Howdy to all! I just got back today from the beautiful town of Kiakoura where I battled seals, captured starfish, collected snails, stuck my finger in a sea anenome (on accident) watched the sun rise...twice and a whole plethora of other exciting and not so exciting things. So why was I in such a magical place you ask? a fieldtrip of course!
My marine ecology class had a 5 day field trip where we learned all about rocky reef systems. I did lots of boring things while I was there like spend 22 hours in front of a microscope between the hours of 7 am on Monday and 3 pm on Tuesday. There were also painful things like getting up at 4 am to beat low tide out on the reef....that is when I battled seals...they just happened to be hanging around our field site where we had to set up our experiment so we had to scare them off...let me tell you it's not easy to scare off a family of seals in the dark when all you have with your is a head lamp and a clip board. I suppose we should have expected as much since we were at a place called "seal reef" because it is home to one of the largest mating colonies of these seals. They are an endangered species.
Despite how much it sucked getting up so early and how cold the ocean is at that time (I had to spend about an hour and a half catching sea snails for our experiment...my hands almost fell off), I did get to see two very pretty Kiakoura sunrises.
This hazy mountain view is what I looked at during breakfast and lunch each day. The landscape in the area is amazing plus it was kind of fun to watch the baby seals playing...from a distance.
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