Bay is famous for its whales, and I was a little disappointed when I found out all they have are humpbacks and the occasional dolphin. After Santa Barbara, where I’ve seen blue whales and whole schools of porpoises, this sounded a bit tame.

But what the local marine mammal population lacks in diversity, it makes up for in enthusiasm and friendliness. My mind was simply boggled by how close these whales got to us. They were literally sidling up to the boat and inspecting us through the windows.

The whale watching was on Sunday. To get back in time for class on Monday, I had to catch a train at one in the morning, arriving in Brisbane at 6, running home for a shower, and back to school. Very exciting stuff. It actually would have been fun but the train smelled like a nursing home—I can’t explain how or why, but it did. And I was tired.

Anyway, papers, papers, and more papers.

And then, Sydney! Last weekend I hopped on a plane down to visit my friend Charles, and had a simply spectacular time. It was relaxing and pleasant, and involved a trip to the Blue Mountains, an opera, and lots of wandering around the city.

The Blue Mountains are so named due to the eucalyptus oils seeping into the air around them. The touristy bit was undergoing construction, and there were lots and lots of Japanese tourists around, but once we got away from all that it was lovely. We took the “Giant Staircase” down to the bottom of the mountain. “Giant Staircase” doesn’t sound that impressive, but you might be surprised. It just went on and on. At the top there was a warning “For Strong Walkers Only”. Charles looked at me, and said “Are you a strong walker?” After a moment’s consideration, I replied, “I’m a persistent walker.” He nodded. “Me too.”

So we went all the way to the bottom, not because either of us is in particularly wonderful shape, but because our pride would not let us do otherwise. Once at the bottom, we walked over to a tram that went back up to the top. Let it be here recorded that I would have climbed back up the staircase, but Charles was not too fond of the idea. Though in retrospect, I’m glad he made us take the tram.

That night we watched “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” which I’ve read, and tried out for a part in with Morgie last year (neither of us made it) and been wanting to see for a while. It’s really quite good. Pleasantly existential, but not exactly gripping action, so you kind of have to force yourself to pay close attention.

The next day was the opera! We saw “Carmen” in the famous Sydney Opera House, and it was lovely. Eating Maltesers and listening to arias is good fun. Carmen was depressing, though. Carmen is a bad bad woman, and Don Jose is a silly silly man. Also anything set in Spain and sung in French is inevitably a bit odd.

That night we played lots and lots of pool, in a place that had a huge fish tank next to the pool tables, and good music.

And then I came home, finished all my papers, and turned them in. At the moment I’m packing for Tasmania, where I will have a brief and blessed respite from the Queensland heat.

Mozzie bites herald the arrival of spring in Queensland, and summer thunderstorms are just over the horizon.

Meanwhile, I’m spending my mornings in classes and my afternoons in the library, slowly hammering out four different papers, to wit: the hermit crab project, a research paper on invasive species in Moreton Bay, an essay on fire in the Australian environment, and a report on the vegetation of Lamington and Stradbroke Island.

Our lectures are sometimes exciting and sometimes not--we have a feeling that we got the same coral reef lecture four or five times now, with slight variations and different professors. Almost all of our lectures are by different lecturers, which is nifty insofar as we often get a specialist on each subject, and not-so-nifty insofar as they don’t know what we’ve learned already, and tend to either repeat each other or completely bewilder us.

Occasionally we get gems such as the glow-worm lady or the dinosaur man. The glow-worm lady is doing her PhD on glow-worms and just thinks they’re the coolest things in the world. She likes bugs in general, so I e-mailed her about my fire paper, as the topic I’ve chosen is the adaptations (or non-adaptations) of Australian insects to the flammability of their environment. She gave me the name of a woman who apparently did her entire thesis on this subject, which is a bit overwhelming but certainly helpful.

The dinosaur man was introduced to us as such, and I had to stifle a giggle, as he looked the part. He was quite small and thin, but his hair was long and unkempt and so was his beard, and he looked ancient. He had us in hysterics for his entire lecture. He’s one of the few paleontologists who still believes dinosaurs had a polyphyletic origin.

However, apart from these rare delights, I’m generally not too impressed with the lecturers, and Mike and Ian, who run the whole program, are still my favorites. Today we had both, and neither had slept last night, between preparing lectures and wrestling with program glitches. Consequently they were very amusing today. Ian has characteristically dry Pom humor, and he always makes us laugh. Mike is just interesting.

Today his lecture was on a biogeographical theory proposed by a man named Tim Flannery in a book called The Future Eaters, which is our token textbook for the terrestrial ecology course, and which I’d really like to get now. It’s very controversial, but he argued that wherever early humans spread, they caused mass megafaunal (large animals, a rather vague category) extinctions, and this happened when the aboriginals moved in Australia some 60,000 years ago. The megafaunal extinctions are actually fairly well documented; the same thing happened in North America, around when early Native Americans were driving entire herds of bison off cliffs. The idea is, in their naïveté, big animals don’t expect skinny little humans to be a threat when they first encounter them, so they are immediately killed off.

Anyway, Flannery went on to say that in Australia, once most of the megafauna was gone, nothing was left to graze the Australian flora, which happens to be extremely flammable. So when it doesn’t get eaten for a while and builds up, big uncontrollable fires are the result. To prevent this from happening and to maintain a greater diversity of plants, Aborigines began a regime of controlled burning, also known as “fire-stick farming,” to take the place of the megafaunal grazers that they had killed off.

When Europeans arrived, they brought with them the European mentality that fire is bad, and stopped the burning. As a result fuel started building up again, and without the control burns that the aboriginals had used to keep fuel levels low, they reached a point where once a fire started (which it inevitably would) it burned out of control. This has been the story since European arrival, though there are a number of people pushing for management policies that include control burns.

The huge, infrequent fires have triggered another wave of extinctions, this time of smaller animals in what is called the “critical size range,” too small to escape the fires, but too big to hide under logs until the fire passes over. Most of the species in this size range that are still around are either endangered or likely to become so.

Anyway, that’s the theory. Right or not, it’s pretty interesting, and I’d like to read the book.

Additional injuries, since my second trip to Straddie and a week in the rainforest: wounded pride from carrying out a science project on hermit crab shell selection, of all topics one of the most overstudied and least peculiar to Australia, scattered bruises from mud-wrestling in the rain, a network of scratches on the back of my hand from the claws of numerous seed-greedy crimson rosellas and king parrots, and sore legs from running with Allie, the border collie.

This morning’s run turned into a fairly amusing episode of foiled romance, as on our way back Allie and I were assaulted and followed home by a large Husky blend. “Paul, Allie’s started bringing her boyfriends home,” called Beck when she found out, and added, “Of all dogs, we had to get the one that was a tart.”

Allie’s been de-sexed, but the poor bloke hasn’t quite gotten it--he’s in our yard now, still confused. We called his owner to come pick him up, as we didn’t want him to get run over in the street, which is a fairly busy one.

To elaborate on the hermit crab project, it really wasn’t that bad. In fact, I think I’ll be able to make quite a decent report out of it, but I’ve been developing the skill of making good reports from bad data for years now. The project itself was conceived by one of the girls in our group, and my friend Cara and I were fairly critical of it to begin with. Our sentiments, though purely professional, led to the injury of some personal feelings, and the threat of losing group harmony, at which point we backed off and simply acquiesced to the hermit crab plan, this not being a particularly important project in the grand scheme of things. The unpleasantness between all members of the group has long since melted away and all are now friends.

The experience, however, just went to strengthen my conviction that working in groups is never as productive or pleasant as working alone, and I can’t fathom why I’ve been forced to do it since grade school.

And, of course, I continue to be obligated to work in groups; while in the rainforest I actually ended up in the largest group, which consisted of seven people, filling out a proforma, profiling the rainforest, and sketching a biodiversity curve. The obvious conclusion to draw, of course, is that I must have something to learn from this experience, that I keep being thrust into it, but though I may flatter myself, I don’t think I’m half bad at working in groups, despite my disinclination to do so. I strive to maintain amiable relations, I attempt to keep everyone on track, and I always do my share of the work if not more. (Our rainforest group tied with another for the most species of leaves collected. Mike gave us chocolate.)

I don’t mind working with people, I know I’ll have to do that for the rest of my life. I think what may bother me most about working in a group is that no one’s in charge. Everything needs a central intelligence; the nervous system requires a brain if any sort of complex task is to be carried out. Nerve nets only work in jellies and sponges.

Either tell me what to do or let me tell you, but don’t let us all be equals.

That sounds odd, doesn’t it?

I'm staying about half an hour from the main campus of the University of Queensland, with a nice young couple and their border collie, in an old “Queenslander” house built in the 1920’s. I have a strong suspicion that the people inhabiting Queensland in the 1920’s averaged seven or eight feet tall. The ceilings are extremely high, and although the doors are normal size, there is a panel over each of them that could easily have been added to fill in the door frame when the door was cut down from giant size. It’s not such a far-fetched idea, when you take into account the fact that the door handles are almost exactly at my eye level.

The University itself is lovely, with several lakes on campus which make it feel more like home, though they abound with foreign waterfowl. Large white ibises wander about, as common, and as pesky, as pigeons, and a very funny bird called the masked lapwing, with a yellow face that looks exactly like a monkey’s, can be seen on occasion. Huge pelicans cruise around in gangs. They look rather vicious, and I have dubbed them the mafia of the Australian waters. If you’re a fish, you don’t cross those guys.

As far as fish go, tetraodontids and diodontids (that is, pufferfish, toadfish, and porcupinefish) are as common as sneezing, and you can hardly wade in the mudflats without sending one or two scurrying away. I would very much like to smuggle one back as company for Agnes. From what I hear, the best way to smuggle animals is in the brassiere, but I am very reluctant to try that with a porcupine pufferfish.

In addition to bony fish, I’ve seen almost a half dozen different rays, all with a wingspread about as wide as I am tall. On the same dives that revealed the rays, I saw a couple of wobbegong sharks with camouflage so good I didn’t notice them until the divemaster pointed them out. The description of wobbegongs in my wildlife guide includes the warning: “Despite sleepy appearance, should never be disturbed or handled as they are capable of inflicting deep wounds and will hang on tenaciously to a victim.”

However, though I am surrounded by all sorts of sharp and venomous things on a regular basis, I have so far sustained only a few small injuries: multiple scratches from breaking my way through the bush (in order to count species diversity for the terrestrial ecology bit of the course), a few cuts on the feet from climbing over oyster beds, dermatitis from touching the abundant toxic black slimy sponge (my reaction was very, very mild, despite the guide’s warning: “highly toxic to touch, producing severe dermatitis”), a number of bites from mozzies and sand fleas, and--best of all--a cuttlefish bite!

That bite is definitely one of the highlights of my trip so far. My only regret is that it won’t leave a scar.

So this is Australia--a huge, mostly empty island continent, drier than British humor, covered with vast forests of Eucalyptus, the “living matchstick,” and surrounded by currents of warm, clear water which bathe reefs of coral in the north and rock in the south. A country that still celebrates the Queen’s birthday as a public holiday but derides Brits as Poms. The vast majority of Aussies live within an hour’s drive of the coast and consider themselves to be an amiable distance from the rest of the world, which they regard with general detachment for the most part, except when riled up by the fact that they are distinctly ignored by it. They tread delicately around the raging issues relating to aboriginals and native islanders. In some cases the politics are so bad that a scientist was refused permission to study in a particular area because she was a woman, and it was disrespectful to the traditions of the local aboriginal tribe for a woman to be there.

It’s a good thing none of our marine biology program involves research in that region, as the participating population is over three quarters female. This exceeds even the girl-biased ratio in UCSB’s aquatic biology program, and can only be explained by a fact already known by the EAP office--more females than males always study abroad.

So get out there, guys!