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| Your blogger being more aquas than areos |
Talk about beauty and remoteness and relatively untouched areas where nature thrives.
Impossible in this day and age?
Well think again! The Abrolhos Islands about 80 km offshore in central Western Australia is a taste of such paradise. Not only that, it is a unique area where corals and kelp trhive together, in a series of unique ecosystems between tropical and temperate, maintained by warm water currents flowing southwards along the coast.
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| The Reel Affair and my buddy Stevie L. |
On board the "Reel Affair" a lovely ship with amazing staff hailing from my new neighborhood the lovely Freo, I travelled to the Abrolhos as part of a research team led by postgraduate researcher Luke Thomas, who is studying patterns of coral connectivity in the area. I was lucky to be selected by Luke to take coral samples during this trip, in which aside from doing my job as a research assistant, I got to suss out potential study sites for looking at the behavior of baldchin groper, one of the species I will be looking at as part of my doctoral thesis on the popualtion ecology of tuskfishes.
The Houtman Abrolhos is baldie heaven and I must now find the way to make it a study site. Tough life being a marine biologist is it not?
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| Release me! An undersized baldie is unhooked |
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| An adult baldie checks the reef out |
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