marinegirl

I’ve been here a month now! I can’t believe how quick it’s gone! So what have I been doing all this time???Well, I’m doing my PhD within the ‘Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies’, which is based at JCU, but is a partnership between several coral-reefy type organisations in Townsville and Brisbane. My supervisor Garry is head of one of the main research programs, on marine reserves and connectivity, which is how I fit in. It’s a good thing to be a part of, as the Australian Research Council are throwing lots of money into it, there’s an impressive list of people involved, and tons of PhD students. Also, they have cakes and scones at their coffee morning, which is always a good sign. I thought that I’d stand out here being English, but as it turns out more than half of marine biology postgrads are international students! The other girls in my office are South African and Norwegian, and at the pub on Friday we could only find two ‘proper’ Aussies among us!So far I seem to have spent a lot of time jumping through various hoops to get on the JCU dive register, which basically allows you to do fieldwork underwater. They’re surprisingly strict! I’ve had to refresh first aid and oxygen courses, have an occupational dive medical and get a Queensland boat license. A week today, I start a week long Scientific Diving Course, which amongst other things involves learning how to use full face masks and drill stuff underwater! Sounds fun, and I get to stay on Orpheus Island for a week to do it. I’ve also got a couple of weeks in the Keppel Islands coming up, helping out a couple of Garry’s other PhD students with some surveys.It would be amazing to be an undergrad student here with time to spare… every day I get e-mails asking for volunteers to go and survey reef islands for months on end, or measure turtles or lizards or whatever.Sometime in between doing all that, I need to get thinking about my own project! I have a lovely new computer to work on, lots of colour coordinated stationary, and a long list of Things To Do… so there’s really no excuse now. Garry has done lots of work on marine reserves in the Philippines, so we’re talking to some people over there about getting datasets and hopefully working with them; as well as people closer to home in Townsville at GBRMPA. I think it will be really interesting to compare how reserves have been set up in the Philippines and Australia, as the approach is so different. So basically I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to be doing… but we’ve got a few ideas and it’s all quite exciting.