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Piper Zola

After arriving at Lizard, we had an excellent orientation led by Anne and Lyle, the directors who have been running the research station for 34 years. Tyler gave us a tour around the research station afterwards. We fixed a nice family dinner that evening which was stir fry veggies and fried rice. It was a good start to all the delicious meals we had together on Lizard. The first morning we snorkeled at Clam Gardens, which did in fact have loads of giant clams. We were all big giant clam fans by the end of the trip! There were also many fun sea cucumbers that were pretty large too. I had no idea how big they could get. On the second day we snorkeled at Mermaid. I saw my first clownfish! One adult and a juvenile and they were too cute. We saw a lot of coral diversity at this site, especially compared to Florida reefs. However, there were still many bleached corals and a decent amount of Acropora mortality from the March 2024 bleaching event. Our first research guest lecturer arrived soon after that. His name was Brad Eyre and visited us at Lizard for almost 3 days giving us lectures on his past research including Tyler’s phD research with the chambers. He also spoke on the flooding that occurred in Australia which caused more CO2 emissions from it and he gave us a lecture on blue carbon which I had never heard of either of those previously. So I learned a decent amount of new things about carbon which was interesting. Brad spoke about what blue carbon is and went over the misconceptions behind it. Technically, for carbon to be blue carbon it must be buried for 100 plus years. We wanted to test the chambers out in the field, so one of the following days we walked down to Casuarina and set-up all six chambers as a group. Three shade clothes were made to cover three of the chambers and the other three were left uncovered. We did a two hour experiment, taking one preliminary sample of the water and practiced taking them out of the chamber. We set them up near the seagrass beds to make it manageable to snorkel and saw so many turtles munching on seagrass. Then, after setting up the chambers we snorkeled around the reef. There were some nice coral colonies and sea cucumbers with loads of fish as well. I got to hang out with one sea turtle for about 15 minutes, he was very content, letting me watch him eat. After collecting the samples after two hours, we headed back to the lab to get measurements for temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and alkalinity. The next morning, we looked at this data and Tyler demonstrated how to do the calculations for the chambers. On the fourth day, we took a break in the afternoon and played some cricket on the beach which was fun! Later that day, Morgan arrived and we had an afternoon lecture on the best methods for monitoring in the field, the point and belt transects. We also learned about pacific coral identification with the Coral Finder 2022 that he got funding for to make so it was updated with the correct coral genera and families. The following morning, we went out to Turtle Bay and everyone got to try out both of the transect methods in buddy pairs. The next day, we went out to Mermaid to do the transects there as well and we had an afternoon lecture on the crown of thorns starfish. The next morning, Morgan gave us one last lecture on coral reef fish and their interactions with coral. That afternoon, we decided on project groups- Alex and I joined forces for the group project and we looked at the coral cover changes at Lizard Island from the 2024 bleaching event. We got to snorkel at the Entrance Bommie that afternoon or the following day and we all had a blast there! So much coral and structure, it was my favorite dive site at Lizard. I don’t think I have ever seen that many corals, more clownfish and we spotted a gray reef shark. Alex and I did more transects over our independent project days at Lagoon, Clam Gardens, and a side reef close to Clam Gardens that we named Cuttlefish Reef for our project. We saw two cuttlefish there, a black tip shark, and multiple octopi- another favorite site! One of the cuttlefish was actively swimming and changing colors, it was so beautiful! Overall, our time at Lizard Island was incredible and I really enjoyed the sunset beers in the evening as well. I am excited for Townsville and to show everybody the results of our independent research project.

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