Another 5am wake up today as we made our way to Lucky Bay to sample the local fish population. We were greeted by a beautiful sunrise roaring across the sky as we entered the chilly water at the bay. Working as a team we used a large net and trawled for fish close to the rocks at the far end of the beach. The water was full of seaweed but also contained a variety of different species of marine animals. We caught Flounder, Magpie Perch, Flathead and Crested Weed Fish just to name a few. These were placed in a bucket and sent off to the makeshift lab back at camp to be studied further.

Not content with the saltwater species we had just found, we embarked on a new adventure. A short 30-minute drive later and we found ourselves at a small stream on the side of a winding road in the middle of the bush. Our mission was to search the riverbed for evidence of fresh water mussels (Westralunia carteri). Whilst we did not find any mussels we found a number of battle hardened yabby’s missing claws from their fights with the local water rat population. We then returned to camp for some food and a break.

Our final adventure of the day took place after sunset. We took off with the Herpetology team in search of frogs. We drove through the dark to meet the herpetologists who had pulled over to the side of the road deep in the middle of Cape Le Grand National Park. With nothing to guide us but the sounds of distant frogs - we took off into the dark. Bush bashing through thick scrub under the light of our head torches we homed in on the call of the frogs. Marching in a single line we made it to a patch of thick reeds over two metres in height. Despite our lack of direction, we had keep moving unless we planned to sink into the swampy mud beneath us. After a few minutes the frogs had gone silent. We sacrificed our shoes to the muddy waters and stood in silence for 2 minutes, turning our torches off. Gradually, the sounds of distant frogs grew closer, and closer, and closer. One of our guides, Ryan, showed us a Slender tree frog (Litoria adelaidensis) he had found. It was clinging to a dead tree branch but often clings to the vertical reeds we were walking through. Having completed our mission (finding a frog) and unlikely to find more of the evasive animals we turned around. After 10 minutes of stumbling through thick bush in the dark we quickly realised we had lost our trail. Thankfully, one of our guides had pinged the GPS coordinates of our cars. Stumbling back through the heavy scrub in the dark we found a variety of new species including a Wolf spider (Lycosidae spp.), more tree frogs and a Golden orb spider (Nephila pilipes). After 20 minutes of zig zagging through the bush we safely made it back to the car before heading back to camp.