My Travels in Australia

I went to my study site yesterday in Gwelup for the first time. I'll be studying the section of the system that is a channel/wetland between the highway and the lake. I was warned about the possibility of redback spiders there, but we didn't see any while we were out. We were digging around a little bit though, and we did find a blind snake - they're really small, and I'm not sure whether the type we found is eye-less or just has eyes that are totally covered for living underground, but it was definitely blind haha. At first I thought Australia had weird blackish earthworms, but then the blind snake species was explained.

You can probably see in the picture (isn't Google Earth great?) that a lot of the roads/sidewalks look reddish-brown or have big reddish sections. They were originally a normal pavement colour - the colour they are now is because of the high levels of iron in the water that gets pumped for sprinkler systems, etc. In the areas that are being studied there also tends to be a lot of dead gardens where people use their own sprinklers, because a lot of the water with high iron has high arsenic levels as well (that seems to be a problem in a lot of the Pacific/Southeastern Asian countries). Down here if your yard is less than a certain size (it was a size that surprised me...you'd have to have an estate to have a bigger yard...something like a hectare of land for a backyard) you can use sprinklers without a permit and can dig your own wells to supply the water (which is surprising in a drought that is classified as a 100 year drought during a 50 year drought in the middle of a 20 year drought...seriously), so most people have shallow wells for sprinkler systems that use the top layer of water, which is the worst layer in terms of pollutants. That's part of what we're trying to find solutions for, because in really concentrated areas the arsenic levels can be way higher than drinking water standards (in the end, the people who have their vegetables die are probably luckier than the people who don't and end up eating them!).

It's about 42 outside already at almost 9 in the morning. Yesterday the UV index was 13 (or "extreme")...at least today it's only 10 (or "very very high").

Labels: ECU, Research, Wildlife