Rainforests, Reefs and Spiders, Oh My! Week Two in Cairns, Far North Queensland
Week two was easily twice as incredible as week one, and if this upward trend continues, I honestly don't know how I'm going to process it all! Our academic journey took a massive leap forward as a class when we ventured out to Fitzroy Island, a breathtaking tropical paradise famous for its fringing coral reef. For the uninitiated, a fringing reef is a structure where corals grow right off the shore’s rocky substrate, rather than being separated from the mainland by a deep lagoon like a barrier reef. This was only my second time snorkeling a tropical coral reef, and it absolutely blew my expectations out of the water. With so much media coverage focusing on how coral reefs are universally falling apart, bleached, and going extinct, I was thrilled to find that Fitzroy Island boasted incredibly lively, healthy, and colorful specimens all around the reef. As someone whose favorite group of organisms is fishes, I like to think I know a decent bit about them. However, this reef wa...
