Mind those sausage-stealing kookaburras

I was out at the Sydney Institute of Marine Sciences (SIMS) last Friday. I gave a guest lecture to finish up the SIMS-CMB Summer Course on Marine Microbial Ecology. Suhelen Egan at UNSW has been organizing this course for the last few years, this has been the first time I've actually been able to make it. It was a fun day, Martin from my group was able to get a portable flow sorter setup and the students were able to sort cyanobacterial cells from Sydney Harbour water they had collected that morning.

I gave the final presentation of the workshop, which had the added advantage that I was there for the celebratory BBQ at the end of the workshop. The only danger were the local sausage-stealing kookaburras. One of the students was a favourite target of the kookaburras, losing several BBQ-ed sausages to them. Next year we might had to add an extra lecture to the course on how to defend your food from kookaburras.

Kookaburra at SIMS. Actually food-stealing kookaburras are a problem at Macquarie Univerity as well- I once lost a lemon poppyseed muffin to a kookaburra