I trotted off to the city today to go to a 'Meet the Experts' talk at the museum - 3 research scientists talking about a voyage they've just completed where they studied the fauna in a small area of deep-sea. Very interesting, informative and fascinating. There's some weird stuff lives down there. One of the questions asked was if they'd found anything that had the potential to be a commercial catch. The answer - thank all the gods - was no. Deep sea critters can live for a long, long time and it can take decades for them to reach sexual maturity, removing the breeding pool (usually the only ones big enough to eat) does horrible things to the species. Take orange roughies for instance. 20 years ago the biggest catch was 50,000 tonnes a year... now it's only 3,000 tonnes and the fish aren't showing any sign of recovering their numbers any time soon. Not only that but deep-sea trawling is indiscriminate and destructive. The equipment breaks up habitats and unlike fishing in shallower waters, nearly everything that comes up to the surface is already dead due to the changes in water pressure. There's no throwing the little ones back so they can grow up and breed...
Sure deep-sea fish is good for you but the way it's harvested is unconscionable.

Walking through the park after the talk I spotted a possum. OK, it wasn't at it's most interesting, basically a furry lump asleep in the fork of a tree, but it's always a thrill seeing wildlife.
And speaking of wildlife, we had a frog in the kitchen this afternoon; one of these I think. No idea how it got inside, or where it came from, but it was very cool seeing it. Frogs are scarce nowadays. Housemate and I managed to save it from KittenKong and I put it outside in one of the damper areas of the garden but I'm beginning to think I should have kept it and taken it down to specialist pet-shop down the road, or given the Friends of the Frogs organisation a call. At least this frog was native to Victoria - a lot of green tree-frogs end up transported down here from Queensland, and they get released into the wild. Not good for them or our own frog population...

It was strange going out without the cubs today. My boys are very bright (literally, their hair colour is amazing and they're so lively) they make a great shield. People's attention is automatically drawn to them and I can amble along in relative anonymity. Felt kind of vulnerable without them. Heh, guess I should get out on my own more often.