Well, the semester is officially over. I spent last week busily writing up my ISP, which turned out to be a 30-page paper titled "Chlamydia in koalas: an investigation of radio telemetry and medical treatments as management tools." Last Sunday, I gave a 30 minute presentation on the topic as well. It all went well, and I'm just glad that the project is over. Monday after the rest of the presentations, Tony, our academic director, took us on a mystery e...

Once again, I just returned to Cairns, this time after my month-long independent study project at the Australia Wildlife Hospital in Beerwah, an hour north of Brisbane. The hospital is associated with the Australia Zoo, both founded and owned by Steve Irwin and his family. I spent the month living with one of the vets and two other zoo workers in the Glasshouse Mountains, the town next to Beerwah. Both areas are very small towns, but it was nice to be settled som...

I just got back from Lizard Island Research Station, a marine research center on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. We left 2 weeks ago and had to fly in small, 20-person planes to get there - very exciting. We stayed in two of the research houses, each about a 30 second walk from the beach. The beach was beautiful, with some of the clearest, bluest water I've ever seen (it reminded me of Hawaii in that way). At times it definitely felt like fami...

Last night, I got back to Cairns from our 10-day Rainforest Excursion led by Jack and Tony. Jack is an Irishman who has lived in Australia for almost 20 years studying the rainforest, and especially rainforest birds. He owns a plot of rainforest near where we stayed and has built himself a small house there (see pictures). He knows so much about everything we asked - my friends and I joke about needing a "pocket Jack" to answer all our questions all the...

Yesterday I got back to Cairns after our week-long Aboriginal-themed camping trip. We went north of Cairns to Laura, Lakefield National Park, and Cooktown with our academic leader, Tony, and 3 Aborigines - two elders, Rus and Ian, and Ian's 20-year-old grandson, Jon. We traveled in 3 four-wheel drive vans because we had to do a fair bit of off-roading to reach our camp sites. The point of the trip was to learn about Aboriginal culture and lifestyle, so we were o...