Finding My Team

Although I’ve made plenty of gym friends, I have not joined any sports teams…  If you recall from my first blog video, joining a club sport was one of the things I was most excited to do, so what happened?! 

I found something better. I joined the Abyss Scuba Diving Club and became one of many PADI certified scuba divers around the world. Diving in Cairns and Sydney, my diving buddies and I don’t conquer other teams as I did with my water polo team for so many years. Instead, we conquer the elusiveness of nature.

On Sunday I joined a dive to look for weedy seadragons, an animal that divers travel from all over the world to see in Sydney, the only place they are be found. We followed our divemaster Rosa, who knew where to look for weedy seadragons. With our eyes scanning and cameras ready, we found both a male and female! I held the torch (Australian for flashlight) for my new friend Nadline, another international student studying in Sydney. She took photos and videos to capture the iridescence of the animals in the torchlight. 

Teamwork enabled us to find and interact with these beautiful animals in their natural habitat, as well as so many more creatures!

Thankfully this has not only applied to scuba diving. Monday was Australian Labor Day, so my friend Sam and I did a coastal hike. Along the way, we heard and saw many birds. Passing the binoculars between us, and using the guidance of the Merlin Bird ID app, we were able to determine several of the beautiful species. But unlike the drifting weedy seadragons, most of the birds fluttered around too quickly for us to take photos.

On Friday I leave on a field trip for my Plant Ecology course. We are traveling to the UNSW Kioloa Field Station several hours south of Sydney so we can collect data for our term research projects. My group will be investigating how insect communities might differ on native versus invasive plants, and I am excited to try to conquer the elusiveness of nature with a new team to get data for our research project.