A whale of a time!

Yesterday marked the end of my last voyage for the Fellowship on Hawere. Once again we were collecting and processing herbivorous fish. In addition to Kendall, Lindsay and Lilly from my first trip, we also has PhD student Selena on board, who was doing some pretty gross stuff with guts and bacteria - actually it was fascinating!

A bonus this trip was encountering a number of Bryde's Whales feeding near where we working at Great Barrier Island. At one stage there was a large school of pilchards (a small fish like a sardine) forced up to the surface. Gannets were diving in for a feed, other seabirds were also getting in there, dolphins were coralling the fish and plucking them off the edges of the school, and through the middle these massive whales were coming in for their share. A fascinating behaviour was observed where the whales were making a bubble curtain, from deep below, to keep the pilchards pinned to the surface. It was amazing to see.
There are plenty of seabirds to look at out there, but we were lucky enough to be visited by a rather hungry mollymawk, which is a member of the albatross family. It wasn't sure enough of me to feed from my hand, but came very close.
I also was able to take some time to do a little underwater photography. The fish in the picture are silver drummer, one of the species we had been sampling. They grow to about 10kg, but these ones were 2-3kg. As you can see the water was beautiful and clear.
One of the samples we had to take from the fish was a blood sample, as nutrients from the gut end up in the bloodstream. Here you can see Kendall extracting blood from a marblefish.

Once again I had a fantastic time observing science in action, and I would like to thank Kendall, Lindsay, and their marvellous students for sharing their expertise and ideas. Now I have to work out how to translate it into the classroom!