AUSTROP Foundation
Cape Tribulation Tropical Research Station


Annual Report/newsletter 2003 (July02 - Nov 2003) Vbr>

Well, this has been the year of consolidation.

With two somewhat air-conditioned laboratories we now have lots of lovely research space, and terrific comfort (especially compared to previous years) and we can contemplate some very serious research projects

While the laboratory design has been very successful, the refrigeration units that are responsible for the de-humidification, have been far less so. Hugh is about to become his own refrigeration engineer (with the design help of some folks in Sydney) - and rebuild the existing ones, using HC refrigerant (totally ozone friendly) and with greatly improved performance. Unfortunately no one in the Cairns/Mossman area are interested in touching non-standard units.

Hugh's neuralgia has become a continuous and periodically irritating background to life, and it will probably remain so, but compared with the last years, is hardly an issueÉ

Our new lab sports a photocopier, which is a real luxury, the HPLC has been set up and from September has had a lot of use. (thanks again to Chris Murray for getting the chemical up here - it is so good to be able to wander into the new clean store room and get a bottle of acetonitrile off the shelf - or 90% of everything else that we might need for a chromatographic run. The darkroom has yet to be sorted out, but as we have a additional new motto (in addition to GUANO HAPPENS) -

"It takes longer than you think"

Things tend to fall into a new perspective.

And the store room "compactus"-style moveable shelving system is wonderful.

Buildings

A new 5th cabin (to give Hugh some privacy) started last Christmas, but there has been no further progress other than the installation of the supports - as the expected supply of second hand timbers did not eventuate - maybe next year!

The third solar tracker (with 8 panels) is in place giving the Station 2.4 KW peak solar power. However, following the completion of the our Daintree Solar-RAPS power study (handed in to EPA mid November) I now realise that our solar system's efficiency is not what it should be and it needs a major overhaul.

Bat House slowly gets small improvements - but it needs about a month of concerted activity to achieve the really needed upgrades. Still no solar display, no skylights, and no ability to show videos. With the regeneration area starting to really grow, we need to put in a marked "forest trail" for tourist education. I wish I could list all the volunteers that have helped the Bat house grow over the past year - it would fill the rest of the pageÉ..

Projects


Bat deterrence - because of the politics of the fruit farmer's group, there is no money and, it appears, no interest in non-lethal deterrence. (It seems that the larger growers want the smaller growers out of the ring, as it were, and as the larger growers are prepared to install total exclusion net cover, something that smaller growers are unable or unwilling to do, then they are not prepared to fund the development of technologies that would in effect help the smaller grower.). Such is politics.

So the radar project has gone indefinitely "on hold" - even though we have one very high quality radar dish unit sitting waiting.

De-sulphator project (to evaluate the effectiveness of pulse-desulphators in maintaining the capacity of lead acid batteries in the Daintree). Now finished and once it has had a couple of members of the solar installers comment on it, it will go to be printed off. It has been a very illuminating experience for both Paul Hollis (the guy doing most of the work) and me. Basically, de-sulphators have a weak positive effect on most conventional lead-acid batteries, (although on the gel-cell batteries that the Station has installed, they show a major protective action against catastrophic failure). What has come out of the survey, is the need for a far better understanding of solar system design philosophy by installers and far more education of the householders. More importantly yet, the urgent need for the development of metering systems that allow the householder to take "ownership" of what is happening in their system. As the frontispiece page states "Batteries don't die, they are murdered...." and the guilty parties have been exposed in the report.

Interestingly one of the local councillors has taken a keen interest in the project (as many of her constituents have complained bitterly about their battery failures to her), so we may see it causing some changes in attitude there.


GPS logger project. After some false starts, the project will be starting in December, with a 10,000 dollar grant from the Samuel and Eileen Gluyas Charitable trust, which will be a good start, but we need $40,000 more. - but we'll hopefully be able to get to "proof of concept" stage. If this one comes off, it will be a major window on the behaviour of flying foxes, and a major generator of data - which will come none too soon for the conservation of flying foxes.


Operant conditioning in flying foxes. The station from May to October has been the site of a psychological study of flying fox's capability to learn to respond to a basic "Skinner-box" situation. This has been Brigitta Flick's (Austrop Founding Director) Honours thesis work, at the Psychology Department at James Cook University in Cairns. We know so little about how flying foxes sense the world - we assume (on pretty good grounds) that they have good night vision; on less secure grounds, that they have a good sense of smell and so on, but these are not things we can measure directly, we require behavioural testing to really find out. Brigitta's pioneering work has certainly helped, we now know that flying foxes can be trained, but, interestingly that only hand reared animals familiar with "gadgets" will make successful subjects. Wild animals totally ignore the test apparatus and the proffered juice reward, scratch themselves and take a nap. So we will have to start training unreleasable babies to be next years test animals. (note - the hand reared bats love it).

br> Bio-Magnetism One of Hugh's long term neurobiological hobby horses has been the investigation of magnetic sense in humans, using the dowsing response as the mechanism for investigating it. Doesn't have much to do with conservation or flying foxes, but is a very unresearched subject, and probably quite an important one in scientific terms. The heavy rains that we had for the first half of the year meant that the underground aquifers were flowing and there were lots of lovely magnetic anomalies for people to respond to - now that's dried up, and the project waits until next year. The project depends on a constant flow of volunteers (which we have in abundance) to "walk the course" and two UK volunteers Dave Gibbs and Henry Coles who not only wrote the software for Brigitta's bat box controller, also wrote the software for processing the data from the magnetism experiments. (It is wonderful to see experts at work - transforming strings of code into something that actually process data!).


Daintree Buyback Program...Julie Tessler, who was the volunteer in 2002, when the first I.S.T. US student group arrived, and who helped immensely to make their program work (as Hugh was quite out of order with the neuralgia) took "fire". On her return to New York, set up the Daintree Land Trust, and has been working for almost a year now spreading the word about the Daintree lowland's parlous plight, and attempting to get the wealthy to part with their dollars to help buy back the private freehold allotments in Daintree. She was able to negotiate a relationship with the Tides Foundation, a big San Francisco based charitable organisation, through which US donors to the program are able to get US tax-deductibility. It's a massive job - and she has been doing it on a voluntary basis (pretty amazing when you work from Manhattan). She's been doing this for 9 months now, and has developed a pretty good stable of contacts - but it is very hard to convince potential US donors that Australia needs external assistance for conservation buy-back. Look up http://www.daintreelandtrust.org/HolidayCard2.html

br> IST International Student Travel. After their very successful debut in 2002, we received 3 groups of students (12 per group on average), for 2 week periods with a 2 week break in between. The weather was not kind, we had continuous light rain, which made field based work difficult, and the mien of the 3 groups were quite different - a party group, a work group, and a group somewhere in-between. Unfortunately, unlike 2002, the age of the IST staff member, who accompanied the groups, was much the same as that of the students, and their lack of experience really showed at times (and sometimes made things very difficult), though one in particular (Kara) was quite good. The last group were also faced with 8 volunteers as well! So what is going to happen in 2004, I don't know - there are some important philosophical issues to be resolved first. I hope we can continue to host them, but we have to be sure that the lessons from here don't get lost in subsequent activities.


Regeneration A continuing process. Damien (UK) and Sabine (Fr.) bashed out the next acre of guinea grass, which was planted out in early 2003, and was give a good start by the rainy first half year. In July 03 it went dry, and we had to install an irrigation line - from the tank to the labs and with a side arm to this new area, fitted with taps and hoses. Since September 2-3x weekly hand waterings have become the rule - but the plants are really thriving with the attention and some have grown over 3 meters in one year!

So we have to knock out another acre for next year before the rains come.

br> Re-habilitation/community weed control - This has been quite an interesting exercise - with the assistance of many volunteers and some students from the IST groups, we have made major inroads on the Emmagen creek area, Melinda, Kirsten, Karen, Sarah and Anselm, Laura and Ed were hard at removing lantana and other weeds from the Emmagen beach area, and eliminating the coconut seedlings. Coconuts in fact have been the leif-motiv of the last half of the year - largely due to Hugh, Laura and Kirsten's efforts on Myall beach, which were very successful, (perhaps too successful!) became noticed, and led to some pretty amazing fracas. However the community seems to have decided that coconuts are in fact NOT native, and ought to be controlled, and the local Council, after over-reacting to the issue, have it appears, decided that control is necessary - so we now wait for the wheels to spin, so we can go out and eliminate the masses of coconut seedlings that are sprouting up. "Singapore" Daisy (a little green monster from S America that is highly invasive and shade tolerant), is slowly being tackled in all sorts of unlikely places, some major infestations in some of the cassowary conservation blocks newly aquired by the Wet Tropics. Despite the ubiquity of these invaders, no one will take any responsibility for control, so by default, we have to do it. Grrrrr.


Water Table dynamics - we now have two temperature/depth loggers that have been placed in the two bores on the Station property. We have a remote radio-linked tipper raingauge which is to be placed on the ridgeline, to get the high altitude precipitation, and a tipper on the lab roof. We have yet to tie all these together to a functioning whole. But what we hope to get from all this is an understanding of the dynamics of the aquifer of the Cape Tribulation basin (as water becomes a major issue during these periods of prolonged dry weather).


Researchers/Interns: We had two interns from US (Rose Galbraith, Uni of New Mexico, and Kevin Hockett, Oregon State Uni) ) here for 10 weeks each and Joern Ebertz from Eberswalde, Germany. Rose came to look at groundwater dynamics, but in spite of (or perhaps because of) our investing in 2 very expensive groundwater monitoring "divers" (loggers suspended in a bore shaft, to log depth and temperature), the weather refused to rain, and the groundwater levels slowly dropped. Kevin was far more fortunate, and took up a project examining the composition of the distended clear abdomens of the ubiquitous green ants (Oecophyla smaragdina) using our recently aquired HPLC. It was our first chance to use this piece of equipment, in this case to look at organic acids - formic, oxalic and proprionic. Like all good scientific projects, this one raised more questions than it answered! But that wonderfully sharp lemon-drop flavour that visitors have when they bite off ant's bums, is due almost entirely to formic acid.

It still hadn't rained by the time that Kevin left in Nov.

Joern is finishing off the cyclone regeneration project (started in 2000) - as the IST groups were not able to finish the plot assessments, despite the enthusiastic and conscientious efforts of Phillipa Pickles, and Joern will be here until early Jan 04. (hope it stays fine!)

Andrej Sussor from Slovakia enthusiastically photographed everything in site - and hopefully some of these will appear when the website gets upgraded.

We also had a visit from Petra Erbe from the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, who was looking at plant hoppers (related to cicadas), and for the first time (after much travelling) found them in great quantities here.


Volunteers We have had 50 volunteers (not counting interns) since July 1 02. to the present (Nov 03). our yearly reports are a bit elastic). Many stayed well `over 4 weeks. They have ALL been a marvellous benefit to the Station, but we certainly need a full time volunteer coordinator - or Hugh won't get any work done next year!


Super cleaner-uppers" - we had Christina and Eric Howe from Toronto - who re-organised everything - and about time tooÉTina also made name plates for the accommodation buildings (we really didn't take enough advantage of her artistic skills!) - We also had Ruper Parker (UK) back for 2 months as well.


Studies and reports -


Brigitta Flick Operant Conditioning of Flying Foxes - Dissertation submitted to Jame Cook University for Honours in Psychology. Nov 2003.

Hugh Spencer, Paul Hollis Solar RAPS Systems in the Daintree lowlands - and an assessement of the effectiveness of pulse de-sulphation technology for extending battery life. Nov.2003.

Kevin Hockett. Characterisation of green ant (Oecophyla smaragdina) abdominal contents using HPLC Nov 2003.


Equipment purchased in 2003 Waters 481 spectrophotometer for HPLC Kuchi Vacuum rotary evaporator KB Electrophoresis system , 2-channel LKB chart recorders 2x Van Essen Temperature/pressure divers Plus various odds and sods to aid the functioning of the Station research.


On the Horizon for 2004.


First - the lab refrigeration has to be upgraded - the existing units are too small and too inefficient for something operating on a solar-renewable system. At the moment the big lab can deal with 2 persons and ancillary equipment - the small (instrument) lab can hardly deal with one.

We will be upgrading the HPLC so we can analyse amino acids and sugars. Luckily there is a great amount of high grade second hand gear available.

We will get a Gas Chromatography system (with H2 generator) - this will allow us to carry out analyses of plant pheromomes, FF marking fluids and things like that.

The 5th building has to be completed.

Installation of a 4th tracker and submersible pump for station water supply, to allow us to operate during the dry periods when there is insufficient spring water.
We hope to complete the assessment of the impact of coconuts on the Myall Beach foreshore by Christmas 03, in time for the results to be considered by the Council.

WE NEED A FULL TIME VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR and general handy person! - Position eminently suitable to someone who wants to take a 2 year break or an early retiree (couple). The Station is getting increasingly complex, and is no longer a one person operation. But - as ever, we ALL have to work as volunteers (including Hugh). That's the 21st Century for you.

And we have to get cracking on the GPS project.

to say nothing of the Daintree buyback.


AND we need to put together a research prospectus for Universities - the Federal Government is busily dismantling the major research institution in Atherton (CSIRO) - because it seems to be felt that it is not bringing in enough corporate support. First to go will be the world renowned herbarium. Such is the economic rationalist mentality. There are so many research projects that desperately need to be done, but there is just no interest (and yet the Commonwealth Government is boasting of a multibillion dollar surplus this year....)

Hope to see you here


Cheers

Hugh