G'day!

I thought that it would be nice to show you the house we are staying in at the moment.
We are staying in a house on site at AIMS and this means that Ronald can just walk to his job in 3 minutes and we can walk to the ocean and the beach in like 10 minutes. If the wind is right we can hear the waves hitting the shore from our house.

Our house is the last one, our view is the forest and we see cockatoos and kookaburras flying over and sitting in trees all the time, we can hear curlews and parrots and in the afternoon the wallabies come to graze on the grass. One of the kids favorite new animal is the gecko, we have a lot of them in the house and they come out in the evening, they are just beautiful creatures and its amazing seeing them walking on the wall and ceiling.

Can you find the gecko? (above the door near the ceiling)

It is truly wonderful here and we feel we are much more in contact with nature here.
A big downside of being so close to nature are the mosquitoes, on some days they really drive me nuts and I feel like getting eaten alive.

Another thing here that we had to get used to is the fact that it is a state of the art research facility and that means big fences and gates and guards. We have a special key to be able to get in and after hours a guard passes by every hour just to check everything.

Today it was a special day, it was Open Day, for the first time in ten years (we are very lucky!) they opened the whole place up and for us it was great to be in the middle of the action for once!
There was even a big kids area with a jumping castle, rocking boat, balloon animals and face painting.
Another thing I loved was a play performed by researchers about the threats to the reef. Ronald's host Mike was playing a crown of thorns starfish, he was awesome!
But it was also nice to see all the cars and buses and thousands of people leaving again and get our rest back :-)

So back to the house, I made a little film of our house (on a normal day...) that you can watch here.
I started out filming some wallabies who were eating next to our house, but it turns into a tour through the house!

Tomorrow we are leaving for Cairns for a holiday, so more about that next time!
Some pictures of today:

The reason why we are here...

The reason why we are in Australia is of course because my research and after a month's work it is time for some fresh scientific results!

My research project is funded by the Danish government, but my research animal is a tropical starfish called the crown-of-thorns starfish. The starfish is a big problem now since it will only eat corals and over the last 30 years they have been responsible for 40% of the coral loss at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Corals are very important since they create a habitat in which many fish thrive. In short, many marine animals rely on corals in one or more stages during their life and when corals disappear many marine animals will suffer. Coral decline is not good news for tourism either...

If you want to do research on the Great Barrier Reef the Marine Station where we are now is great. It is called the Australian Institute of Marine science, abbreviated to AIMS. It's an Australian wide governmental research institution and it carries out a lot of important research on the Great Barrier Reef.

Recently, my good friend and colleague in Denmark, Anders, published a paper together with the supervisor from my Ph.D. study Dan-Eric Nilsson, showing how another Coral Reef inhabiting starfish uses its eyes to find its way back to the reef. At this point in time we already have proof that the crown-of-thorns starfish does the same and it too uses its eyes to find coral reefs.

What I am doing here in Townsville is finding out which particular visual cues are used by the starfish. I have good laboratory facilities and in short what I do is, I put the animals in a circular arena where I can control what the animals see on the horizon. I put patterns with different sizes, grey tone, stripes and circles onto the horizon of the arena and see whether the animals respond to the patterns or not. From this I can determine exactly which visual cue they use for navigation.

The exact causes of the recent increase in numbers of crown-of-thorns starfish and the resulting decrease of Coral reefs is still debated along with the role that humans play in this phenomenon. I actually went to an interesting lecture today just about this topic. I'm quite convinced my project won't be able to address the cause of the problem, however I'm hoping my findings will help constructing a bait for the animals which will make it easier to catch starfish and reduce their numbers on a short-term basis giving us time to find the cause of the problem and act.