Smith's Lake OtEE

The reason I stayed in Sydney over break was to go on a field trip for my favorite class, Ocean to Estuarine Ecosystems. We went to a research camp on Smith’s Lake a few hours drive north of Sydney. It is a intermittently open lake. Which means that it is a lake/estuary that has a sandbar sometimes closing the lake from the ocean and sometimes leaving it open. 

We spent 5 days doing research on this lake. We were separated into 6 research groups each focusing on a different project and different aspects of the ecosystem of the lake. My group focused on the small fish in the lake, this involved using nets to beach seine. That is dragging the net through some shallow water and collecting what is caught. 

We caught a lot of different kinds of fish! Most of them were small glass fish and hardyheads 

A striped trumpeter 

Some garfish

A couple fortescues which we avoided touching the points

We caught some prawns and shrimp including this big guy 

We caught this as well but I'm blanking on its name

Along with counting the number of fish and species in each catch, we collected some to examine back in the lab (I’ll get to that) We also did some ‘random’ seabird counts and weighed samples of sponges.

Besides the beach seining we deployed a system of baited remote underwater video equipment. Which is the fancy way of saying we strapped GoPros to crates with some dead fish attached. This was to record the number of larger fish in the area. We placed these out deeper than each of the places we did the seining.

Back in the lab, we watched over 6 hours of footage from the gopros. That is over six hours stating at murky water determining if that shadow we saw was actually a fish, and mostly seeing nothing.

The fun part, was the fish! We dissected about 150 small fish ranging from 18-30cm. For each fish we cut out the two largest of the ear bones. These were measured and compared to the fish length the get a good measure of relative growth rates. It took a long time and we started having competitions to see who could get it out of the smallest fish and who could do it the fastest.

It was all great and I learned a lot. On the last night we presented our findings to the rest of the class and then sat back and had a couple of beers with our professor and demonstrators. The whole trip was a really great experience, showed us a little more of what actual research is like. We lived in small cabins and took turns cooking dinner. It was so nice to be able to interact with professors in a more casual way outside of the classroom but still having that learning environment.

It all looks so nice in the pictures. But there was that one day we were standing in the lake taking samples during a storm. And our boat was filling with water as quick as we were shoveling it out.