A typical day starts about 6:30 when the skipper starts the motor, with the oil pressure alarm waking everyone from their slumber. The Deckhand bolts out of bed and raises the anchor, then it’s usually about half an hour to the first site.

On this trip we have three marine biologists: one from CSIRO Cleveland, one from QDPI and one from Queensland Museum (that’s me!). We also have a technician from CSIRO who keeps the computers, cameras and fibre optics running.

Once at the site we lower the Dropcam over the edge to the bottom of the sea bed (which for a lot of the sites we visited in the Torres Straits is about 15 m).

Slowly we run the camera over a transect of the terrain, recording flora and fauna for 500m. We then haul the dropcam back on board do a u-turn and drop the sled in the water and go back over the same site.

The ‘catch’ gets hauled on board and we start sorting the samples whilst the skipper steams onto the next site. We are aiming for about 120 sites over this two week cruise.

The catch is basically sorted into phyla, photographed, weighed and then frozen or preserved. By this time we are usually at the next site and so we repeat the same procedure.

We do somewhere between 7 and 11 sites a day. Sometimes this means we anchor between islands and watch the sunset, but other days we might not finish the sites until 9:30pm at night with waves crashing over the deck and you get soaked sorting the samples.

But the real work will be doing the analysis back at the lab, Identifying the samples to species level. There are some delightful creatures brought on board such as decorator crabs, seahorses and for me sponges like Clathria basilana (sponge nerd).

How did I become a marine biologist? A long and convoluted story. I did a science degree at UQ, then an honours research year followed by a PhD in the field of molecular genetics in plant pathology.

After the PhD I took a break from science and did some work at Channel 9 as science communicator on “why?”. Then I worked for two years as a research scientist in the QUT physics department doing research on natural lighting and solar hot water system design.

After that I worked as a shop assistant at Mountain designs before taking up a plant pathologist position at DPI in Cairns. I then had 6 months of travelling before I had another science communication job this time with the Queensland Museum Science Centre Roadshow, until I got my current job as marine biologist with the Queensland Museum.