After another relaxed start today I took off with the herpetologists at 9am to check the traps they had set the night before. The traps themselves were simple - a low-lying mesh wire fence that ran into a series of buckets dug into the ground. Frogs and other insects run into the net then run along it in the dark before falling into the buckets. In the buckets we counted the number of species present. There were two key species that were found in almost all buckets across two distant sampling sites. They were the Moaning frog (Heleioporus eyrie), Quacking frog (Crinia georgiana) and Banjo frog (Limnodynastes dorsalis). Once counted we removed these frogs from the buckets and set them free. In one of the buckets we discovered a small Honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus) which is easily the cutest animal I have ever seen! As we wandered through the bush I also stumbled across a spider (Argiope trifasciata) in the middle of a meal.

After we finished packing away all the traps and returning the local ecosystem to its original state we set off for Little Hellfire Bay. We had visited this site a few days before but were back today with the mission of searching for spiders. WOW did we find some spiders! The arachnologist we are traveling with, Dr Jeremy Wilson spotted a trapdoor on the side of the path we were walking along. After ~30 minutes of digging a 65cm hole next to the trapdoor he finally extracted the spider from its silky lair. This was apparently one of the deepest trapdoor spiders that Dr Wilson has ever retrieved.

Another hectic day in Esperance with some fantastic finds out in the field!