Blog for 2009-06-24

From BiodivBorneo09

Sreekar

A Fishy Day!!

Dr. Webb started the day with his lecture on Fish taxonomy with some great identification tips followed by a hit list of 11 fish that we had to submit by the night. Jessica and Min Sheng helped us identify the the common fishes on the reef. This activity was followed by an amazing talk by Dr. Yukinori Mukai on fish schooling behavior that was explained using an animal planet documentary but good light played a spoil-sport :). He was quite pissed due to the light and shifted his talk to Fish senses and the experiments he conducted to study them, which was equally interesting. After the talk we all got into a boat and went to the nearby mangrove.

At the mangrove we all swam around for an hour exploring the fish nurseries that was also home for jellyfishes of all sizes, cone-snails and many other invertibrates. After getting back on to the boat, the nature guide (Mindy) gave a brief talk on mangroves, their identification and ecology.

After the mangrove visit we were free for the whole afternoon, few went back to the reef, few started to work on their project proposals, few on the blog and few were out into the forest for their focal taxon studies.

In the evening, we had a talk on the macro-fungal systematics and their status in Borneo by Dr. Jaya. It was a very interesting talk, Iwan, Mindy and Dita loved it and never stopped asking questions trying to suck up all the information :). We (Dower and me) identified 9 species of fish on the hit-list and hopefully get to see the missing two (Puffer fish and the Grouper) tomorrow :)

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