The 2016 summer experience of a West Australian student in Moreton Bay, Queensland
by Owen Taylor-Williams
While working on my Gold Award for the Duke of Edinburgh program, I was offered the opportunity to swim with the dugongs, in Moreton Bay, just outside of Brisbane. As part of a team of researchers, I would be working out of the University of Queensland's Moreton Bay Research Station (MBRS) on North Stradbroke Island. And, if you don't know what dugongs are, they are mammals, commonly called sea cows, and are found in warm waters of the coast.
Our team would collect data – sightings of sea animals, and vegetation cover on the Bay floor, to improve environmental management of the area, and help save it for future generations. We were members of the Earthwatch expedition: “Snorkel for Queensland's Marine Mammals 2016”.
My sister went on the same Earthwatch expedition, just last year and had a great experience - she saw two dugongs, mum and pup – I was hoping to see more. She and I were both lured to this program because we had seen manatees in Florida, in the US a few years ago, close relatives of the dugong.
I did some research and found out that dugongs and manatees are part of the family that includes elephants. They are plant-eaters, and very docile. In Australia, they are found from Shark Bay in WA to Moreton Bay, but Moreton Bay is the only place dugongs are found in herds. Dugongs can be prey for sharks and killer whales and human hunting. But they are considered globally vulnerable to extinction, from pollution and coastal development, which destroy seagrass beds, as well as other human interaction - boat traffic and entanglement in fishing nets. It was the same for the manatees in Florida - we were told by a park ranger that the manatee population was under stress, as they like the warm waters of Florida's rivers, especially near power plants where exhaust water is very warm and fishing is popular. He told us also that the manatees are too curious - they have scars on their backs from boat propellers – not a pretty sight.
Our Earthwatch program was directed by Drs James Udy and Paul Maxwell, Chief Scientist and Principal Scientist at Healthy Waterways, a non-governmental organization that publishes a report card for eastern Queensland's waters, as well as run the Moreton Bay expeditions for Earthwatch. Using Earthwatch volunteers to collect data is part of a new approach to Science, called Citizen Science. My expedition began with an overnight flight from Perth to Brisbane, where I met up with my Earthwatch coordinator Louise Noone, and the other nine in my group. From the airport, we took a van and a ferry to Dunwich (pronounced Dun-ich) on North Stradbroke Island and met up with Drs Udy and Maxwell at the Moreton Bay Research Station which was to be our base of operations. MBRS is one of two island research centres operated by the University of Queensland – the other is on Heron Island, just south of the Great Barrier Reef. MBRS was a large and busy place this summer as we found, we were sharing it with a number of other scientific groups and student programs.
We were given briefings on the Research Station rules, as well as a safety briefing, in which we learnt about wildlife of the Bay and its potential hazards, including the obvious – sharks. But there were many more I'd never heard of, like blue ringed octopuses, blue bottle jelly fish, and razor clams. Of those nasties, we saw the blue bottle jellies, a shark, and razor clams which we brought up from the bay's bottom, being careful not to touch their sharp edge. The shark we saw was not far from our boat and was our signal to hang out topside, until he was gone.
Our team was divided into three groups – one group for each of the three boats used for this project: the first group directed a sled-mounted camera to record the seagrass type; the second group placed Baited Remote Underwater Video Stations, BRUVS, to take videos of the sea-life; and, the third group, which used the smallest boat, performed many dives to the bottom of the Bay to bring up samples - I liked swimming and the diving, so I volunteered for several days on this boat.
Our workdays started at 6:15am and were very long, taking full advantage of of the summer sun; at the end of every day, after dinner, we got together and recorded the data we had collected. We always wore our wetsuits to prevent being stung by stingers, and took our boats back and forth across the Bay to selected collecting points. Key to our data collecting was revisiting the same sample areas, using GPS, where data was collected on previous expeditions. It was important to gather a large amount of data and report back all that we saw, as later Drs Udy and Maxwell correlated our data with past data and then charted the rise and decline of the bay’s health.
As simple as it is, seagrass is crucial to the ecosystem of the bay – all the sea creatures depend on it, like the dugongs, the splendid creature shown here, as well as the many turtles we saw. However, pollution and climate change are degrading the habitat of Moreton Bay and many coastal areas, so understanding how seagrass responds to human impacts is critical for the future – whether or not dugongs and other animals will survive in Moreton Bay.
At the end of the expedition, after a great number of rewarding dives to the bottom of the Bay, I was left with memories of many large turtles, many colourful fish swimming alone and in schools, and one elusive dugong. It was really fun living on the shores of Morton Bay, boating across the bay and diving into it's waters looking for animals like the dugong - who wouldn't want to be there? And it's really reassuring to know that facilities like MBRS are around to be used as a resource for environmental work, for us and other researchers, who are also environmentally aware and wanting to pitch in to work towards a brighter future. Also as a bonus, at the end of our expedition Dr. Udy told our group that we had recorded more dives and collected more data than any group he had led out on the Bay before, so naturally we all were pleased to be commended on a job well done, while at the same time we also all learned a great deal about the health of Moreton Bay and its marine life.
