Day 3 Sea spotting avian friends: Christian Halverson

We had a bit of a rough night with the ship pitching loud enough to hear the slap of the hull on the waves as it forged its way towards the Queensland coast.

After yesterday’s astounding success with over 2,000 birds observed and 100 whales, I had high hopes for a similar glimpse of our marine fauna. What transpired was exactly why Eric, the Principal Investigator, is undertaking this survey. He is looking at spatial and temporal distribution of seabirds. That is looking at the seabirds, their numbers and the oceanographic and biological reasons why they are in certain places or not at different times.

Today, the team observed a little over 100 animals, that’s it. Not knowing too many actual species, I just could point and shout and then let the real people zoom in with binoculars and cameras to record the information needed. So what did we discover? That for this area of the coast from Northern NSW at about Taree to Stradbroke Island during late September there is not much there in the ocean.

But this is when it gets really interesting. Working with Eric is a geophysicist and the laptops in the Monkey Island, where observations occur, connected to the hydrochemistry labs (measuring the chemistry of the water) and bathymetry (the lay of the land below the surface of the water as measured by the multi scan sonar). I could only guess at what was going on in the water but I was able to note that the oxygen levels seemed to go up as we neared sundown, phytoplankton numbers were not terribly large, the temperature of the water did steadily go up throughout the day, and the depth varied from around 70 metres to 130 meters or so.

Are these all linked? I guess we will wait for the scientific paper that Eric hopes to publish on this work.