faith . . . down under: Froggin' Review

So, I'm bittign the bullet and goign use some of my uni internet quota to upload my froggin pics.
The trip, now almost two weekends ago, was absolutely intense. I don't quite know what I was expecting to be doing, I mean, lets just say my experience catching frogs in the grass and ponds is quite different from Australian tree forgs. Since frogs really only come out at night, there really isn't much point frogging during the day.

So the first day we headed up to Kirrama and ended up staying at this nice little motel and had a great meal of pesto and asparagus (they fed us REALLY well) adn then got ready to go out. so i guess i should probably define who "us" is. There were 4 people who went: robert, the PhD student (looking at frog populations and BD, a fungal disease), Sarah, works in the lab, very field experienced British woman, Ainsilie, other assistant, friend of Jaime's and now mine, and myself. So, we got our feild gear on: long sleeves, pants, Dunlpo Vollies (cheap shows with good grip) and head lamps and hoped into the uni 4X4 and headed up the range. So we just stopped on the side of the road at the first bridge on this little dirt road going up the range and hoped out and climbed down into the stream. So what we wre doing the first night was basically climbing up the side of this range (i mean a huge hill, not qutie a mountain, but close) and grabbign everyfrog we could find and bagging them to be weighed, measured, etc and swabbed for fungus. And we did this for 400m up the range. yeah. it was a looooooong night. it was beautiful and fun work but hard and tiring at the same time. you have to go slow so you don't slip on the algae cover rocks adn climb up boulders with waterfalls. You get stack all the time in Calamus all the time which is a climbing palm, adequately called Wait-A-While as it has many long tendrils that hang down with barbs you have to carefully remove from your clothes.

So we caught some really cool frogs, mainly "Gemi-Macs" or Litoria genimaculata :

And the waterfall frog (which is the only one we worked with the next two nights) Litoria nannotis: (ps Ross Alford is one of my lecturers)

and the giant white-lipped tree frog, Litoria infrafrenata

We were out there from ~830 and didnt get back untill after 2 am. It was a long fulfillign day

The next day, we went to these beautiful swimming holes under this water fall. The first was sooooo cold it kinda took your breath away, which was nice as is was soooo hot.

So that night, we went to a brigde higher up the range, much more boulder-y, very pretty, my favorite night. We caught Nannotis and then Sarah and I went back to the truck and set up to do peptide analysis, they are looking at the anti-fungal peptides these frogs secrete. So, the frogs were weighed and injected with an appropriate ammount of norepinephereine (like adrenaline) to get them to secrete the stuff into a buffer which we then filtered (took sooo long) to take back to the lab. It was soooo cool. my perfect science, feild lab stuff. Anyhow, the next night we did the same but that day we took a great drive and ill let the pictures speak from themselves:

wild emus:

wild kangaroos:

waterfall from afar:

me sitting on top of that waterfall:

for the third night we moved to the JCU Kirrama feild station which was beautiful. cockatoos adn kookaburas calling all the time, cane toads on the path to the outhouse . .. awesome animals all around. i have some pics but there were also some great reptiles we saw on the road that i just have to borrow pics from the web (like for the frogs as it was waaaaayyy to wet to take my camera out at night) like:

amethystine python:

lace montior:

mildly venomous brown tree snake (the one introduced to Guam that wiped out bird populations they alwasy talk about in classes at home, for anyone who cares):