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Charlotte Heacock - Week Two



This week was very busy. I started out each day watches two or three fin print videos. I have been seeing a lot of brown-banded bamboo sharks and lemon sharks and I even saw a couple of green sea turtles. I spent three afternoons in the wet lab processing my vertebrae and so far I have managed to get through about half of the samples. After I finish all of them, my next step will be to bleach and bake them.  The other two afternoons I spent collecting data for a spreadsheet on the life history of guitarfish. I have about fifty-five species to get through, many of which are data deficient.

After the spreadsheet is as complete as it can get with the data that is already available, I will finish aging the vertebra and getting the DNA samples back so it will hopefully fill in some of the blanks and provide data about this fish that has not yet been provided. I also got to help another student feed the epaulette sharks this week. She is working on determining the temperature preference for these sharks.  This was extremely exciting for me because they are one of my favorite species, they can survive out of water for about three hours and have the ability to use their fins to walk back into the water. One of the PI’s has also got me setting up a community science database project for sightings of porcupine stingrays because they are also fairly data different so the more information about their location or presence, the better chance we have of learning more about them. On Friday we also had a dead juvenile scalloped hammerhead and a whip ray brought in most likely left on the beach from bi-catch by a fisherman. We were able to take a fin clip for DNA analysis and freeze the specimens for further research. I’m looking forward to my weekend so that I can explore the city some more. I am going to a waterfall and swimming hole with some of the students at my lab on Saturday and we are going to have an authentic Aussie BBQ!



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