2 last hours of sun on a typical fieldwork day.

BTW: I can recommend the sandbags to anyone interested in studying the settlement of flora/fauna.

The grazing effect on the seagrass is enormous, which is clear if you remove the cages that kept away the grazing turtles. Seagrass regrows quicker into gaps behind wave barriers. And the effect of waves and grazing seem to differ between the stations, so now it is time to spend some hours analyzing the huge amount of data that we have collected and write the results up.

In these last months we had quite a lot visitors. Research (photo) journalist Hans Wolkers visited a few weeks to write an article about our research here. With his too infected he could not photograph the turtles during his last days so he ended up helping to sort out numerous seagrass samples . And we also had family/boy/girlfriends of Iris and Peter and my sister around. it was a lot of fun having him here. Hans, Sara, Sabine, Jelco, Ger thanx a lot for the help!

You can see a lot of turtles and my experimental set up. The wave barriers I've set up are clearly visible.

Obstacles

High palm trees/ phone tower are not the only obstacles to fly on Derawan.

Obstacle 2: While looking at the flight track suddenly the plane flew 180 degrees the other way than planned, the plane was out of sight so we wondered what the disturbance  could have been. The plane corrected itself and safely landed but part of the frame was missing! We repaired it with syrofoam and during our test flight it became clear what did this: Sea eagles! A 1.5m wingspan sea eagle flew 100m above the plane and pulled in his wings in to rocket down on the plane, so after some quick steering I manage to make quick turns and with some shouting the plane escaped from the bird. Every next flight I gave 2 children the task to report any fish eagle and called the plane to the ground until the coast was clear of eagles.

Obstacle 3: Children: The only place to land the airplane is on the “Lapangan” the soccer field right in the middle of the schools. Everytime that I come walking around the corner with the interesting suitcase the teachers don’t manage to keep the children in there classroom and it would be handy to have 8 hands extra to keep the hands of the plane, get the field cleared & stop the kids from running over the plane.

Overall we spend our most time looking for the turtles instead of finding them. We did several surveys of seagrass meadows to look for grazing evidence and suitability for grazing. The turtles we found most were Hawksbills and not the Greens we were looking for. But there is some evidence that on the South reefs the densities are far bigger. Time to go back some day. An impression of the conditions can be seen below.

• Arrange research & travel permit, KITAS, letters for governors, certificate of good conduct police (10 trips, at least 3 days)
• Give presentation at World Delta Summit & follow EcoDynamic Design workshop
• Buy all research equipment (60 kg) from small shops all around Jakarta,
• transport this on the back of Arifins’ motorcycle and busway to avoid being stuck for ours in Jakarta’s traffic jams
• Book 25 domestic flight tickets
• Get essential soto-ayam & es jeruk nipis,
• Prepare 30 under-water cages at Wawans house
• Introduce Iris & Peter to Indonesia
• Visit the wedding of Arifin’s son that follows Indonesia’s principle: SMP (sesudah makan pulang; finished your food? go home)
• Go to Open Science meeting (Jakarta) and give OSM workshop (Makassar)
• This all with laryngitis under 33 degrees celsius in formal dress.

This time Iris and Peter will join me for their MSc. intership during this last fieldwork period of my Phd. Here they are presenting our new penyu-team merchandise. You can follow Peters’ stories here, and Iris’ on facebook

After a week of CERF-ing (Conference of the Coastal & Estuarine Research Federation) in Daytona Beach, Florida, USA, I was totally saturated with new knowledge. So a great time to go out to the field & spend a day searching for Florida seagrasses near Sebastian Inlet. Lori, our guide never saw the seagrass in such turbid & low biomass conditions and even when snorkeling in knee deep water we couldn’t see the seagrass or bottom. BUT I did saw my first manatee in the wild, they came very close to us (± 2m). A cool way to end a conference!

Thanx to by my not-scientist boyfriend that send me the link on Discovermagazine.com

Check the slide show for a report of our last week of research in Shark Bay. Tjisse, Fons and Leon left after 2 weeks and because we had already finished the research (and our research budget: Australia=super expensive!) Laura & me cool explore Ningaloo reef.

Here we saw a lot of Green turtles mating, and .. Humpback whales.. UNDERWATER

Now I am back in the Netherlands, and still have a month time to prepare for the 4 months of fieldwork in Indonesia.

The team: Laura, me, Leon, Fons & Tjisse above the seagrass patterns

The seagrass leaves of Amphibolis are still full of red pigment after the winter period and make a really beautiful underwater panorama..We were very lucky with the weather and could work in extremely calm waters. In September the water temperature is between 18 and 20 C and a 5mm wetsuit is still quit cold.

Tjisse and Fons are analyzing the photosynthetic efficiency of our seagrass samples until 5 in the morning

Thanx Leon & Laura for additional pictures!

We surprised the hardware store assistant with a list of the strangest combination of fieldwork equipement, from osmocote to bamboo-sticks, to plaster etc. And bought 800 dollars of food to survive the next 4 weeks in Shark bay.

After arriving in Denham, Sharkbay (a 10 hr drive from Perth), it was time to take a first glimps of the seagrasses:

And the local fauna! Including loads of Dugongs, Sharks, Turtles, Emu’s walking inside mangroves, Kangaroos, and sea snakes later on.

At the look out at Eagle Bluff we saw sharks swimming around the seagrass patches.

Thanx Laura for additional pics!

Together with Laura Govers, Tjisse van der Heide, Leon Lamers and Fons Smolders and researchers for the University of Western-Australia we will investigate the driving mechanisms behind the unique seagrass patterns of Shark Bay (picture below). Recently, van der Heide et al. demonstrated that banded spatial patterns in seagrasses (France) resulted from a scale‐dependent feedback between seagrass and hydrodynamics. Moreover, additional measurements showed that stress predictably influenced patterning in the seagrasses, hence suggesting that self‐organized patterns might be a useful stress‐indicator in seagrass ecosystems. Now in Sharkbay, there are patterns at 2 scales: Inside larger seagrass bands smaller seagrass bands occur, we will try to unravel the underlying mechanisms of their formation. We will post updates of our fieldwork on this blog.