I braved the cold today and managed an hour and a half swim. There aren’t a lot of fish about right now. If you look offshore towards Portarlington you’ll see a lot of birds. Most of the fish life moves out into the middle of the bay in winter, which is a topic I covered in a recent blog. Today was the chance to take a look at the habitat at Ricketts Point as it grows in the winter ..read more

First, a big thank you for signing up or buying the snorkelling guide. I realise it’s a bit cold at the moment but spring will soon be here. I’ve been a little bit quiet of late too, as I don’t tend to get in the sea so often at this time of year. I did want to mention, in passing, that I’m leading a trip to swim with humpbacks in Tonga late August ..read more

It took Biruté over twenty years to begin to understand Orangutans. This is because it takes at least two generations to confirm the way any animal behaves. For female Orangutans, that’s at least sixteen years. Before this, it was a widely held belief that Orangutans couldn’t be studied. Like her beloved Orangutans, for Biruté’s work to succeed, she needed to disappear. She became invisible in the forest for many years. Biruté’s consummate patience even led to her being ‘adopted’ by an Indonesian family ..read more

Last night we went to see Jane Goodall speak at the Palais in St Kilda, Melbourne. It’s Jane’s 90th birthday this year. Last time I was at the Palais, I was watching the band First Aid Kit. Years before that, Nick Cave. It’s surprising to see a gentile, elderly lady stand in front of a packed house, speaking quietly with the air of a grandmother. Jane would occasionally set the record straight when a question or idea strayed off course ..read more

It might be the last chance for a few days so I dropped into the shallows at Ricketts today for an hour. I was only picking around the edges of the reef and the deepest it got was about 30cm. I went nearer the southern end, where the car park nearly ends. The reef there is a bit muddier on the top. This time of year, it grades through beds of sargassum and sea grass ..read more

A paper published this week in Current Biology describes some of the ideal mechanisms behind soil restoration. However, like many academic studies, it is questionably too complex and theoretical to be of practical use. It leaves me wondering how one would implement these measures. The authors point at several key factors: soil properties (S), climate (C), organisms (O), relief (R), parent material (P), age (A) and spatial position (N)’ adding ‘these factors interact in complex ways [and] understanding and manipulating [them] can aid in restoring soil biodiversity.’ However, the inordinate sca ..read more

After my successful swim yesterday I decided to look at the other side of fossil beach to the east. I had heard visibility was better there yesterday. That little pocket tends to be a little clearer on average, as it doesn’t seem as affected by currents circulating from the coast north and south. It was indeed clearer … but not much. Enough to make it attractive though. A few fiddler rays were nice finds. I found myself once again distracted by the cryptic sacoglossum in Port Phillip Bay ..read more

It never ceases to amaze me how different every swim can be. Today I dropped in on the fossil-beach side of the Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron and headed out to where it’s about 2m deep. Visibility wasn’t great but I was able to find not one but three species of sapsucker. These seas slugs have a very interesting life history as they effectively absorb the essence of plants into their bodies to become plant-like. Unlike nudibranchs, which are carnivorous, they are strictly vegetarian ..read more

A night snorkel at Blairgowrie Pier was the chance to take advantage of light winds. There are spring tides at present but the evening tide variation was only small, so currents were quite minimal. We got in at about 6PM, half an hour after sunset and got out about 7:15PM. The seagrass was pumping with animals. There was so much to see from Shorthead Worm-eels and Shorthead Seahorses to Bobtail Squid, Pygmy Squid, Seahares, Shaw’s Cowfish, Grass Clingfish, Helmetshield Slugs and nudibranchs ..read more

This is a bit of a departure from my normal blogs but this came up in conversation twice yesterday. I thought it useful to link to a few of the key references on this subject. For many years we have been led to think that human population is growing. In actual fact, the rate of human reproduction has been declining since the 1960s. This is despite recently reaching 8 billion people in the world. The reason for the time difference is a lag-effect, which is quite normal in ecological systems ..read more