Back from Armidale

People often get confused when I tell them I'm going to Armidale for residential school. They assume I'm going there for exams.

What we actually do is the practical stuff that, as external students, we don't get to do at home, like mixing chemicals in chemistry class and stinking the lab out with rotten egg gas as a result.

As well as chemistry I'm doing vertebrate zoology this semester, that's the study of animals with backbones, like us. The res school involves drawing lots of pictures of different types of animals and their internal anatomy.

Below is a picture of a cane toad, part way through being dissected by yours truly.



This isn't the first time I've dissected a cane toad at uni, but I never cease to be amazed at what's inside them. If you're interested, the pink spongy looking things in the picture are lungs, between them is the heart and the liver (the liver is the dark bit). Underneath the lung that I'm holding up with a probe is the stomach and those spotty looking things are eggs (it's a female toad).

The animals we dissect are well and truly dead by the time we're let loose on them, but it's not unusual to cut open a cane toad and find its heart still beating. The one in the picture wasn't, but a couple of my classmates were surprised when they realised there's was still pumping away. The reason it does this is that the heart is actually its own power supply. To put it another way, it supplies its own electricity to make it pump. It'll often carry on doing this for quite a while after death in some animals until it runs out of energy.

As well as the toads, we dissected trout (some of which ended up as dinner for some people, they were fresh from the hatchery at Ebor) and mice, so we could compare the differences in the way they lived.

It wasn't all cutting up dead animals though. We also did some spotlighting for nocturnal animals and some trapping and on the Tuesday we spent a couple of hours birdwatching around Dumaresq (pronounced dooMAreck) Dam followed by a pizza lunch. In all we counted fifty four different species of bird, including a Tawny Frogmouth sitting on its nest. Oh, and we analysed bat calls on the last day. Four Anabat devices were placed in the area we'd been spotlighting in and we went through the files to figure out what species of bat they were. There were about half a dozen different species in all, flying around while we were there. We didn't see a single one.

Apart from all the drawing, it was another enjoyable res school, but I was glad to get back home again, especially since it was our fourth wedding anniversary the day I got back. It's also warmer up here. It was six degrees Celsius when I left Armidale yesterday morning and twenty four degrees here when I got home.