Closing one chapter and opening another

April 1, 2019April 1, 2019 / Maarten De Brauwer / 3 Comments

It is time to share some very big news. My time in Australia has officially come to an end and I am starting a new and exciting chapter on the other side of the world. From April onward I will officially become a “Research Fellow in Quantitative Tropical Marine Ecology” at the University of Leeds in the UK. In other words, for the next two years I will work as a postdoctoral researcher on a very exciting new project.

I will write about the new project in more detail soon, but right now I am feeling a bit nostalgic about the past 6 years of living and becoming a scientist in Australia .

Celebrating the end of an experiment on the Great Barrier Reef

I arrived in Australia as a dive instructor, thinking I’d be there for a few months to help out a good friend with a research project on cleaner wrasses in the Great Barrier Reef. Working and living on Lizard Island Research Station gave me the chance to meet some amazing marine scientists passionate about their research. More than anything else, the people I met there are what pushed me in the direction of becoming a marine scientist.

A series of fortunate events lead me to Perth and I somehow managed to convince Professor Euan Harvey that taking on a semi-nomadic beach bum for a student would be a great idea. To this day I still do not know if Euan was being very wise or very stupid, but once I got my foot in the door of the Fish Ecology Lab it took them about 6 years to get me out again.

The amazing team of the Fish Ecology Lab, all of you will be missed!

Happy sunset drinks by the beach

While I never planned on spending a long time in Australia, it didn’t take me long to appreciate the beauty of the place. Western Australia in particular is basically a Europe-sized playground for people who love the outdoors. I can’t count how many camping trips, dives, surf sessions, ocean swims, hikes, … I’ve done in recent years and I still haven’t seen half of what I’d want to see. Some of the highlights that come to mind include camping on remote beaches, diving with seadragons, snorkeling with sea lions, and sunrise surf sessions with friends. I won’t even begin to write about the many wine tasting sessions down south 🙂

I was lucky enough to meet some amazing people along my journey. Almost without noticing it, I built up a group of colleagues and friends. I love the typical Australian easy-going, honest (sometimes in-your-face) style of communication. Even if it could not be more different from what I was used to in Indonesia (or even Belgium). The people more than anything is what make or break a place, and I will miss the ones I left behind in Perth dearly.

Exploring the coastline in southern Western Australia

When I arrived in Australia I never expected that it would become a second home, but that is exactly what happened. The people, the wildlife, the landscapes, all of it have found a spot in my heart, and I am grateful for my time there. I am very much looking forward to starting a new chapter, if it’s even half as good as the last one it is going to be fantastic.

See you next time Australia!

Exciting things ahead

August 5, 2018 / Maarten De Brauwer / Leave a comment

I may not have been blogging much recently, but a lot has happened in the last few months. First and foremost, I completed and handed in my PhD-thesis. Since then I have been teaching, writing grant and job applications, and I’ve had a nice long holiday relaxing and traveling in Europe and diving in Indonesia.

In all honesty, handing in my PhD-thesis isn’t really news anymore since it’s been almost four months ago. That does not change anything about how happy and relieved I am that I managed to finish this epic project. Although this happiness might also have a slight tinge of regret as it means the end of more than 3 fantastic years of being absorbed by something that I love doing very much. By now I have also received the examiners’ comments back from my thesis, which were very positive, meaning that the whole process of finalising the PhD might be even quicker than I’d really like to.

Yours truly during my PhD-presentation, very happy days!

Why quicker than I’d like to? Mostly because it means I have to find a job now! I really, really like doing research, especially when it involves little critters or sandy ocean floors. So I will try my very best to keep on doing research on this, but post-PhD research jobs (so called “post-docs”) are hard to come by. Even harder when you study sand and animals that look like sand 😉 So I have been applying for positions all over the world, ranging from Australia, to Germany, the UK, Indonesia, etc.

This is all very exciting, since I might literally end up anywhere in the world. But as you can imagine, it also means a fair amount of insecurity of what life will look like in a few months time. The excitement about new projects and adventure always wins over the worries though 😀

But, just in case you’d happen to know someone who is looking for a researcher who knows his way around Southeast Asia, soft sediment, and cryptobenthic fauna, do give me a ring 😉

There are more exciting thing going on than just job-hunting! As a matter of fact, August will be a pretty busy, action-packed month. At the moment I am in Perth airport, almost ready to fly to South Africa. As you may or may not remember, a few months ago we (my friend Louw and me) received a grant from the Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund to conduct research on the endangered Knysna Seahorse (Hippocampus capensis). We have been working behind the scenes and preparing since, but now it is finally time to do the fieldwork portion of the work!

The species we’ll be studying: the Knysna seahorse (Hippocampus capensis)

To try and give everyone who is interested an idea of what marine science fieldwork is like, I am planning to blog frequently during the next 2 weeks. No promises about just of frequently, but I will do my very best to document trip and give you an insight of what it’s like (for me) to do the data collecting that is behind most of the stories I share here.

If you do not want to miss anything, you can always follow the blog (there’s a button on the site somewhere), you don’t need an account, you can just get the updates via email. Alternatively, I’ll try to post (almost) daily pictures on Instagram (crittersresearch) and Twitter (@DeBrauwerM) as well if you can’t be bothered reading and just want to see what it all looks like.

Work in progress….

April 3, 2018 / Maarten De Brauwer / Leave a comment

I am currently in the final stages of writing up my PhD-thesis, so not much time to blog. I’ll be back soon, but in the mean time, here are some fresh critter pictures from Raja Ampat to keep you happy!

Hunting cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) in Raja Ampat

Goby (Bryaninops amplus) in gorgonian seafan

Curious octopus checking out my camera

Bargibant’s pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus bargibanti) chilling out in its gorgonian seafan home

Orange anemonefish (Amphiprion sandaracinos) posing for the camera

Writing, Seahorse conferences, and Australian coral reef talks

August 10, 2017 / Maarten De Brauwer / 1 Comment

I’ve had a busy few weeks, so it has been a bit quiet on the blog. To make up for it, here is what I have been doing lately instead of writing blogs…

This might surprise you, but doing a PhD in marine biology is about more than just going to tropical beaches, diving and looking at cool ocean critters. By now I have collected all the data I need to write up my PhD, so what is left is mostly sitting at my desk, analysing data and writing that data into something that will eventually become a doctoral thesis. At the moment I’ve written about 40 thousand words (~90 pages), which might seem like a lot, but in reality I’ve still got a lot of work to do (just have a look at the figure below by Beck on R is my friend).

Median length of a PhD thesis per field. Link to original source.

Besides writing, there’s a lot of statistical analysis to do. I never expected to write this, but doing stats is actually quite fun (and excruciatingly painful at the same time). There is just something about having collected data, then getting to test your hypotheses and turning all of that into graphs and results. To me, the feeling of turning your ideas into new, real information is probably one of the most gratifying aspects of doing research. That, and sharing your fresh results with people and listening to other people share their new work.

That is where scientific conferences come into play. Over the last years I have attended a few big and not so big conferences, which were always good fun. Last May and July I presented different aspects of my research at two smaller, but very interesting conferences: SyngBio 2017 and the ACRS 2017 conference.

Participants of SyngBio 2017 (Tampa, Florida)

Tagging workshop at SyngBio 2017

Syngbio stands for Syngnathid Biology, but it really should be called seahorse camp. Syngbio is a global conference solely focused on Syngnathid fishes (=seahorses, pipefishes and their relatives). The conference was held at the University of Tampa in Florida (USA). For the duration of the conference we had accommodation in a dorm on campus, which contributed to the “summer camp”-feel and additionally made it a lot easier to socialize (read: “drink alcoholic beverages”) with other researchers at the end of the day. I must say that this conference was the most fun conference I’ve done so far, even if I leave out the social events. Hanging out with a group of people who are all passionate about the species you study is great, especially since I usually work with people who study very different species than I do. There was so much to learn from experts on all kind of topics ranging from conservation, to physiology, husbandry, ecology, evolution, etc. I was also lucky enough to attend a meeting of the IUCN Syngnathid Specialist Group, which are the people who decide on global conservation priorities for these animals. During the conference I presented my own research on the impacts of flash photography on seahorses. The writing on that chapter isn’t entirely finished yet, but I will make sure to share results here as soon as they are published.

The other conference I attended was organised by the Australian Coral Reef Society (ACRS), who kindly sponsored my flights to Townsville (Australia) to attend the conference. Townsville is the home city of James Cook University (JCU), one of the world’s leading marine biology universities. Over the years I have met a lot of JCU researchers in the field and on other conferences, so it was great to finally visit the place and catch up with everyone. The conference had a strong focus on the recent coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef and how it eventually effects far more than just the corals. While certain (uniformed) people still claim otherwise, climate change was one of the main reason this happened, and will probably happen even more in the future. This isn’t the blog post to go into depressing details, but seeing the destructive effects for yourself and talking to the scientists who do the research really drives homes the message of how important it is to take action to slow down climate change.

A Tambja nudibranch (Tambja sp.), winner of “public’s choice”-award at ACRS 2017

I presented some of my biofluorescence research at the ACRS conference and was very happy to win an “Outstanding presentation award” for my talk! The work I presented is in review at the moment and will hopefully be published within the next 3 months. During the conference I also submitted a few of my photos for a conference photo competition. I am quite proud that one of the photos won the “Public’s choice” award! 🙂

So what are the plans in the near future? I will definitely try to write blogs more regularly, although I have a pretty busy schedule. I am tutoring a few classes (Functional Biology) to 1st year students, and I will be doing a lot more writing and analysing. I might get some short relief from the cold Perth winter to do another trip to Coral Bay with the 3rd year students as well, which would be good fun. Finally, I’ve got three papers which are in review, so hopefully I will be able to share more news about new publications soon!