Mother's Day

May 14 (Mother's Day)
Cairns
Cloudy, breezy

Happy Mother's Day.

This is the beginning of our third full day in Cairns. Yesterday, as we got on the transfer bus for our Reef cruise, I briefly saw this strange yellow ball in the eastern sky; the coach driver said he thought it might be the sun, but he couldn't be sure as no one had seen it in recent memory. The students appear convinced that my colleague and I have been lying to them all along about beautiful, sunny Cairns in tropical north Queensland (TNG).

There's not too much to say about the transfer from Townsville to Cairns, apart from the destruction left behind by Cyclone Larry. This cyclone came ashore in Innisfail some weeks ago with 300 km/hr winds, comparable to Hurricane Katrina. The eye was 80 km wide, and the storm itself was some 350 km wide. The severe building damage was evident all around, though many roofs had already been repaired. Of course, once a roof has been peeled off during a storm, nothing stops the rain from getting inside and ruining everything. That 80% of the banana crop was destroyed was reflected in the ridiculously high prices we say in the stores: about $10 AUD per kilo -- that converts to about $3.60 USD per pound, about ten times what we normally pay in the States. The banana plantations we saw had new growth on the old, knocked over stalks, although it will be another 9 months before those plants bear fruit. 20% of the sugar cane crop was wiped out, though this was less evident from what we saw.

The biggest evidence of the cyclone by far was the damage to the forested hillsides. As we drove along, we could see that the trees had been stripped bare by the fierce winds. It seemed as though we were driving through the remnants of a massive forest fire -- this is the tropics; it's supposed to be lush growth! But the trees here are resilient, so I imagine that it will look just fine in a few months.

And, of course, no one was killed. That was the best news to come out of the storm. The early news reports credited this to the experiences of the citizens of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina; when people realized that this one was comparable in size to Katrina, they boarded up and got out of the way fast.

We arrived in Cairns in a drizzle. After check in and bit of unpacking, we took the students over to the Cock 'n' Bull for a pleasant dinner. I spent most of Friday morning out and about in the city, doing some prep work for our reef cruise, answering e-mails, and ordering Mother's Day flowers (hope you liked them!). I sat out a rainstorm at an outdoor cafe on the esplanade eating a mediocre fish and chips lunch, and returned here to do laundry and get ready for the evening at ReefTeach.

We have done ReefTeach every year of the course. It is a two hour lecture, delivered by dive instructor/marine biologist/mad Irishman Paddy Coldwell. Backed with slides and props in his theatre/shop, Paddy delivers an animated introduction to the Great Barrier Reef, its flora and fauna, and how people ought to behave while snorkeling or diving on it. He's a little over the top at times, but his style involves a lot of repetition and distilling the essential knowledge tourists need in order to enjoy the reef without damaging it. When our students go on the cruise the next day, they invariably talk about the Reef in the terms that they learned at ReefTeach.

Yesterday was our cruise of the Passions of Paradise II (POPII), a twin-hull sailboat that takes us out about 90 minutes to the middle patch reef. The specific reef we go to is Paradise Reef, for which the POPII has the only license to visit. The result of this licensure is that the owners of POPII have a great incentive to keep their bit in good shape, and so we get a great view of the reef.

. . .

I've relocated to the downtown esplanade. It is about 10:30 am on Mother's Day, and already the grills nearby are up and running, as families are bringing their mothers out for a day of relaxing fun by the lagoon. Even though it continues to be overcast and rain threatens, it does not appears to have stopped the picnickers and sightseers. Children are kicking about rugby balls, people are enjoying ice reams, tour helicopters are flying low over the mud flats and the mangroves.

Back to the reef cruise ... I have usually bought a disposable underwater camera to take along, but I decided to do without this year, thinking -- correctly -- that the thing just took away from my enjoyment and appreciation of what I was looking at. So, I just went out snorkeling and watching, and was much happier with the experience. I saw all manner of fish, coral, anemones, and other sea life out and about. Mostly you see damsel fish, a broad category that refers more to the shape than anything else. Damsels have squaring bodies with some bullet-shaping to their head, a somewhat curved tail, and fins on their side that they use somewhat like birds use their wings. These small fins allow for both forward and backward motion. There are bluegreen damsels, striped damsels, chocolate-dipped damsels, just to mention a few; you can probably guess what they look like. Damsels can be quite small, as are the bluegreens, but can get to be about 6' long (like the chocolate dipped).

I also saw some clownfish living inside their anemones. I did not see Nemo. There are several varieties of clownfish, and the orange and white Nemo is only one of them. The ones that I saw were the black two-striped anemone fish -- again, I'll let you work out what they look like.

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I've relocated to the Cairns library, just up the street from Global Gossip, where I'll upload this journal entry. As with the library in NSW, I am impressed with the extent to which it is used, even on Mother's Day. Of course, some folks are just in to use the internet service, but many families are here with their children. There seems to be more of that type of interaction here, as though they have time for it.

Okay, back again to the Reef ... what I really enjoyed doing this time was just looking at the coral. While there are many species of coral, they are not always identified by shape and color. The same species of hard coral can appear as a boulder, as a staghorn shape, a plate, or a bunch of conical fingers. The color can vary as well, determined by the nature of the underlying rock to which they're attached, the time in their life cycle, the water conditions around them, and other factors. Hard coral have a hard skeleton inside their bodies, so touching hard coral immediately injures the animals. We are told by every dive instructor around to never touch hard coral.

There's a lot of soft coral at Paradise Reef, too. Soft coral is a sort of group organism, with many individuals connected via a simple nervous system. They have a simple musculature that allows them to extend out beyond their shell to obtain nutrients from the water for the algae they host (and depend upon for food). Divers will touch the soft coral to observe it withdraw into its shells; the effect is striking. It also stresses the animals, so one should not do it very often.

The appeal of the hard coral to me is very mathematical, and is related to dynamical systems, my area of expertise. The behavior of the individual coral animal is governed by simple rules: grow to a certain size, then split into three and repeat. It seems reasonable to assume that their growth can be modeled mathematically, and that the different shapes that they ultimately assume can be thought of as arising from initial and/or boundary conditions. My assumption is that this is a well-studied topic, but I think I'll look around it as time permits.

We also visited Michaelmas Cay, a stage 2 reef island. As the ocean levels change, or as the coral dies and debris builds up, islands can emerge from the ocean. These islands are at first nothing but a little spot of sand and coral debris, and are called stage 1 islands. As time goes by, sea birds will find these islands and flock to them, and their droppings will fertilize the sand and permit the growing of grasses and other simple shore plants, creating a stage 2 island. Michaelmas Cay is one of these. When trees get hold, the island is called stage 3, and when a rainforest canopy develops, stage 4. The birds were everywhere! Not all of the students went to the island itself, probably recalling the Hitchock movie. Indeed, I suspect that the inspiration for The Birds came from visits to islands like Michaelmas Cay, where the sounds of the birds crying is continuous, and their behavior intense. We saw birds flying, birds hunkered down, birds fighting with other birds for territory, birds going through mating dances, burds hovering in the stiff breeze, birds swooping past you at close range, ... I spent about a half-hour filming and looking around before returning to the boat. Looking at my bird guide, I am fairly sure that I saw oystercatchers, masked lapwings, Australian darters, and of course gulls.

The sea conditions were only fair yesterday; we had swells of about 1 meter at the reef and up to over 2 meters when moving from site to site and returning to shore. It was cloudy all day, though it never rained and the sun did try to break through. Viewing conditions were also only fair, without the sunlight. Comfort was an issue, too; a few of the passengers on the boat became seasick, it's always a shame when that happens, though after the boat stops moving and you get into the water that usually goes away.

The crew on the boat is always great. One of the crew did magic tricks all day for small groups, others would spend time in small talk. One of the dive instructors was kind enough to extend an offer to my colleague and I for next year's course, a sort of preboard introduction to snorkeling and diving, something we might do the day before getting on board.

I talked for awhile with a teacher at the equivalent of our community colleges, who was finishing up a holiday that had included a visit to a corroborree, an Aboriginal gathering and celebration. It seems that there are many of these held, and that recently, the tribal elders have been inviting whitefellas. It's worth looking into ...

It's time to go and upload this ... I'm also going to find out whether there truly is baseball in Cairns. The day is improving, it appears nice and sunny outside now.