Thursday, April 21, 2011

The Easter Bilby, and Other Stories

First, a couple more pictures for your enjoyment!

Me holding one of the baby sea turtles that was in the shipment from Melbourne.  They are absolutely adorable creatures! (Photo: Kent Sargent)

Me and my snorkel buddy, on our open water (off the boat) snorkel at Heron Island. I think I am on the left.  (Photo: Brianna Michaud)

I have been settling in to a more normal life over the past week.  I commute to school every day, which takes about an hour, since I have to ride two different buses.  The key thing about buses in Brisbane is that you have to hail the driver in order for the bus to stop so you can get on; if you forget to signal, the bus will drive right past you.  Despite what you are probably thinking, I did learn this the easy way, though many newcomers do not.  I have only made a couple of errors on the bus system thus far: I got on a bus going the wrong direction, and I also attempted to hail the wrong bus yesterday morning.  Both of these issues were solved fairly quickly and painlessly.

Easter is coming up very soon!  It is a 5-day weekend here, because of both Easter and Anzac day, and is a fairly major holiday, with a lot of people traveling.  Most of my group is taking off - some people are heading to the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, others are renting + driving a camper van (yikes!) with no particular destination.

The Easter Bunny does visit Australia, but there has been a fairly recent movement towards eradicating the Easter Bunny in favor of the Easter Bilby.  The bilby is a native + threatened species, which looks something like a rabbit but is actually a marsupial.  Most mammals in Australia are marsupials; the only eutherians (the category involves placentas) that have arrived on their own are rats and bats.  All other eutherians are introduced species, and in many places, they have wrecked havoc on the ecosystem, outcompeting the native species in their same ecological niche.  Rabbits are one such species: non-native, and incredibly destructive, through overgrazing and creating an abundance of prey (which maintains invasive predator populations at abnormally high levels).  Hence the conservation push towards promoting the bilby rather than the rabbit.  The picture above shows a chocolate bilby, on sale right next to the Cadbury's chocolate eggs in the grocery store.

Two days ago, we had a lecture on the impacts of the most recent series of floods in Queensland (that happened back in January).  The water level in Brisbane when it flooded was 6 or 8, maybe 10 feet high on streets that my bus takes every day to get to campus.  The flood arrived and receded within a period of about a day, and you can still see the debris and watermarks all over the place.  Several years ago, Australian politicians were talking about "drought proofing" Brisbane.  Now, all they can talk about is "flood proofing" the city.  Neither, of course, is actually possible.  The Australian environment has had drought/flood cycles for eons, which are unpredictable both in their timing and their intensity - neither of which lends itself to feasible city 'disaster-proofing' plans.  The other thing to keep in mind is that Australian ecosystems function the way they do, and have as much biodiversity and endemism as they do, because of (not in spite of) these cycles of droughts and floods.

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