Arriving in Cairns

10 May
Cairns
Rainy, Windy, and Humid
(Partly sunny on the reef)

It is the morning of Mother's Day here in Australia. It's been a busy time, but I finally have a few moments to recount the last few days.

The rainy weather has been less than perfect for frolicking, but it does illustrate why we call them rain forests. As I write this, the sun is just beginning to break through the morning clouds. Perhaps the weather system is moving on.

Our travels on the 7th took us from Magnetic Island to Cairns. The region around Townsville, which includes Magnetic Island, is called the dry tropics, and the flora reflect this, favoring more the eucalypus and less the tropical. So, as we move north, we head into the wet tropics, a region more dominated with the strangler figs, tea trees, and turpentines.

The soil from Brisbane to Cairns is rich enough to support a lot of agriculture. DUring the 19th century, a lot of the rainforest wascut down and replaced with farmland and pasture for dairy cattle. as we drove along, we saw many cane fields, pineapple and banana plantations, and grazing cows.

We stopped at the Sugar Museum just south of Innisfail, for a presentation on the sugar industray and a peek at some of the tools of the trade and its history. After wool and minerals, sugar is ne of Australia's most imprtahnt eports, traded with many countries in Asia and the Pacific, as well as the USA and Canada. The curator of the museum had a surprise for us. AFter the tour, he produced a couple of cane toads to show us. They're everywhere in Queensland, so he had little trouble catching them the night before. One had exuded a bit of it's venom, and so had a bit of a dull white coating above one eye, but he handled them, not us. I do not understand why Aussies like these animals; they are ruining the ecosystem here. But clearly the curator was very fond of them.

After lunch at Innisfail, our afternoon stop was a visit to the Curtain Fig Tree, an amazing natural work-in-progress. A strangler fig has a most unusual life cycle. A bird or a bat eats the fruit of the fig and then deposits the seeds in the branches of another tree -- which need not be a fig tree. The seeds sprout and begin life as an epiphyte, a plant that uses another plant for support but not for nutrients as a parasite would. The young plant sends out vines that reach toward the forest floor, where they take root and turn hard and woody. as the plant sends more vines out, those that have taken root begin to merge into a large hollow trunk that surrounds the host tree. The fig continues to grow and envelop the host, which eventually dies as its ability to perform photosynthesis is compromised. At this point, only the fig remains, with the dead encased tree slowly decaying. This process can take hundres of years.

The Curtain Fig Tree is a stuinning example of this process. This strangler fig is encasing not one but two trees, one of which fell during a storm and is leaning against the other. Thousands of vines dangle down, others have combined into trunks. The host trees are still alive, though it's only a matter of time. Nearby trees are being affected as well, so there may well be at some point in the future where this fig takes over four or five trees and becomes some scary super-fig. Out driver estimated that this tree was 450 years old, but I suspect it's much older. Some of the strangler figs we will see in the Daintree are a few thousand years old.

We arrived in Cairns late in the day on the 7th. Since we have kitchenette units, some of the students went off to the local IGA to shop, while I led another group down the Esplanade along the mud flat. We saw a few things, but the weather was cloudy and the tide was in, so much of the interesting of the ecology was hidden.

We visited Reef Teach the evening of the next day, and went on our day cruise of the Reef the day after. I will write about those in my next entry.