Open Day at Moreton Bay Research Station

This weekend Mary and I headed up to Moreton Bay Research Station on Stradbroke Island to volunteer for the station's open house. They open the doors to the public to show off how cool marine biology is through exhibits, touch tanks, and fun activities for kids. We had a great time out in the little town of Dunwich. I'm sure we'll head back out again to explore the island more.


Mangrove trees in Moreton bay on the way out.


A little mangrove island in the middle of the bay. It's weird seeing trees kilometers offshore. The whole bay is very shallow so they do a lot of dredging for ships. In between the deeper channels, there are little patches of mangroves.


I was pretty excited to see this pelican as we came in on the boat.


The research station and the park next to it. The park is the site of an Aboriginal midden. Along the water if you look at the sediment you can find shells from the waste of generations of indigenous people.


Mary and I in the harbour.




There was a beautiful little cemetary by the jetty. Apparently koalas live in the gum trees nearby, but although we looked, we didn't see any.


The beach in front of the station. Some of the samples in the touch tanks came from the mud flats and sea grass beds just off here.


Mary and another volunteer, Carla. We saw pelicans, so I had to run out to get a closer look.


I spooked one.


But they relaxed. In the background is some kind of oyster picker bird. Stradbroke is home to a lot of oyster farmers, human and otherwise.





We saw lots of other crazy animals in the tanks at the station. Some dangerous, others not so much.


I was pumped to see this Wobbegong aka Carpet Shark. There was a picture of one of these in a shark book I had when I was about 6, but of course I had never seen a live one until this weekend. It was about a meter long.


This puffer is apparently toxic to eat, so I didn't try.


Watching this brittle star move around was great. It's a sea star but it moves super fast. It kept running away to stuff itself in this hole on the underside of the rock.


I held what I'm pretty sure was a navigator from Dune or an Advisor from Half Life 2. Or maybe it was a brain slug. Or maybe just a sea cucumber. Actually, one of the few unpleasant things about this weekend was when a sea cucumber decided to barf up its innards all over a tank and we had to move everything quickly before the toxic guts poisoned the rest of the animals in the tank. Apparently the prolapse of sea cucumbers is a defence mechanism, but I don't really get it.


Egg sac from a conch. The egg sac was almost as big as the animal - about 8 inches long. Very bizarre. They expand when they leave the animal, but it's still a huge egg sac compared to the size of the animal.


Meggie and a sea star from the touch tank.


Gimme 5. Or one.


Sunset on Friday night.






Mary and Meggie on the way home.


A bunch of us volunteers on the way back.

Definitely a fun weekend. I'd like to go back to Stradbroke sometime to explore it more.